I just posted about this on another board where they were discussing Societies.
I've seen the rabid SimCity fanbase lamenting the loss of the nth degree of micromanagement and replacement with Attitudes or whatever the hell they're calling those high level attributes in Societies. I agree that if the part of SimCity you loved was that micromanagement, it looks like the game is heading in a different direction.
But personally, I struggled with the micromanagement. I recently reloaded SC Deluxe and a bunch of mods to give it another go, but I was already tiring of the tedium required to get things really up and running. So the new lighter version might actually have some appeal to me if it's not oversimplified or campy.
I'm at least going to give it a shot and hope that EA hasn't again pulled out the textbook on how to kill franchises.
I know I'm probably being overly optimistic, but if I am at least there's like 10 other games to drown my sorrows in..
SimCity Societies COD 4 World in Conflict Supreme Commander Expansion Orange Box Crysis NWN 2: Mask of the Betrayer Empire Earth 3 Hellgate: London The Witcher F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate
All of that in a what, 3 month period. My bank account is crying uncle already! That doesn't even include games I'm less interested in like UT3, ET:QW, etc.
I don't remember the last time there were this many all at once..
To be fair, reading the message boards for Everquest back in the day when guilds would fight for spawns, race past other guilds who were trying to get to the end boss, training mobs to raids, that shit provided some hilarious reading...
Instances do away with the griefing and drama that was so fun to watch from the sidelines..
The 38% was the 38% of a"significant portion" of the 1.2 million who visited the site, not the full 1.2 million. Depending on the level of embellishment, significant portion could be 50.00001%, which would still yield a solid return based on the additional numbers, but not nearly as much as they try to imply...
Without getting into details and to add to my time analogy with the toll road, I have a limited amount of time to play video games because I work in IT and have a 4 month old baby. So in that limited time that I have to play, I want it to be a very high quality experience. As a result of that high value that I place on that time, I'm willing to spend a good amount of money to ensure that time nets me a high quality experience, e.g. a 24" monitor playing games at 1920x1200 with all the sparkly bits turned on. I doubt you can show me a $200 card that's going to support that resolution at high settings for the likes of WIC, Crysis, Bioshock, etc., all of which I'm able to enjoy in all their DX10 goodness.
Sure I could wait a year and play those games on an 8800GTX that I pay 200 bucks for. But my hobby is gaming, and I don't WANT to wait a year to save a couple hundred bucks. My willingness to spend that money to enhance the quality of the experience I get doesn't mean I'm ridiculously wealthy and wasteful with my money or that I "have no life". It means I value things differently than you do. My problem is not with how you value things, it's with your judgement of all valuations that differ from yours.
Taken to an extreme, if everyone valued things the same way as you there would never be a $200 card because the card making companies wouldn't have us bleeding edge players to subsidize their R&D.
I can't wait for the GTXs to drop below 500 so I can buy a second and get SLI up and working...
I love how rife with judgement this post is. When did *your* calculation of value per dollar become the end all be all, with all others representing irrational overspending or lack of social skills?
It reminds me of people who use to gasp when I told them I took the toll road home. "But you're wasting seven dollars a day doing that!" they would say. They didn't get that I'd gladly pay seven dollars to have an extra hour or two at home doing what I want with my time vs. sitting in shitty traffic.
I'm fine with you saying the value proposition isn't there for *you*, but please stop short of getting on your high horse and proclaiming that it couldn't be there for me either unless I'm irresponsible or stupid.
What narrow-minded crap. To get the equivalent from iTMS that I have in my portable Rhapsody player right now, I'd be spending a metric shitload of cash. I'm sitting on 4GB of music, none of which I own, that I pay the price of an album a month for. Every time I plug it in it updates the channels I've selected (5 of them, 3 custom built by me) with about 4 hours of music each.
I bet most of the people spewing about how this is a flawed model haven't A) looked into the details of it, or B) tried it.
I type this as I sit listening to a custom made channel full of house music on my Rhapsody enabled mp3 player that I got for 40 bucks.
It is freaking awesome, and as soon as I get a car with an input jack, I will be even more in heaven than I am now (screw you Infiniti, your radio system SUCKS).
Every album on this 4GB player (with 2GB MicroSD chip I got for 20 bucks) is an album I don't have to own.
So far I'm finding Rhapsody to be worth every penny, even more so now that I have this portable player.
It's funny, because if they try to run the "we don't know what the content is, we're just blocking the protocol", tell them they should just block all chat because that's what child predators use to lure young kids.
What, some chat is not used for that so you don't want to block all of it? Interesting...
