Prices have been $50 since about 1990. The first 16megabit cartriges were expensive to make, or at least used as a justification for charging fifty bucks. Prices have stabilized, though. Sure DVDs are cheaper to make than carts, but development costs are much higher. A game that took eighteen months to make in 1990 would now take two years. I hope you bought a few computer games instead of pirating every single one just because you could. The music analogy is simple, support the artists you can afford to. Otherwise you're just a scummy pirate enjoying himself at the expense of others.
1989. 1991 was the Oakland hills fire. The 89 quake was near Santa Cruz. Its easy to think of it as a SF quake, but if it really was centered in SF there would have have been a decent amount of damage. Some brick buildings near the epicenter were very much damaged or destroyed. The Cypress structure, a two mile long stretch of double-decker freeway collapsed in Oakland. It was 6.9 or 7.1 depending on the source.
I always understood it to be a professional courtesy among the superheroes/villans. Unmasking always happened when the unmaskee was conscious and aware. At any rate, the green goblin offered spiderman a chance to join him. How would spiderman feel about joining someone who had unmasked him?
Don't be afraid of your power supply unless you are an absolute klutz with a soldering iron or have a magnetic-like attraction to powerful capacitors. The fan in my power supply is 80mm and I think that is standard. Buy whatever you like. The Silencer fans from pcpowerandcooling.com work great for me. Cut two wires, unscrew the two screws holding the fan in place. Solder, I had a third hand help since the wires were mid-air over my case. Screw in the new fan and screw the supply back together and to the case. The capacitors are far from the fan and wires in my supply.
Get a Noise Control Siverado CPU heatsink and fan. Get a Zalman chipset heatsink. Get a Papst chipset fan if you want, I did. Get some Silencer 80 or 92mm case fans from PCPowerandCooling. Use the Silencer in the case and also in the power supply. Crack it open, cut two wires, unscrew the current fan and solder in a new one. Adda case fans are good too. I have all of the above. I spent over $100 but my computer tops out at 35db from the CPU fan. Everything else is 20-24db. Since the quiet fans don't move as much air I have to have more fans. Anyone who bitches about how noisy their computer is needs to replace the crap that came with it.
Would someone please explain what the hell is up with 11th place: Ben Hur?!? The movie was released in 1959 and took in $70,000,000 unadjusted, or $609,000,000 adjusted. Meanwhile in 12th place: 101 Dalmations, released in 1961 and grossed $152,000,000 unadjusted, but $595,000,000 adjusted. How the hell does this work? From 1959 to 1961 the price of a movie ticket did not double, did it?!?
Uh huh. That entire sequence was shot specifically and only for that trailer. It was never meant to be in the movie. The trailer was so successful that the sequence was going to be incorporated into the movie but after 9/11 it was pulled entirely.
Bull. The frequency matters. Microwaves interact with water in a way that generates heat. That's why we shouldn't stick gerbils in the microwave. Cell phones use microwaves. FM radio does not. Having 50,000 Watts coming from a radio tower has not been shown as a danger.
Have you ever jaywalked, littered, or been given too much change for a purchase then kept it after you realized what happened? Technically these are all crimes in the USA, maybe they aren't where you live. If you have ever done any of these things then you need to back down on your stance about entrapment. The circumstances that lead someone to commit a crime matter. If an undercover cop points out to someone the car is available to be stolen, that someone is much more likely to try it because the idea is planted.
If you read the article, you would have read: "Entrapment is where the government plants the seed of a crime in the mind of individual who would not otherwise be criminally inclined," Trodden said. " . . . We don't want that. But if we had somebody who was out there, ready to steal something . . . it's good police work."
Take issue with that if you want. Apparently by US law it is not entrapment.
Why in hell are you willing to pay $2 a song? I'll pay $1. $1.50 for a few songs and $2 for about 100 songs tops. Suppose I want to buy Soundgarden's Superunknown album? There's what, 14 songs on it? I like at least 8 of them. That's $16 at $2 a song. Why the hell should I pay $16 when the bandwidth costs 10 cents? RIAA or the artsists do not deserve $16 for 8 songs. Especially when the middleman like Tower Records is being cut out of the picture. Tower pays what, $8 wholesale? I should be paying $10 for an album in mp3-or-similar format.
Re:Compression, compression, compression
on
Wireless Monitors?
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· Score: 2
I don't think you mean "as a consumer." I think you mean, 'if I was Joe Shmoe consumer.' You wouldn't expect a wireless LAN to be as fast as directly accessing a hard drive on a desktop. You shouldn't expect a wireless monitor to be as responsive as a wired monitor. Seriously, who is going to play Quake on a 10" screen? Who can afford this screen? Not Joe Shmoe consumer. Almost anyone considering this screen already knows something about computers, or knows someone who does.
