and has been busily removing roundabouts for the past 15 years. The insurmountable problem with roundabouts is that they have a maximum traffic limit above which they simply do not work. Yes, driver selfishness and lack of skill are pervasive problems. But even with perfect drivers, roundabouts simply do not work in dense traffic.
When we looked at blu-ray, the total cost for changing to blu-ray technology was a complete non-starter for us.
We are a family of six. We have three upconversion DVD players with three HD TVs, HD cable, and two portable DVD players for long cross-country trips.
Replacing just one DVD player and the two portable players with blu-ray versions would have cost over $1,500 and that was just to replace part of what we have for video alone. Audio was not even included. Blu-ray discs were at least twice as expensive as DVD discs. That price difference is still about 50%.
Blu-ray technology is simply a large expense for only minor improvements in video and audio. So our answer to blu-ray was and remains "No sale."
If you're happy spending $50-$60 bucks a pop for bug-riddled games offering only 5 hours of campaign mode, DRM, limited installations, and no resale value, then by all means, open your wallets wide for the ongoing rip-off.
If not, then DON'T BUY. And be certain to visit the game developers' forums and state firmly and directly why you are not buying their games.
If even a small fraction of buyers did that, say, 10,000 or 20,000 customers, game developers and publishers would be falling all over themselves to get customers back.
YOU are the ones who have the power to make game producers change.
what? economics 101 - if there is no competition, prices rise
But there is competition. Competition is Sony's biggest problem The real economic dynamic here is increasing prices without increased demand will suppress rather than increase sales.
This discovery dovetails neatly with the National Geographic Genographic Project. The Genographic Projects reveals through our human DNA that humans originated in Africa and populated the rest of the world in multiple great migrations starting about 60,000 years ago.
These great migrations are described on a virtual globe of the Earth on the Genographic Project website under the "Atlas of the Human Journey" tab.
Christian theology holds that God and His Creation are Truth. Those who assert that the geological, cosmological, and genetic records are false creations by God to test believer's faith label God a liar and make Him into a cheap parlour magician. Creationism is no more christian than it is scientific, but rather simply so uneducated, illogical, and unfaithful as to be unable to recognize its own inherent contradictions.
I'm catholic you insensitive clod! Clearly the bible was written in Latin by God!
I can't tell if this is a joke or serious. If serious, it is seriously ignorant.
The original books of the Old Testament were written in either Hebrew or Aramaic. The original books of the New Testament were written in Koine (common) Greek. The Bible was not translated into Latin until the 4th Century AD:
"DRM Broke Dragon Age: Origins For Days": Ars Technica reports that a server problem with the DRM authentication servers has caused Dragon Age: Origins players to be locked out of any saved games that include downloadable content. The story is here on Slashdot.
"Gamer Banned From Dragon Age II Over Forum Post": A Dragon Age II gamer banned from BioWare’s forums for an allegedly inflammatory post has been locked out of the (singleplayer only) game for the duration of the ban. This story is also right here on SlashDot.
The question is - why does anyone in their right mind pay for any products with DRM? If the majority of the public would simply act in their own interest and boycott DRM products, DRM would abruptly disappear.
The sad truth about copy protection in all of its forms is that it only hassles honest users. Pirates are never deterred or hindered. In fact, pirates welcome each new copy protection scheme as a challenge to be overcome in an enjoyable momentary diversion.
In contrast, copy protection all too often prevents honest customers from using the products they pay for. SecuROM, for example, rendered the Atari version of the game Armed Assault unusable with the very first 1.08 patch. The only way that honest customers could continue playing the game was to download a cracked version until the 1.12 patch stripped away the copy protection completely and made the game completely diskless. Many honest customers had the exact same experience with Neverwinter Nights and NWN2.
Requiring constant internet connection is a non-starter for those customers suffering with unreliable ISPs like Comcast. Limiting re-installation is completely unacceptable, period.