Like I said on my other post replying to the "Usenet.com != Usenet", things will get really interesting if they win this case and then trot it out as legal precedent to the big cable and telco companies that host usenet. I guess it's probably extremely likely the cables and telcos will just roll over on it because usenet is not a revenue generator for them, but if they DID decide to fight it, that would be some fireworks right there.
I am amazed how far I had to read to get to this distinction. Looks like they're going to try to set precedent by winning a case against a small guy, then they'll trot it out to all the other usenet server hosts and try to get usenet shut down or irrepairably changed (e.g. back to the discussion board it started as).
I can honestly see a potential future where they've clamped down on p2p, usenet, and even gotten the government to block torrent sites hosted outside the country. That would halt a vast majority of the piracy of their content.
Who knows if they'll succeed and/or to what degree, but their overall plan is starting to become clearer.
Bioshock World in Conflict Medal of Honor: Airborne Civ 4: Beyond the Sword Supreme Commander Crysis DiRT HL2: Orange Box Call of Duty 4
I could go on and on, and the holiday season hasn't even hit yet. You could argue a couple of those are console ports, but the vast majority wouldn't even begin to work on a console.
yeah first thing I thought when I read that was What the hell does disparaging AT&T have to do with harming children.
Then it occurred to me. If children see you disparaging AT&T, they may not grow up to be consumers of AT&T products, so that would be pre-emptively harmful to the children.
Unfortunately probably not. It's hard to prove that the sales of their stock weren't part of normal executive stock sales. Unless a pattern emerges where they were selling right before important announcements/court decisions/etc., these guys will likely not have to give back a dime of that money.
Keep an eye on sub-prime mortgage execs, you'll see the same thing. They knew the loans they were selling were unsustainable, but they just kept selling stock at regular intervals and all walked away with multiple millions of dollars, and its the market that's eating the loss on the bad loans.
But the question I came here to ask/see responses on is, if I pay you royalties on a patent, and that patent is later ruled invalid, do I have any recourse with regard to recouping royalties I paid you on an invalid patent?
Not sure how good faith, reasonableness, etc. apply when it comes to contracts and such
I agree. It is overwhelmingly likely that negotiations continue and are close to being final. That said, Cisco is still legally obligated to protect their trademark, otherwise Apple could bait them along until they feel sufficient dilution has occurred, then back out and seek their own suit alleging dilution.
Me, I think this is a knee jerk reaction to the complaining that security software companies have been doing lately. Your post sums it up, EU sees this as another potential "embrace and extend" scenario when they read the bitching by Symantec/McAfee, etc., and starts beating the drum.
To be honest, it seems like most of the features MS is trying to put in, while long overdue, aren't features that are meant to cut out security companies. They're meant to secure the OS like it should have been from the beginning. Cutting out the security companies is more of a byproduct IMO.
Hopefully you're first year, because that last statement you made is ridiculous.
Or you're already gunning for that top corporate lawyer spot. As other posters have said, trademark is designed to protect the guy who does it first, not the guy with the biggest pocketbook/customer base/lawyer corps.
THat response doesn't address the parent post at all. Technically the AI was respecting his borders by building on the ONE tile that he didn't have cultural control over. It was violating the spirit of the law, not the letter. The guy's answer above just says they'll obey the letter of the law.
It's not just me, either; it's a running sardonic joke among tech columnists that you can't even USE the word 'Apple' or 'Microsoft' without getting hate mail from somebody or other."
I certainly hope no one thinks it will be any different here. In my several years reading/., its been a constant that I can always count on; rabid fans of both spouting broken record thoughts about how poor the other is.
Seems to me both have their uses, both have their faults.
Hell yes. I've never pirated a game, but I have downloaded a crack or two for the sake of not having to constantly find the CD from the shelves, insert it, wait for the disk to spin up, and wait for the software to decide that it is all legitimate. I've got a fast hard drive and a fast machine with the whole game installed, and I paid for it. Why do I have to wait around to use a product that I did *not* pirate? I have no qualms about killing the copy protection for the sake of speed and the abilility to make a functional back up copy of the disk.
The first thing I do with a game after I install it is grab the no-cd hack for it. I have way too many games installed, and way too short an attention span, to be swapping cds in and out every time I sit down to do some gaming.
That being said, I don't mind the Steam thing so much. It has an offline mode once you validate it and the download process was pretty slick for me.
I would expect the price to be a bit more competitive for games that are downloaded however, given the money they are saving on pressing, packaging, distributing, etc.
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I just posted about this on another board where they were discussing Societies.
I've seen the rabid SimCity fanbase lamenting the loss of the nth degree of micromanagement and replacement with Attitudes or whatever the hell they're calling those high level attributes in Societies. I agree that if the part of SimCity you loved was that micromanagement, it looks like the game is heading in a different direction.
