I have a Mac. I have Steam on it. Roughly a quarter of my game library will run on my Mac. Of those, roughly 40% are Valve games (another 40% being indie games, and 20% being non-Valve AAA titles).
Because all* of Valve's games run on the same engine, once one game has been ported to a new OS, the rest of their library soon follows. And they are quite good games. On Metacritic, there are three titles tied for "highest-rated game of all time". Two of the three are Valve games.
* OK, technically not all. They have their old old GoldSrc engine, used for Half-Life, Opposing Force, etc., and then the current Source engine used for Half-Life 2, Portal, etc. Only Source was ported to Mac, and likely to Linux as well. But we already have enough decade-old games on Linux - we don't need Ricochet or Team Fortress Classic.
I do actually have a Blu-Ray drive in my laptop, and I will probably try to watch at least one movie on it (note to self: see if The Atomic Bomb Movie is still around). I would probably be fine just using the laptop's 1080p screen (do BD movies actually store it any higher than that?), but 1440p would be nice. So I'll probably put "HDCP support" at the bottom of the feature list (if two otherwise-identical monitors differ only in HDCP support, I'll grab that one), but otherwise, shouldn't be a problem.
Ripping to disk isn't a good option. I am perennially low on disk space, and ripping a 30GB disc is not something I'd like to do.
Number of inputs actually isn't as important to me as *types*. I only need two (one for my laptop, one for my primary desktop (the secondary can stay on the 1600x900 one)), but the type is more important. I need a DVI (desktop has only two DVI ports), and either an HDMI or DP (laptop only has HDMI, DP and VGA). Converters are acceptable if cheap.
I'm actually looking for a good 1440p display. If the $400 ones have all the specs I need (at least two usable inputs, minimal ghosting and latency, color that isn't terrible, and at least 60Hz refresh rate), I'll probably grab two (I was already expecting to spend $900+; if I can get two for the price of one, so much the better).
PS: Does lack of HDCP support really hinder anything?
"The program will cover 95% of the cost" "the maximum Amazon will contribute is $2,000/year for four years"
2,000 $/yr * 4 yr =.95 X X = $8421
So apparently you can become a trained aircraft mechanic for not much more than $8,000. Which is about 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of a common Bachelor's degree.
Yeah, either the summary dropped a zero somewhere, aircraft mechanics are trained far less than you would think, or that 95% figure is *way* off.
I can't quite understand you (just a tip: "want" is not a contraction, no apostrophe is needed), but I *think* you're interpreting my movie-pitch "it's like ___, but ____" far too literally.
Those descriptions were the kind of thing you'd tell a Hollywood exec to convince them just to listen to your pitch. The similarities between Gunnerkrigg Court and Harry Potter, for instance, are: * Both take place in unusual schools * Both include magic * Both feature teens in a coming-of-age story * Both feature English, Scots and Irish mythology * At least one of the main character's parents is dead
The differences? * GK's school is mostly modern in design (or renovated with modern and post-modern technology); HP's is a magic castle * GK's main story is about the difference between magic and science (including each's approach to the other (see: spells as programs)); HP doesn't even use technology except when completely magicked out the ass * GK uses mythology from everywhere - Native American, Egyptian, Viking, Germanic, Chinese, etc. And probably more obscure ones I completely missed. * GK has more robot characters than some sci-fi stories; HP has no robots whatsoever * The "moral" of HP is "love conquers all"; GK treats love more like Shakespeare - tragic death awaits it (just read the chapters about Jeanne to see what I mean)
So yeah. If you had only ten seconds to describe each of them, you'd think they were extremely similar. If you actually read the entirety of both, you'll see the only similarities are general. But if you had ten seconds to describe "Dr. Who" and "Star Trek", they'd sound pretty similar.
Same goes for my other comparisons, but I have not the time to show just why my brief, vague descriptions are not definitive and complete.
I think, with the proper cuts, it could be a single movie. You'd need to cut out a lot of minor scenes, even some entire minor storylines. For example, the whole Chromatic Death thing? Throw it out. Doesn't even happen. In fact, trim down a lot of the things between "Agatha arrives at Castle Heterodyne" and "Agatha takes control of Castle Heterodyne". It's just stretching out the story.
