Says the guy who hasn't used Opera in over 3 years.
Seriously. I don't even get where all this Opera hate comes from. It's always had more features than the other browsers. Since Opera 9 it's been extremely stable and since 10.5 it's been one of the fastest performing browsers in most benchmarks.
It's not really an issue of management, but Vista/7's memory management is so superior, I don't remember how I tolerated laptops before it. XP doesn't prefetch commonly used programs into RAM (or at least doesn't do it well as I believe it is technically possible to enable the feature, albeit poorly). As such, XP tends to crawl on laptops with slower HDDs because it had to hit the drive every time you open a program. And this is not some nitpicky benchmark thing. It's very noticeable in everyday use. I've been using 7 for about a year now and I can't see why any person or business would chose XP instead.
Personally, I seriously doubt that it was the Linux that caused the problem. My guess is open office. While I generally prefer windows to Linux, I'm a big fan of open source software. Open Office is the very worst the open source ecosystem has to offer though. It's buggy, poor compatibility, slow, limited features, features not working like they should. Most people treat it like software that gets the basics done admirably but struggles with advanced features. I totally disagree with that. Open Office gets almost nothing done admirably. I think if they had tried to switch to Linux/Google Docs they might have found more purchase. I have seen OO torpedo lots more people's opinions of the quality of open source software than I have seen any other package elevate them.
If you had payed attention reading the comic, you'd have seen that chronologically Dr. M choses to wear less and less clothing. Going from a jumpsuit to some shorts to some weird thong looking thing to just the full monty. It's a metaphor for his decreasing concern for humanity and it's silly rules and taboos. He becomes less emotionally attached to people and wears less clothing (which is a very human custom compared to any other animal) as an outward display of that. I'll admit that the connection was not as clear in the movie as it was in the original comic so if you had only seen the movie it would have just seemed like excessive nudity.
I think the music selection single handedly murdered the film. Great visuals, good enough acting (what was anybody really expecting?), pretty good story telling and pacing (stuck too strictly to the source which didn't always work well in film but ok), absolutely terribly music selection. A good half of the movie had music playing that was inappropriate for the scene and distractingly so, the much maligned sex scene was only the worst of many offenders in this regard. I'd love to see a Phantom Edit style recut of the film that fixes that particular problem.
Very true. Something like 11% of people polled are happy with Congress right now. If China invaded the U.S. to "save us from Congress" we wouldn't be happy about it. We would respond with extraordinary violence to protect that Congress which 89% of us don't like in the first place.
I believe he was suggesting that the items were in his carry on, not his person. Thus the TSA spent so much time looking at his junk they missed the two "daggers" in his carry-on. Or something to that effect.
I couldn't get into 9. The protagonist is just such an asshat. I'm assuming that he "grows" through out the game as always, but I just couldn't stomach it long enough to get that far. FF protagonists always start the game as something of an asshole/douche bag/whiney brat/etc. and then grow up during the game, but 9's was just petty and annoying.
As far as the economic woes, seems like as good a way to create jobs as any. It's basically just stimulus money that happens to be taking care of a long term issue at the same time.
Also, I'm pretty sure that phalanx formation was used almost exclusively with spears as weapon, not swords. So being able to draw a sword while in phalanx formation would be irrelevant. Though again, I'm not any kind of expert.
Not that I'm any expert, but it was alway my understanding that the Roman Legion favored short swords because they spent so much time fighting the Gauls and other barbarian tribes around Europe who favored long and heavy weapons that needed to be swung for momentum or brought down from overhead, which left them extremely vulnerable to someone who closed in fast with a short blade. I thought the Gauls also favored chain mail armor, which is easier to punch through with a small blade than to chop through with a heavy one. But the main reason was the first one, that it's almost impossible to actually use something like a claymore against someone who's less than two arm's lengths from you despite what it looked like in Braveheart.
You believe those people are informed, rational and impartial. I doubt all three of those assumptions. Don't forget that DRM is an industry all in itself, there are people out there working full-time just on convincing those developers that DRM is a necessity. Not because it is, but because the company they work for sells DRM products.