The problem with PSO is, how many people played it for more than a few months? Three friends of mine all quit after 4 months. The game was too simplistic and there was nothing new to do after several play throughs. My friends did not join the game to take part in a chat room. They wanted a game they could play with many other humans, since NPCs still suck generally as in game companionship. Games have to focus on gameplay first.
*Ding!* You are correct. Also, the Dreamcast has 8MB RAM for graphics, plus texture compression in hardware from S3. However the Dreamcast only has 16MB RAM total, or maybe it was 24MB total. Anyway, Dreamcast beat the pants of the PS2 in that respect.
I recently had a new 19.0" CRT screen from Viewsonic loaned to me for a trial period. Wow. I used it connected to my desktop and the larger screen was incredible. I forget the resolution I was running, but it was great for working on documents side-by-side. Going back to the 15" on my desktop was disappointing.
No this didn't actually happen to me. Crumbz, why did you bother to share at all? Why is your comment modded up?
Good question. If someone abridges a work of Shakespeare, do they own and control those words? Can anyone else publish that rendition of a play or sonnet?
The only problem I see with your argument is that you play 10-15 hours per month, not a puny 5. 10-15 hours is perfectly reasonable to me, while 5 is not. Developers who focus on getting people to play only 5 hours a month might save themselves server and bandwidth costs, but the gameplay changes should not adversely affect anyone playing more than 5 hours. Anyone who pays to play only 5 hours a month is an idiot according-to-me. That is a subjective opinion, not an objective statement of fact.
Re:This is a trojan horse, plain and simple.
on
Spy v. Spy
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· Score: 2
You moderated something over/underrated? You're a weak suck...tell us what you really think!
Until I see a moderation option for -1 Stupid, -1 Plain Wrong as Shown in Following Comments, -1 Zealot, and +1 Offtopic, I'll continue to use over/underrated. I'll be damned if I'm going to be metamodded down by someone who doesn't know what they're reading about and isn't taking the time to check for context.
Re:The most important thing developers must note:
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The Future of MMORPGs
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· Score: 1
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/gamespot ting/031502/p2_01.html
Trey doesn't outright say the market has stagnated, but I think he raises the interesting question of the available market. Also, of the recent issues of PC Gamer magazine I recall metioned that the market seems to be slowing in growth at about 900,000 paying customers.
Uh, hello, 5 hours a month is about 1.2 hours a week. That's nothing at all. How many people are going to pay $10 a month for 5 hours of play? Thats $2 an hour. Do you think someone will pay $120 a year for that? I don't think so. Anyone who does is an idiot, and I think they make up a very small segment of the market. If gamers don't contribute more to the game, they will never feel relevant. Its more important that developers figure out how to make the gamers' contributions relevant. If the gamer has a genuine impact on the world, and currently gamers don't, then they will feel relevant.
Re:The most important thing developers must note:
on
The Future of MMORPGs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Nevertheless, developers are still on crack if they expect more people to play for two to three years just to level up endlessly. I think its possible to create a game where the 90% are just as powerful as the 10%. When the players decide they want to kill the evil NPC Mordrath who is in his castle deep in the mountains of Sloemp, everyone can take part in the battles to eradicate his minions from the mountains, lay seige to their towns, and finally kick his ass, which mind you will require cooperation from tens or hundreds of players.
How much one participates in this living world is up to the player, but the designers will have to stay on their toes to keep the world interesting. I figure this can be done, but it will take committment.
Slashdot Mirror
Prices have been $50 since about 1990. The first 16megabit cartriges were expensive to make, or at least used as a justification for charging fifty bucks. Prices have stabilized, though. Sure DVDs are cheaper to make than carts, but development costs are much higher. A game that took eighteen months to make in 1990 would now take two years. I hope you bought a few computer games instead of pirating every single one just because you could. The music analogy is simple, support the artists you can afford to. Otherwise you're just a scummy pirate enjoying himself at the expense of others.
1989. 1991 was the Oakland hills fire. The 89 quake was near Santa Cruz. Its easy to think of it as a SF quake, but if it really was centered in SF there would have have been a decent amount of damage. Some brick buildings near the epicenter were very much damaged or destroyed. The Cypress structure, a two mile long stretch of double-decker freeway collapsed in Oakland. It was 6.9 or 7.1 depending on the source.
I always understood it to be a professional courtesy among the superheroes/villans. Unmasking always happened when the unmaskee was conscious and aware. At any rate, the green goblin offered spiderman a chance to join him. How would spiderman feel about joining someone who had unmasked him?
Don't be afraid of your power supply unless you are an absolute klutz with a soldering iron or have a magnetic-like attraction to powerful capacitors. The fan in my power supply is 80mm and I think that is standard. Buy whatever you like. The Silencer fans from pcpowerandcooling.com work great for me. Cut two wires, unscrew the two screws holding the fan in place. Solder, I had a third hand help since the wires were mid-air over my case. Screw in the new fan and screw the supply back together and to the case. The capacitors are far from the fan and wires in my supply.