But get it down to roughly one movie, and I'd watch the/shit/ out of it.
The Oasis/Hereticorp plot? The Dimension of Pain? Aylee? The K'z'k/Gwynn arch? The Holiday Wars? The Sam Cirkhail? The Elevator to Hell (with ghosts in the gas tank)? All of those are *at* *least* big enough for a movie on their own (possibly several). Trying to cram even two of them into one movie would be too much - but without all the interweaving plotlines, is it even Sluggy? Is it even nifty?
Some of the minor archs in that comic could be movies on their own. Hell, I'd watch an Oceans Unmoving movie (separate from the rest of the work, it's actually pretty good).
There are plenty of good ones (arguably better than what Marvel/DC publish), and they target much wider demographics than "superhero movie".
Gunnerkrigg Court? Think Harry Potter, except with more global myth references and with robots. Schlock Mercenary? It's Star Trek, minus the pacifism, as a sometimes-dark comedy. The Phoenix Requiem could win awards for "serious drama". The Adventures of Dr McNinja would make a good kung-fu comedy.
Need I go on?
The only big problem is existing fanbase. Any Spider-man movie can be a decent success, simply because there are already so many self-identified fans of Spider-man. They may not read the comics, at least not anymore, but they watch the movies and such. And even the non-fans recognize the name - Superman is a pop culture monolith.
Very few webcomics have nearly that much brand identity. You go up to someone and ask them who Hannelore Elicott-Chatham is, you'll get some very weird stares. You ask who Bruce Wayne is, and everybody knows he's "the goddamn Batman".
But that's what an advertising campaign is for. Tell people they should see it, and some of them will. And hey, you can probably get the movie rights to Dresden Codak or Dumbing of Age much cheaper than you can get even Aquaman.
"Fight Fire With Fire" or "Rust in Peace... Polaris" might do nicely, as a sort of "hey, this thing you're building will kill millions of people, you know" message.
They won, but (and here's the important part) THE OTHER COMPANY DIDN'T LOSE.
Economics is not warfare. In battle, one side wins, the other loses (at least in the general case). Not so in business. It's entirely possible for both sides to win. It's possible for both sides to lose. It's possible for one side to win and the other to be pretty much unaffected - like, say, this time.
People thinking of business only as zero-sum are one of the biggest problems with modern capitalism.
That does not (IIRC, IANAL, STFU) apply to brand stylings. You can write a book called "Jack Daniels", you can make a TV show called "Jack Daniels", but you can't use the branding style of the Jack Daniel's trademark on them. It's the same reason why you can get sued for using a Superman-esque logo.
I never said Nixon was the worst. I just said we should *blame* him.
Besides, everyone knows the *real* worst President was Buchanan. But it's kind of hard to blame him for any modern problems, if only because nobody really remembers him (at least Millard Fillmore had a funny name!).
Wouldn't it go the other way around? During inflation, prices increase and the value of money decreases. So eventually *everyone* would be above that nominal poverty line.
I'm pretty sure the poverty line in Washington's time was in the range of hundreds of dollars per year.
Yep. It goes back at least to Bush I, probably much earlier.
I say we blame everything on Nixon. That's when things started going downhill and the budget started spiraling upward.
Plus, he makes a good scapegoat. He's already "evil" in the public eye; why not blame him for starting America's decline as well as for Vietnam and Watergate?
My last laptop was also an Asus. Core 2 Duo era. Lasted three and a half years (I'm a bit rough on laptops, they don't tend to last longer than that in my care). Quite satisfied with it, although it was rather obsolete by the time it kicked the bucket. The one time I had to use the warranty (failed hard drive), they replaced it quickly and painlessly. That's why I chose to buy another Asus - because my last experience with them had been good.