All customers have fundamental rights when purchasing a product that the product::
- Is fit for its intended purpose; - Matches its description: - Is of satisfactory quality to function for a reasonable time without defects.
Copy protection simply has a very high rate of violating these rights with no deterrence or hindrance to real thieves.
The real consequence of copy protection is not honest customers resorting to piracy after paying for a copy of a game. The real consequence is lost sales to honest customers like us who research games before we buy and refuse to purchase games that are highly prone to either never work right or stop working.
More like 5 to maybe, just maybe, 10 hours of play for the single player campaign. One should get 40 to 100 hours just for the single player campaign alone. That is the difference between formula bug-riddled piecework like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 versus games with real substance like the Elder Scrolls series, The Witcher, and the Metal Gear series.
So yes, absolutely, paying $50 to $60 for 1/20th to 1/8th of of a real product is an obscene rip-off.
How many games these days really do offer co-op gaming?...
Or am I just the odd one in the bunch again for wishing for good ol' co-op mode in games?
Well, you may be odd like our family, but you're not alone. We (our family, not an "editorial we") like the same type of play you describe - games featuring cooperative play together on the same couch playing side by side with intelligent plot and game design. We agree that there is a marked dearth of such games that are actually worth playing.
Call of Duty World at War. Rainbow Six Vegas Rainbow Six Vegas 2 Resident Evil 5
And then there's other games which offer non-campaign co-op modes like Splinter Cell: Conviction, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 etc.
There's surprisingly numerous co-op games out there if one bothers to look.
There are several factors that determine what games are suitable for which buyers: Platform limitations, how co-op is implemented, and personal taste are big ones.
The Rainbow Six Vegas series was a lot of fun but is very dated in its graphics. CoD:WaW was a lot of fun. All three of these games had true co-op mode - playing through the single-player campaign with someone else sitting on the same couch. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is another game I'd recommend. CoD: Black Ops seems to be better implemented than CoD:MW2, but how many FPS games can one stand before they turn monotonous? Borderlands was alright once but holds no replay attraction for us.
We don't have XBox or PC gaming systems for the time being. Splinter Cell: Conviction is only for XBox and PC. Magicka and Trine sounds interesting but are PC-only. Alien Swarm is PC-only.
Games we don't recommend: CoD:MW2 was a bug-riddled overpriced travesty when it was released. We skipped it after seeing the diaster unfold in the game forums. Army of Two, Resident Evil, and Grand Theft Auto are examples of games we find repulsive. Death Spank has a strong theme of gradeschool potty humor. Shank is gratuitous violence.
So I agree with the original poster - there is a marked dearth of games with co-op mode that are worth playing on any one platform. Most recent console games seem to be focused on gratuitous violence, profanity, gore, violent pyrotechnics, and no content worth paying for.
1) Good personal hygiene - shower, brush teeth, wear fresh clean clothes comparable to others around you, as mentioned many times here already.
2) Be a team player.
3) No "pride of ownership." You'll be much more successful by building on other's ideas - adding to rather than fighting against.
4) You will fail if you don't help make your boss look good.
5) You will fail even worse if you stab your coworkers in the back.
6) Don't be naive. There are backstabbers out there. Avoid taking a knife in the ribs yourself.
7) Be nice and fun to be around. Work isn't always dull and "nose to the grindstone." Every organization relaxes and lets their hair down after a major accomplishment or during a breathing spell.
In short - work is just another set of relationships. Think about how your actions affect your relationships with the people with whom you work.
Some companies don't just stand up a project without an idea of what their investment will buy them. These companies require a business case that states, "for x dollars of investment, we expect y dollars of return within z years." The business case includes the analysis that supports the return on investment (ROI) estimate.
The ROI is profit. If the project fails, then both the investment and the ROI are lost. If the company has anyone at the wheel at all, there will be an executive and a carpet waiting for someone to give an explanation.
For many companies, failure is not an option - it's part of the corporate culture. For a minority of others, failure and excuses are not acceptable.