But personally, I struggled with the micromanagement. I recently reloaded SC Deluxe and a bunch of mods to give it another go, but I was already tiring of the tedium required to get things really up and running. So the new lighter version might actually have some appeal to me if it's not oversimplified or campy.
I'm at least going to give it a shot and hope that EA hasn't again pulled out the textbook on how to kill franchises.
I know I'm probably being overly optimistic, but if I am at least there's like 10 other games to drown my sorrows in..
SimCity Societies
COD 4
World in Conflict
Supreme Commander Expansion
Orange Box
Crysis
NWN 2: Mask of the Betrayer
Empire Earth 3
Hellgate: London
The Witcher
F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate
All of that in a what, 3 month period. My bank account is crying uncle already! That doesn't even include games I'm less interested in like UT3, ET:QW, etc.
I don't remember the last time there were this many all at once..
To be fair, reading the message boards for Everquest back in the day when guilds would fight for spawns, race past other guilds who were trying to get to the end boss, training mobs to raids, that shit provided some hilarious reading...
Instances do away with the griefing and drama that was so fun to watch from the sidelines..
The 38% was the 38% of a"significant portion" of the 1.2 million who visited the site, not the full 1.2 million. Depending on the level of embellishment, significant portion could be 50.00001%, which would still yield a solid return based on the additional numbers, but not nearly as much as they try to imply...
Without getting into details and to add to my time analogy with the toll road, I have a limited amount of time to play video games because I work in IT and have a 4 month old baby. So in that limited time that I have to play, I want it to be a very high quality experience. As a result of that high value that I place on that time, I'm willing to spend a good amount of money to ensure that time nets me a high quality experience, e.g. a 24" monitor playing games at 1920x1200 with all the sparkly bits turned on. I doubt you can show me a $200 card that's going to support that resolution at high settings for the likes of WIC, Crysis, Bioshock, etc., all of which I'm able to enjoy in all their DX10 goodness.
Sure I could wait a year and play those games on an 8800GTX that I pay 200 bucks for. But my hobby is gaming, and I don't WANT to wait a year to save a couple hundred bucks. My willingness to spend that money to enhance the quality of the experience I get doesn't mean I'm ridiculously wealthy and wasteful with my money or that I "have no life". It means I value things differently than you do. My problem is not with how you value things, it's with your judgement of all valuations that differ from yours.
Taken to an extreme, if everyone valued things the same way as you there would never be a $200 card because the card making companies wouldn't have us bleeding edge players to subsidize their R&D.
I can't wait for the GTXs to drop below 500 so I can buy a second and get SLI up and working...
I love how rife with judgement this post is. When did *your* calculation of value per dollar become the end all be all, with all others representing irrational overspending or lack of social skills?
It reminds me of people who use to gasp when I told them I took the toll road home. "But you're wasting seven dollars a day doing that!" they would say. They didn't get that I'd gladly pay seven dollars to have an extra hour or two at home doing what I want with my time vs. sitting in shitty traffic.
I'm fine with you saying the value proposition isn't there for *you*, but please stop short of getting on your high horse and proclaiming that it couldn't be there for me either unless I'm irresponsible or stupid.
What narrow-minded crap. To get the equivalent from iTMS that I have in my portable Rhapsody player right now, I'd be spending a metric shitload of cash. I'm sitting on 4GB of music, none of which I own, that I pay the price of an album a month for. Every time I plug it in it updates the channels I've selected (5 of them, 3 custom built by me) with about 4 hours of music each.
I bet most of the people spewing about how this is a flawed model haven't A) looked into the details of it, or B) tried it.
I am loving my Rhapsody subscription.
I type this as I sit listening to a custom made channel full of house music on my Rhapsody enabled mp3 player that I got for 40 bucks.
It is freaking awesome, and as soon as I get a car with an input jack, I will be even more in heaven than I am now (screw you Infiniti, your radio system SUCKS).
Every album on this 4GB player (with 2GB MicroSD chip I got for 20 bucks) is an album I don't have to own.
So far I'm finding Rhapsody to be worth every penny, even more so now that I have this portable player.
It's funny, because if they try to run the "we don't know what the content is, we're just blocking the protocol", tell them they should just block all chat because that's what child predators use to lure young kids.
What, some chat is not used for that so you don't want to block all of it? Interesting...
Like I said on my other post replying to the "Usenet.com != Usenet", things will get really interesting if they win this case and then trot it out as legal precedent to the big cable and telco companies that host usenet. I guess it's probably extremely likely the cables and telcos will just roll over on it because usenet is not a revenue generator for them, but if they DID decide to fight it, that would be some fireworks right there.