They changed, near as I can tell, sometime in the past year or two. Their customer service is shit (when they say they will respond "within 72 hours", they really mean "within the next two weeks"), they don't even try to treat their customers nicely, they nickel-and-dime you on such items as the installation disks ($15?!?). Even the quality of their bloatware has gone down - the Engrish on their "reinstallation disk creation tool" was horrible (and bad at math - it said it would take six discs, but when I had it burn them to ISO, it made four (why does it even take four DVDs to make a Windows install disk, anyways? The one I got online burned to just one)).
TFA seems to be down, but when I read it, it didn't seem to be about Jack Daniels at all.
Imagine taking, say, the Star Wars logo font and title crawl, and using it in a generic romantic comedy. That doesn't reference Star Wars in any way. Or have anything to do with Star Wars. And isn't trying to make a joke of it. Would that be "fair use"? If so, then anything is fair use, and the whole trademark system is irrelevant.
I see you've been reading too many/. comments, and now assume any enforcement of IP laws is an evil only slightly less than the Holocaust.
"Intellectual property" laws (patent, copyright, and trademark) exist for a reason. The fact that they are heavily abused does not mean that every enforcement of them is invalid. There are millions of valid uses.
In this case, it seems to be one of the increasingly-rare cases of the law being used properly. The book rather clearly copies the trademarked style of JD. It does not have any obvious fair use exemption - it's not being used to reference JD itself (nominative fair use), it's not a parody. It is someone using another's branding apparently either out of laziness, or deliberate deception (most likely the former, but I can't rule out the latter).
It's not censorship. They aren't trying to get the book withdrawn, or removed (which they definitely would, if they were trying to censor the book). The cover has nothing worth censoring - it's just the title and other basic metadata. The only "artistic expression" they're trying to control is their own - the art of their trademark.
Asus in generally is fucked up right now. Completely and utterly incompetent.
I bought a laptop from them back in late April. Finally got it in early June, after manufacturing delays, processing delays, processing errors and finally the slowest and worst shipping option they could find.
It broke three hours later. Totally fried. Wouldn't even get to the POST screen.
I finally got it back from RMA two weeks ago - over a month after sending it back. And, after they insisted I send it back in the original packaging and include the charger, they shipped it back in a plain cardboard box and bubble wrap, and had somehow lost part of the power cord (the wall->brick cord, which fortunately is a standard PC power cord).
If that's the kind of service they give to a customer spending $1500 (and who, by the end, was threatening a lawsuit), I'd hate to how they'd treat a cheap tablet customer. I'll never find out, myself - after *that* experience, I went from an Asus fanboy to an Asus nemesis, and will never be buying anything from them again.
A man once asked me what OpenBSD was. I responded with a thousand-word history of UNIX, AT&T, Berkeley University, Linux, a rundown of the various *BSD forks, a brief bit about Steve Jobs (NeXT and OS X, mainly), and even a small paragraph on non-BSD Unices.
They should put me in a video game, because I am *crazy* good at blurting out random information dumps and exposition.
Your argument is that there are less than 1 million porn sites, and you cite an article that examines ONLY one million sites. Do I even need to point out the flaw in that reasoning?
Still, let's suppose that your 42,000/1,000,000 figure is true. There are somewhere between 300,000,000 and 6,800,000,000 websites, total, which (using naive extrapolation) gives between 13,000,000 and 290,000,000 pornographic websites. And I for one would bet that porn tends more to the "many sites with low traffic" style than average.
Part of the proliferation is just how the business works. They tend to buy up many domains, one for each "series" almost, and combine them into one "package". They commonly refer to this as "affiliate" sites. So that inflates things a bit. Then there's the rather large number of free sites that just rehost content. Then all the camwhore sites. And some "dating" sites are classed as pornography for obvious reasons.
That's why they made the underwear unremovable (as I mentioned). But they could have used more "historically-accurate" undergarments.
But that does not explain why they chose to make the women's undergarments include anachronistic bras, rather than, say, Roman-style breastbands (I actually seem to remember them using that in Morrowind, but I can't recall precisely).
Valve understands that a *fun* game will be fun. As long as the graphics are good enough to support the gameplay, the ame will be fun whether you're running it at 2006-era graphics or at 2016-era graphics.