Whatever numbers one believes, the bottom line for any professional engineer should be that IT failures are too common and too expensive to continue with "the way it's always been done."
There are dozens of reasons for program failure, most of which cannot be laid on the shoulders of software engineers. For examples, just in program management:
Was the system need clearly defined?
Was the size of the program's effort accurately estimated?
Was the program schedule realistic?
Did the program schedule accurately show the necessary development activities?
Was the program properly staffed with the right skills and experience in sufficient number to execute the program?
Were the requirements clearly specified?
Was the requirements specification complete?
Was the requirements specification consistent?
Was the requirements specification baselined?
Were requirements changes managed by a change board, accurately estimated for development time and cost, and were cost and schedule changes added into the program schedule?
The most common process failure I've seen has been poor requirements specification. This causes a lot of requirements changes that make the program cost and schedule expand in a Big Bang. The sysmptom in development is many changes in direction that result in the software developers thrashing to pull something together. The result on the I&T floor is a dramatic train wreck. Both software and testing are victims rather than causes.
Roger Sessions did a simple order-of-magnitude estimate. Order-of-magnitude estimates are common practice in science and engineering and were especially used by the great estimator Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist:
http://www.education.com/activity/article/Fermi_middle/http://physics.suite101.com/article.cfm/fermi_problems_physics_estimation
If you don't like the numbers, provide your own values, justify them, and calculate your own estimate. Or work up an entirely different approach, describe it, and calculate your own estimate. Either approach would give a basis for informed dialogue.
Counterexample: A company starts a $50M IT project based on a business case projecting increased revenues of $2B per year. The project expends its whole budget with no useful product. The project is replanned for $100 million and takes one year to finally succeed. The company has actually lost $100M plus $2B, or $2.1B. That's a total loss of 42x, or 4200%. Those are quite reasonable numbers for global business.
Slashdot Mirror
and has been busily removing roundabouts for the past 15 years. The insurmountable problem with roundabouts is that they have a maximum traffic limit above which they simply do not work. Yes, driver selfishness and lack of skill are pervasive problems. But even with perfect drivers, roundabouts simply do not work in dense traffic.
When we looked at blu-ray, the total cost for changing to blu-ray technology was a complete non-starter for us.
We are a family of six. We have three upconversion DVD players with three HD TVs, HD cable, and two portable DVD players for long cross-country trips.
Replacing just one DVD player and the two portable players with blu-ray versions would have cost over $1,500 and that was just to replace part of what we have for video alone. Audio was not even included. Blu-ray discs were at least twice as expensive as DVD discs. That price difference is still about 50%.
Blu-ray technology is simply a large expense for only minor improvements in video and audio. So our answer to blu-ray was and remains "No sale."
is "Who has the real power?"
You the buyers do!
If you're happy spending $50-$60 bucks a pop for bug-riddled games offering only 5 hours of campaign mode, DRM, limited installations, and no resale value, then by all means, open your wallets wide for the ongoing rip-off.
If not, then DON'T BUY. And be certain to visit the game developers' forums and state firmly and directly why you are not buying their games.
If even a small fraction of buyers did that, say, 10,000 or 20,000 customers, game developers and publishers would be falling all over themselves to get customers back.
YOU are the ones who have the power to make game producers change.
Otherwise, you're all just easy marks.
what?
economics 101 - if there is no competition, prices rise
But there is competition. Competition is Sony's biggest problem The real economic dynamic here is increasing prices without increased demand will suppress rather than increase sales.
This discovery dovetails neatly with the National Geographic Genographic Project. The Genographic Projects reveals through our human DNA that humans originated in Africa and populated the rest of the world in multiple great migrations starting about 60,000 years ago.
These great migrations are described on a virtual globe of the Earth on the Genographic Project website under the "Atlas of the Human Journey" tab.
Christian theology holds that God and His Creation are Truth. Those who assert that the geological, cosmological, and genetic records are false creations by God to test believer's faith label God a liar and make Him into a cheap parlour magician. Creationism is no more christian than it is scientific, but rather simply so uneducated, illogical, and unfaithful as to be unable to recognize its own inherent contradictions.