Get a Noise Control Siverado CPU heatsink and fan. Get a Zalman chipset heatsink. Get a Papst chipset fan if you want, I did. Get some Silencer 80 or 92mm case fans from PCPowerandCooling. Use the Silencer in the case and also in the power supply. Crack it open, cut two wires, unscrew the current fan and solder in a new one. Adda case fans are good too. I have all of the above. I spent over $100 but my computer tops out at 35db from the CPU fan. Everything else is 20-24db. Since the quiet fans don't move as much air I have to have more fans. Anyone who bitches about how noisy their computer is needs to replace the crap that came with it.
The next day MS went back to their usual two words, monopolistic and hostile.
Would someone please explain what the hell is up with 11th place: Ben Hur?!? The movie was released in 1959 and took in $70,000,000 unadjusted, or $609,000,000 adjusted. Meanwhile in 12th place: 101 Dalmations, released in 1961 and grossed $152,000,000 unadjusted, but $595,000,000 adjusted. How the hell does this work? From 1959 to 1961 the price of a movie ticket did not double, did it?!?
Uh huh. That entire sequence was shot specifically and only for that trailer. It was never meant to be in the movie. The trailer was so successful that the sequence was going to be incorporated into the movie but after 9/11 it was pulled entirely.
Bull. The frequency matters. Microwaves interact with water in a way that generates heat. That's why we shouldn't stick gerbils in the microwave. Cell phones use microwaves. FM radio does not. Having 50,000 Watts coming from a radio tower has not been shown as a danger.
You're damn right. Its just like calling the Playstation 1 a SNES killer. Well DUH, they're different generations of hardware.
Have you ever jaywalked, littered, or been given too much change for a purchase then kept it after you realized what happened? Technically these are all crimes in the USA, maybe they aren't where you live. If you have ever done any of these things then you need to back down on your stance about entrapment. The circumstances that lead someone to commit a crime matter. If an undercover cop points out to someone the car is available to be stolen, that someone is much more likely to try it because the idea is planted.
If you read the article, you would have read:
"Entrapment is where the government plants the seed of a crime in the mind of individual who would not otherwise be criminally inclined," Trodden said. " . . . We don't want that. But if we had somebody who was out there, ready to steal something . . . it's good police work."
Take issue with that if you want. Apparently by US law it is not entrapment.
You sounded very much like The Plague in Hackers. "There is only fun, and boring."
Why in hell are you willing to pay $2 a song? I'll pay $1. $1.50 for a few songs and $2 for about 100 songs tops. Suppose I want to buy Soundgarden's Superunknown album? There's what, 14 songs on it? I like at least 8 of them. That's $16 at $2 a song. Why the hell should I pay $16 when the bandwidth costs 10 cents? RIAA or the artsists do not deserve $16 for 8 songs. Especially when the middleman like Tower Records is being cut out of the picture. Tower pays what, $8 wholesale? I should be paying $10 for an album in mp3-or-similar format.
I don't think you mean "as a consumer." I think you mean, 'if I was Joe Shmoe consumer.' You wouldn't expect a wireless LAN to be as fast as directly accessing a hard drive on a desktop. You shouldn't expect a wireless monitor to be as responsive as a wired monitor. Seriously, who is going to play Quake on a 10" screen? Who can afford this screen? Not Joe Shmoe consumer. Almost anyone considering this screen already knows something about computers, or knows someone who does.
The problem with PSO is, how many people played it for more than a few months? Three friends of mine all quit after 4 months. The game was too simplistic and there was nothing new to do after several play throughs. My friends did not join the game to take part in a chat room. They wanted a game they could play with many other humans, since NPCs still suck generally as in game companionship. Games have to focus on gameplay first.
*Ding!* You are correct. Also, the Dreamcast has 8MB RAM for graphics, plus texture compression in hardware from S3. However the Dreamcast only has 16MB RAM total, or maybe it was 24MB total. Anyway, Dreamcast beat the pants of the PS2 in that respect.
No this didn't actually happen to me. Crumbz, why did you bother to share at all? Why is your comment modded up?
Can anyone say mod this guy up since the idiot parent post surely will be by fast skimming fools.
Good question. If someone abridges a work of Shakespeare, do they own and control those words? Can anyone else publish that rendition of a play or sonnet?
Until I see a moderation option for -1 Stupid, -1 Plain Wrong as Shown in Following Comments, -1 Zealot, and +1 Offtopic, I'll continue to use over/underrated. I'll be damned if I'm going to be metamodded down by someone who doesn't know what they're reading about and isn't taking the time to check for context.
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/gamespot ting/031502/p2_01.html
Trey doesn't outright say the market has stagnated, but I think he raises the interesting question of the available market. Also, of the recent issues of PC Gamer magazine I recall metioned that the market seems to be slowing in growth at about 900,000 paying customers.
How much one participates in this living world is up to the player, but the designers will have to stay on their toes to keep the world interesting. I figure this can be done, but it will take committment.