Valve understands this. They make a fun game, then make it run on the lowest hardware they expect will be commonplace. They design their system to be scalable. They allow features to be disabled, have an extensive set of shader fallbacks. Examine this somewhat-outdated wiki page detailing the features enabled and disabled for each DirectX level in the original Half-Life 2. That's no longer current, I believe - they patched it to use a newer engine revision that I think dropped support for some of the lower levels, and I know it added higher ones.
I have played that game many times on many different computers. It was fun on my Athlon 3000, Radeon X700 build. It's fun on my dual-Xeon, Radeon X1900 rig. It was fun on my Core 2 Duo, GeForce 9600M laptop. It was fun on my Phenom II X3, Radeon 4830 build. It would probably be fun on this new Core i7, GeForce 660M laptop, but I haven't replayed it yet on this.
The only machine it wasn't fun on? My ancient Pentium II, Rage Pro laptop, and that was because it glitched like crazy - corrupted textures, BSOD after a few minutes. The machine just could not handle some of the things that were actually necessary for gameplay - the Havok physics (used in puzzles), the fade-in shaders (used for one-way gates), the dynamic lights (used to highlight gunfire). Remove those, and it wouldn't have been a fun game, so Valve just didn't remove it.
But the rest? Water refract/reflect shaders? Rim lighting? Normal maps? Soft shadows? Turn them off if necessary. They don't make the game less fun. Less immersive, perhaps - that's why they have them as an option - but the fun doesn't change.
Slashdot Mirror
Except Valve also makes games.
I have a Mac. I have Steam on it. Roughly a quarter of my game library will run on my Mac. Of those, roughly 40% are Valve games (another 40% being indie games, and 20% being non-Valve AAA titles).
Because all* of Valve's games run on the same engine, once one game has been ported to a new OS, the rest of their library soon follows. And they are quite good games. On Metacritic, there are three titles tied for "highest-rated game of all time". Two of the three are Valve games.
* OK, technically not all. They have their old old GoldSrc engine, used for Half-Life, Opposing Force, etc., and then the current Source engine used for Half-Life 2, Portal, etc. Only Source was ported to Mac, and likely to Linux as well. But we already have enough decade-old games on Linux - we don't need Ricochet or Team Fortress Classic.
I do actually have a Blu-Ray drive in my laptop, and I will probably try to watch at least one movie on it (note to self: see if The Atomic Bomb Movie is still around). I would probably be fine just using the laptop's 1080p screen (do BD movies actually store it any higher than that?), but 1440p would be nice. So I'll probably put "HDCP support" at the bottom of the feature list (if two otherwise-identical monitors differ only in HDCP support, I'll grab that one), but otherwise, shouldn't be a problem.
Ripping to disk isn't a good option. I am perennially low on disk space, and ripping a 30GB disc is not something I'd like to do.
Number of inputs actually isn't as important to me as *types*. I only need two (one for my laptop, one for my primary desktop (the secondary can stay on the 1600x900 one)), but the type is more important. I need a DVI (desktop has only two DVI ports), and either an HDMI or DP (laptop only has HDMI, DP and VGA). Converters are acceptable if cheap.
I'm actually looking for a good 1440p display. If the $400 ones have all the specs I need (at least two usable inputs, minimal ghosting and latency, color that isn't terrible, and at least 60Hz refresh rate), I'll probably grab two (I was already expecting to spend $900+; if I can get two for the price of one, so much the better).
PS: Does lack of HDCP support really hinder anything?
As has often been said, it's a really nice operating system. Shame the text editor is so clunky.
"The program will cover 95% of the cost"
"the maximum Amazon will contribute is $2,000/year for four years"
2,000 $/yr * 4 yr = .95 X
X = $8421
So apparently you can become a trained aircraft mechanic for not much more than $8,000. Which is about 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of a common Bachelor's degree.
Yeah, either the summary dropped a zero somewhere, aircraft mechanics are trained far less than you would think, or that 95% figure is *way* off.