I'm catholic you insensitive clod! Clearly the bible was written in Latin by God!
I can't tell if this is a joke or serious. If serious, it is seriously ignorant.
The original books of the Old Testament were written in either Hebrew or Aramaic. The original books of the New Testament were written in Koine (common) Greek. The Bible was not translated into Latin until the 4th Century AD:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_original_languages_the_Bible_was_written_in
"DRM Broke Dragon Age: Origins For Days": Ars Technica reports that a server problem with the DRM authentication servers has caused Dragon Age: Origins players to be locked out of any saved games that include downloadable content. The story is here on Slashdot.
"Gamer Banned From Dragon Age II Over Forum Post": A Dragon Age II gamer banned from BioWare’s forums for an allegedly inflammatory post has been locked out of the (singleplayer only) game for the duration of the ban. This story is also right here on SlashDot.
The question is - why does anyone in their right mind pay for any products with DRM? If the majority of the public would simply act in their own interest and boycott DRM products, DRM would abruptly disappear.
The sad truth about copy protection in all of its forms is that it only hassles honest users. Pirates are never deterred or hindered. In fact, pirates welcome each new copy protection scheme as a challenge to be overcome in an enjoyable momentary diversion.
In contrast, copy protection all too often prevents honest customers from using the products they pay for. SecuROM, for example, rendered the Atari version of the game Armed Assault unusable with the very first 1.08 patch. The only way that honest customers could continue playing the game was to download a cracked version until the 1.12 patch stripped away the copy protection completely and made the game completely diskless. Many honest customers had the exact same experience with Neverwinter Nights and NWN2.
Requiring constant internet connection is a non-starter for those customers suffering with unreliable ISPs like Comcast. Limiting re-installation is completely unacceptable, period.
All customers have fundamental rights when purchasing a product that the product::
- Is fit for its intended purpose;
- Matches its description:
- Is of satisfactory quality to function for a reasonable time without defects.
Copy protection simply has a very high rate of violating these rights with no deterrence or hindrance to real thieves.
The real consequence of copy protection is not honest customers resorting to piracy after paying for a copy of a game. The real consequence is lost sales to honest customers like us who research games before we buy and refuse to purchase games that are highly prone to either never work right or stop working.
"... a few dozen hours of play ..."
More like 5 to maybe, just maybe, 10 hours of play for the single player campaign. One should get 40 to 100 hours just for the single player campaign alone. That is the difference between formula bug-riddled piecework like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 versus games with real substance like the Elder Scrolls series, The Witcher, and the Metal Gear series.
So yes, absolutely, paying $50 to $60 for 1/20th to 1/8th of of a real product is an obscene rip-off.
How many games these days really do offer co-op gaming? ...
Or am I just the odd one in the bunch again for wishing for good ol' co-op mode in games?
Well, you may be odd like our family, but you're not alone. We (our family, not an "editorial we") like the same type of play you describe - games featuring cooperative play together on the same couch playing side by side with intelligent plot and game design. We agree that there is a marked dearth of such games that are actually worth playing.
Call of Duty World at War.
Rainbow Six Vegas
Rainbow Six Vegas 2
Resident Evil 5
And then there's other games which offer non-campaign co-op modes like Splinter Cell: Conviction, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 etc.
There's surprisingly numerous co-op games out there if one bothers to look.
There are several factors that determine what games are suitable for which buyers: Platform limitations, how co-op is implemented, and personal taste are big ones.
The Rainbow Six Vegas series was a lot of fun but is very dated in its graphics. CoD:WaW was a lot of fun. All three of these games had true co-op mode - playing through the single-player campaign with someone else sitting on the same couch. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is another game I'd recommend. CoD: Black Ops seems to be better implemented than CoD:MW2, but how many FPS games can one stand before they turn monotonous? Borderlands was alright once but holds no replay attraction for us.