I am amazed how far I had to read to get to this distinction. Looks like they're going to try to set precedent by winning a case against a small guy, then they'll trot it out to all the other usenet server hosts and try to get usenet shut down or irrepairably changed (e.g. back to the discussion board it started as).
I can honestly see a potential future where they've clamped down on p2p, usenet, and even gotten the government to block torrent sites hosted outside the country. That would halt a vast majority of the piracy of their content.
Who knows if they'll succeed and/or to what degree, but their overall plan is starting to become clearer.
Just off the top of my head:
Bioshock
World in Conflict
Medal of Honor: Airborne
Civ 4: Beyond the Sword
Supreme Commander
Crysis
DiRT
HL2: Orange Box
Call of Duty 4
I could go on and on, and the holiday season hasn't even hit yet. You could argue a couple of those are console ports, but the vast majority wouldn't even begin to work on a console.
PC Gaming dying? Uh no.
yeah first thing I thought when I read that was What the hell does disparaging AT&T have to do with harming children.
Then it occurred to me. If children see you disparaging AT&T, they may not grow up to be consumers of AT&T products, so that would be pre-emptively harmful to the children.
It's genius really.
Unfortunately probably not. It's hard to prove that the sales of their stock weren't part of normal executive stock sales. Unless a pattern emerges where they were selling right before important announcements/court decisions/etc., these guys will likely not have to give back a dime of that money.
Keep an eye on sub-prime mortgage execs, you'll see the same thing. They knew the loans they were selling were unsustainable, but they just kept selling stock at regular intervals and all walked away with multiple millions of dollars, and its the market that's eating the loss on the bad loans.
But the question I came here to ask/see responses on is, if I pay you royalties on a patent, and that patent is later ruled invalid, do I have any recourse with regard to recouping royalties I paid you on an invalid patent?
Not sure how good faith, reasonableness, etc. apply when it comes to contracts and such
I agree. It is overwhelmingly likely that negotiations continue and are close to being final. That said, Cisco is still legally obligated to protect their trademark, otherwise Apple could bait them along until they feel sufficient dilution has occurred, then back out and seek their own suit alleging dilution.
This is just CYA while negotiations finish up.
Nothing to see here...
Me, I think this is a knee jerk reaction to the complaining that security software companies have been doing lately. Your post sums it up, EU sees this as another potential "embrace and extend" scenario when they read the bitching by Symantec/McAfee, etc., and starts beating the drum.
To be honest, it seems like most of the features MS is trying to put in, while long overdue, aren't features that are meant to cut out security companies. They're meant to secure the OS like it should have been from the beginning. Cutting out the security companies is more of a byproduct IMO.
Oh I don't know, movies that are larger than 320x240 and 6 seconds long?
Hopefully you're first year, because that last statement you made is ridiculous.
Or you're already gunning for that top corporate lawyer spot. As other posters have said, trademark is designed to protect the guy who does it first, not the guy with the biggest pocketbook/customer base/lawyer corps.
Include Kazaa/BitTorrent/eDonkey as part of the operating system?
Embrace and extend baby, MS tried to play nice, but the RIAA wasn't having any of it.
Now its gonna get UGLY!!
THat response doesn't address the parent post at all. Technically the AI was respecting his borders by building on the ONE tile that he didn't have cultural control over. It was violating the spirit of the law, not the letter. The guy's answer above just says they'll obey the letter of the law.
What he says is no different than CivIII.
IMHO of course.
It's not just me, either; it's a running sardonic joke among tech columnists that you can't even USE the word 'Apple' or 'Microsoft' without getting hate mail from somebody or other."
/., its been a constant that I can always count on; rabid fans of both spouting broken record thoughts about how poor the other is.
I certainly hope no one thinks it will be any different here. In my several years reading
Seems to me both have their uses, both have their faults.
I'm sure the answer will be higher fees though, so in the long run the banks will be fine.
Outlook not so good.
Hell yes. I've never pirated a game, but I have downloaded a crack or two for the sake of not having to constantly find the CD from the shelves, insert it, wait for the disk to spin up, and wait for the software to decide that it is all legitimate. I've got a fast hard drive and a fast machine with the whole game installed, and I paid for it. Why do I have to wait around to use a product that I did *not* pirate? I have no qualms about killing the copy protection for the sake of speed and the abilility to make a functional back up copy of the disk.
The first thing I do with a game after I install it is grab the no-cd hack for it. I have way too many games installed, and way too short an attention span, to be swapping cds in and out every time I sit down to do some gaming.
That being said, I don't mind the Steam thing so much. It has an offline mode once you validate it and the download process was pretty slick for me.
I would expect the price to be a bit more competitive for games that are downloaded however, given the money they are saving on pressing, packaging, distributing, etc.