I can't quite understand you (just a tip: "want" is not a contraction, no apostrophe is needed), but I *think* you're interpreting my movie-pitch "it's like ___, but ____" far too literally.
Those descriptions were the kind of thing you'd tell a Hollywood exec to convince them just to listen to your pitch. The similarities between Gunnerkrigg Court and Harry Potter, for instance, are:
* Both take place in unusual schools
* Both include magic
* Both feature teens in a coming-of-age story
* Both feature English, Scots and Irish mythology
* At least one of the main character's parents is dead
The differences?
* GK's school is mostly modern in design (or renovated with modern and post-modern technology); HP's is a magic castle
* GK's main story is about the difference between magic and science (including each's approach to the other (see: spells as programs)); HP doesn't even use technology except when completely magicked out the ass
* GK uses mythology from everywhere - Native American, Egyptian, Viking, Germanic, Chinese, etc. And probably more obscure ones I completely missed.
* GK has more robot characters than some sci-fi stories; HP has no robots whatsoever
* The "moral" of HP is "love conquers all"; GK treats love more like Shakespeare - tragic death awaits it (just read the chapters about Jeanne to see what I mean)
So yeah. If you had only ten seconds to describe each of them, you'd think they were extremely similar. If you actually read the entirety of both, you'll see the only similarities are general. But if you had ten seconds to describe "Dr. Who" and "Star Trek", they'd sound pretty similar.
Same goes for my other comparisons, but I have not the time to show just why my brief, vague descriptions are not definitive and complete.
I think, with the proper cuts, it could be a single movie. You'd need to cut out a lot of minor scenes, even some entire minor storylines. For example, the whole Chromatic Death thing? Throw it out. Doesn't even happen. In fact, trim down a lot of the things between "Agatha arrives at Castle Heterodyne" and "Agatha takes control of Castle Heterodyne". It's just stretching out the story.
But get it down to roughly one movie, and I'd watch the /shit/ out of it.
But what would it even be about?
The Oasis/Hereticorp plot? The Dimension of Pain? Aylee? The K'z'k/Gwynn arch? The Holiday Wars? The Sam Cirkhail? The Elevator to Hell (with ghosts in the gas tank)? All of those are *at* *least* big enough for a movie on their own (possibly several). Trying to cram even two of them into one movie would be too much - but without all the interweaving plotlines, is it even Sluggy? Is it even nifty?
Some of the minor archs in that comic could be movies on their own. Hell, I'd watch an Oceans Unmoving movie (separate from the rest of the work, it's actually pretty good).
Two words:
Web
Comics
There are plenty of good ones (arguably better than what Marvel/DC publish), and they target much wider demographics than "superhero movie".
Gunnerkrigg Court? Think Harry Potter, except with more global myth references and with robots. Schlock Mercenary? It's Star Trek, minus the pacifism, as a sometimes-dark comedy. The Phoenix Requiem could win awards for "serious drama". The Adventures of Dr McNinja would make a good kung-fu comedy.
Need I go on?
The only big problem is existing fanbase. Any Spider-man movie can be a decent success, simply because there are already so many self-identified fans of Spider-man. They may not read the comics, at least not anymore, but they watch the movies and such. And even the non-fans recognize the name - Superman is a pop culture monolith.
Very few webcomics have nearly that much brand identity. You go up to someone and ask them who Hannelore Elicott-Chatham is, you'll get some very weird stares. You ask who Bruce Wayne is, and everybody knows he's "the goddamn Batman".
But that's what an advertising campaign is for. Tell people they should see it, and some of them will. And hey, you can probably get the movie rights to Dresden Codak or Dumbing of Age much cheaper than you can get even Aquaman.
Why not do something actually about nuclear war?
"Fight Fire With Fire" or "Rust in Peace... Polaris" might do nicely, as a sort of "hey, this thing you're building will kill millions of people, you know" message.
They're even renewable!
They won, but (and here's the important part) THE OTHER COMPANY DIDN'T LOSE.