We don't have XBox or PC gaming systems for the time being. Splinter Cell: Conviction is only for XBox and PC. Magicka and Trine sounds interesting but are PC-only. Alien Swarm is PC-only.
Games we don't recommend: CoD:MW2 was a bug-riddled overpriced travesty when it was released. We skipped it after seeing the diaster unfold in the game forums. Army of Two, Resident Evil, and Grand Theft Auto are examples of games we find repulsive. Death Spank has a strong theme of gradeschool potty humor. Shank is gratuitous violence.
So I agree with the original poster - there is a marked dearth of games with co-op mode that are worth playing on any one platform. Most recent console games seem to be focused on gratuitous violence, profanity, gore, violent pyrotechnics, and no content worth paying for.
I enjoyed the dragon-riding in the Drakan series.
1) Good personal hygiene - shower, brush teeth, wear fresh clean clothes comparable to others around you, as mentioned many times here already.
2) Be a team player.
3) No "pride of ownership." You'll be much more successful by building on other's ideas - adding to rather than fighting against.
4) You will fail if you don't help make your boss look good.
5) You will fail even worse if you stab your coworkers in the back.
6) Don't be naive. There are backstabbers out there. Avoid taking a knife in the ribs yourself.
7) Be nice and fun to be around. Work isn't always dull and "nose to the grindstone." Every organization relaxes and lets their hair down after a major accomplishment or during a breathing spell.
In short - work is just another set of relationships. Think about how your actions affect your relationships with the people with whom you work.
The typical practice I've seen and used is cost modeling based on similar projects in the past.
One company I worked for used parametric modeling with SEER-SEM. That was the most reliable, accurate, and precise method I've ever seen.
Some companies don't just stand up a project without an idea of what their investment will buy them. These companies require a business case that states, "for x dollars of investment, we expect y dollars of return within z years." The business case includes the analysis that supports the return on investment (ROI) estimate.
The ROI is profit. If the project fails, then both the investment and the ROI are lost. If the company has anyone at the wheel at all, there will be an executive and a carpet waiting for someone to give an explanation.
For many companies, failure is not an option - it's part of the corporate culture. For a minority of others, failure and excuses are not acceptable.
Whatever numbers one believes, the bottom line for any professional engineer should be that IT failures are too common and too expensive to continue with "the way it's always been done."
There are dozens of reasons for program failure, most of which cannot be laid on the shoulders of software engineers. For examples, just in program management: Was the system need clearly defined? Was the size of the program's effort accurately estimated? Was the program schedule realistic? Did the program schedule accurately show the necessary development activities? Was the program properly staffed with the right skills and experience in sufficient number to execute the program? Were the requirements clearly specified? Was the requirements specification complete? Was the requirements specification consistent? Was the requirements specification baselined? Were requirements changes managed by a change board, accurately estimated for development time and cost, and were cost and schedule changes added into the program schedule? The most common process failure I've seen has been poor requirements specification. This causes a lot of requirements changes that make the program cost and schedule expand in a Big Bang. The sysmptom in development is many changes in direction that result in the software developers thrashing to pull something together. The result on the I&T floor is a dramatic train wreck. Both software and testing are victims rather than causes.
Roger Sessions did a simple order-of-magnitude estimate. Order-of-magnitude estimates are common practice in science and engineering and were especially used by the great estimator Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist: http://www.education.com/activity/article/Fermi_middle/ http://physics.suite101.com/article.cfm/fermi_problems_physics_estimation If you don't like the numbers, provide your own values, justify them, and calculate your own estimate. Or work up an entirely different approach, describe it, and calculate your own estimate. Either approach would give a basis for informed dialogue.
Counterexample: A company starts a $50M IT project based on a business case projecting increased revenues of $2B per year. The project expends its whole budget with no useful product. The project is replanned for $100 million and takes one year to finally succeed. The company has actually lost $100M plus $2B, or $2.1B. That's a total loss of 42x, or 4200%. Those are quite reasonable numbers for global business.