Economics is not warfare. In battle, one side wins, the other loses (at least in the general case). Not so in business. It's entirely possible for both sides to win. It's possible for both sides to lose. It's possible for one side to win and the other to be pretty much unaffected - like, say, this time.
People thinking of business only as zero-sum are one of the biggest problems with modern capitalism.
That does not (IIRC, IANAL, STFU) apply to brand stylings. You can write a book called "Jack Daniels", you can make a TV show called "Jack Daniels", but you can't use the branding style of the Jack Daniel's trademark on them. It's the same reason why you can get sued for using a Superman-esque logo.
I never said Nixon was the worst. I just said we should *blame* him.
Besides, everyone knows the *real* worst President was Buchanan. But it's kind of hard to blame him for any modern problems, if only because nobody really remembers him (at least Millard Fillmore had a funny name!).
Wouldn't it go the other way around? During inflation, prices increase and the value of money decreases. So eventually *everyone* would be above that nominal poverty line.
I'm pretty sure the poverty line in Washington's time was in the range of hundreds of dollars per year.
Yep. It goes back at least to Bush I, probably much earlier.
I say we blame everything on Nixon. That's when things started going downhill and the budget started spiraling upward.
Plus, he makes a good scapegoat. He's already "evil" in the public eye; why not blame him for starting America's decline as well as for Vietnam and Watergate?
Yes - that's why I said "right now".
My last laptop was also an Asus. Core 2 Duo era. Lasted three and a half years (I'm a bit rough on laptops, they don't tend to last longer than that in my care). Quite satisfied with it, although it was rather obsolete by the time it kicked the bucket. The one time I had to use the warranty (failed hard drive), they replaced it quickly and painlessly. That's why I chose to buy another Asus - because my last experience with them had been good.
They changed, near as I can tell, sometime in the past year or two. Their customer service is shit (when they say they will respond "within 72 hours", they really mean "within the next two weeks"), they don't even try to treat their customers nicely, they nickel-and-dime you on such items as the installation disks ($15?!?). Even the quality of their bloatware has gone down - the Engrish on their "reinstallation disk creation tool" was horrible (and bad at math - it said it would take six discs, but when I had it burn them to ISO, it made four (why does it even take four DVDs to make a Windows install disk, anyways? The one I got online burned to just one)).
So yeah. Old Asus rocked. New Asus sucks.
Yes, when the point of the work is the parody.
TFA seems to be down, but when I read it, it didn't seem to be about Jack Daniels at all.
Imagine taking, say, the Star Wars logo font and title crawl, and using it in a generic romantic comedy. That doesn't reference Star Wars in any way. Or have anything to do with Star Wars. And isn't trying to make a joke of it. Would that be "fair use"? If so, then anything is fair use, and the whole trademark system is irrelevant.
I see you've been reading too many /. comments, and now assume any enforcement of IP laws is an evil only slightly less than the Holocaust.
"Intellectual property" laws (patent, copyright, and trademark) exist for a reason. The fact that they are heavily abused does not mean that every enforcement of them is invalid. There are millions of valid uses.
In this case, it seems to be one of the increasingly-rare cases of the law being used properly. The book rather clearly copies the trademarked style of JD. It does not have any obvious fair use exemption - it's not being used to reference JD itself (nominative fair use), it's not a parody. It is someone using another's branding apparently either out of laziness, or deliberate deception (most likely the former, but I can't rule out the latter).
It's not censorship. They aren't trying to get the book withdrawn, or removed (which they definitely would, if they were trying to censor the book). The cover has nothing worth censoring - it's just the title and other basic metadata. The only "artistic expression" they're trying to control is their own - the art of their trademark.
Asus in generally is fucked up right now. Completely and utterly incompetent.
I bought a laptop from them back in late April. Finally got it in early June, after manufacturing delays, processing delays, processing errors and finally the slowest and worst shipping option they could find.
It broke three hours later. Totally fried. Wouldn't even get to the POST screen.
I finally got it back from RMA two weeks ago - over a month after sending it back. And, after they insisted I send it back in the original packaging and include the charger, they shipped it back in a plain cardboard box and bubble wrap, and had somehow lost part of the power cord (the wall->brick cord, which fortunately is a standard PC power cord).
If that's the kind of service they give to a customer spending $1500 (and who, by the end, was threatening a lawsuit), I'd hate to how they'd treat a cheap tablet customer. I'll never find out, myself - after *that* experience, I went from an Asus fanboy to an Asus nemesis, and will never be buying anything from them again.
Have you tried "knocking this fasco-capitalist shit off before the revolution comes and lines you all up against the wall"?
'cuz that's what's gonna happen if you don't. Brick wall. Machine gun. Get the picture?
A fitting end to the MAFIAA, I think.
Indeed, that *was* succinct for me.
A man once asked me what OpenBSD was. I responded with a thousand-word history of UNIX, AT&T, Berkeley University, Linux, a rundown of the various *BSD forks, a brief bit about Steve Jobs (NeXT and OS X, mainly), and even a small paragraph on non-BSD Unices.
They should put me in a video game, because I am *crazy* good at blurting out random information dumps and exposition.
Wait wait wait.
Your argument is that there are less than 1 million porn sites, and you cite an article that examines ONLY one million sites. Do I even need to point out the flaw in that reasoning?
Still, let's suppose that your 42,000/1,000,000 figure is true. There are somewhere between 300,000,000 and 6,800,000,000 websites, total, which (using naive extrapolation) gives between 13,000,000 and 290,000,000 pornographic websites. And I for one would bet that porn tends more to the "many sites with low traffic" style than average.
In any case, this source lists 4.2 million sites, and this study lists 260 million porn pages online as of 2003 - do your own estimates for average pages per site and extrapolate towards today if you wish.
Part of the proliferation is just how the business works. They tend to buy up many domains, one for each "series" almost, and combine them into one "package". They commonly refer to this as "affiliate" sites. So that inflates things a bit. Then there's the rather large number of free sites that just rehost content. Then all the camwhore sites. And some "dating" sites are classed as pornography for obvious reasons.
tl;dr there's a TON of porn out there
That's why they made the underwear unremovable (as I mentioned). But they could have used more "historically-accurate" undergarments.
But that does not explain why they chose to make the women's undergarments include anachronistic bras, rather than, say, Roman-style breastbands (I actually seem to remember them using that in Morrowind, but I can't recall precisely).
To put it more succinctly:
Valve understands that a *fun* game will be fun. As long as the graphics are good enough to support the gameplay, the ame will be fun whether you're running it at 2006-era graphics or at 2016-era graphics.
Valve understands this. They make a fun game, then make it run on the lowest hardware they expect will be commonplace. They design their system to be scalable. They allow features to be disabled, have an extensive set of shader fallbacks. Examine this somewhat-outdated wiki page detailing the features enabled and disabled for each DirectX level in the original Half-Life 2. That's no longer current, I believe - they patched it to use a newer engine revision that I think dropped support for some of the lower levels, and I know it added higher ones.
I have played that game many times on many different computers. It was fun on my Athlon 3000, Radeon X700 build. It's fun on my dual-Xeon, Radeon X1900 rig. It was fun on my Core 2 Duo, GeForce 9600M laptop. It was fun on my Phenom II X3, Radeon 4830 build. It would probably be fun on this new Core i7, GeForce 660M laptop, but I haven't replayed it yet on this.
The only machine it wasn't fun on? My ancient Pentium II, Rage Pro laptop, and that was because it glitched like crazy - corrupted textures, BSOD after a few minutes. The machine just could not handle some of the things that were actually necessary for gameplay - the Havok physics (used in puzzles), the fade-in shaders (used for one-way gates), the dynamic lights (used to highlight gunfire). Remove those, and it wouldn't have been a fun game, so Valve just didn't remove it.
But the rest? Water refract/reflect shaders? Rim lighting? Normal maps? Soft shadows? Turn them off if necessary. They don't make the game less fun. Less immersive, perhaps - that's why they have them as an option - but the fun doesn't change.
And the fun is what is important.