And it's sooo much easier to justify pirating games when we decide for no reason other than we want to believe it, that the entire industry is full of nitwits who have no idea what so ever how to do their jobs. It's a convenient guess at best and at worst it's self serving "Robin Hood" fiction that paints game pirates as noble.
You oversimplify. In most cases, people do like the game offering. They dislike the additional baggage. Ok, most of them dislike the price tag, but we don't need to talk about those, you won't turn them into customers anyway, no matter what DRM or not you do, so for this discussion they're irrelevant.
Which is precisely why DRM is such a failure. You're trying to force people into buying something that most of them will never buy. If the industry were to find a perfect DRM system tomorrow, I predict they would be very unhappy by next week, when they realize that it doesn't help sales one bit. It reduces piracy rate, but the number of additional sales it generates is vanishingly small.
So, as a game producer, you have to get your priorities straight. Do you first and foremost want to make money, or make something people enjoy? In the first case, forget about DRM because it doesn't help you make money. In the second case, forget about DRM because it doesn'tmake anyone happy. One way or the other, the way to both profit and happiness is to make an offering people want. I don't see anyone on the customer side complaining that games don't have enough DRM.
Publishers sell a product. You don't get to steal it just because you don't like some aspect of it. You don't get to steal movies that you like just because the music during the credits bothers you. You don't get to steal books because the author killed your favorite character. Like it or not, DRM is part of the package. Deciding you have the right to steal something just because you don't like the package it comes in is extremely immature. You can make any rationalizations you want to, but if you really hated DRM you'd boycott those products instead of contributing to the market dynamic that made DRM seem like a good idea in the first place. Also, you're assertion that uncracked games don't lead to increased sales is demonstrably false. You really think World of Warcraft would make anywhere near as much money if cracks were as easy to execute as most games? The piracy rate for the game is tiny and it's the most profitable video game in history. Console game sales remain significantly higher than PC sales for just that reason. If you look at Nvidia and ATI GPU sales, you'll see a huge game playing base on the PC that simply doesn't pay for their games compared to harder-to-crack console games.
Here's a good reason not to act like a criminal. Because it makes things worse for the next release. If everybody who complains about DRM simply refused to buy the game and (like we do with most everything else) didn't steal it on top of that, developers would get a much better picture of how to fix their industry. Right now games with or without DRM have pretty much the same piracy rates, the only thing that changes is the rate of people on forums claiming they did it because of the DRM. Publishers aren't so stupid. If stronger DRM actually led to MORE piracy, they would notice and identify the problem. However, more DRM doesn't lead to more piracy, just to more pirates being self-righteous about it. That's your problem right there. If people actually just didn't play games that they don't think are worth the money instead of stealing them, publishers might actually have some incentive to make the product better instead of making stronger DRM. The problem is the sense of entitlement amongst gamers. They are all entitled to play the game, and entitled to steal it if publishers don't do what THEY want. It's infantile and counter productive. If you don't like a publisher's game offering, for whatever reason, then don't play it! It's so easy that you already do it with most products you encounter.
I really don't understand why this continues to be anything other than curbside trash. The original game was terrible. The sequel was likely to be just as bad. 10 years later people are still excited about it? Really? The only people who liked the original were 12 years old at the time. Does anybody honestly give a crap about this?
"the lucrative market of video communications" This seems wrong to me, but I guess I don't actually know. Skype's profits are actually pretty small, Face time is considered a fun gimmick rather than a major selling point for iPhone4. Aside from major commercial installations, like for web based university classes, I don't really see anybody who is interested in paying actual money for video communications over what they pay for voice communications. Who's actually paying to make this market so lucrative?
Blu-ray discs are TOTALLY scratchable. Worse than DVDs actually. Netflix released their data on it and found that Blu-ray discs are damaged far more often than DVDs suffering the same treatment in their envelopes and by their customers. Other than that, I mostly agree with you. Backups is code for piracy for 99.5% of the people claiming it as fair use. Especially considering Sony has been pretty progressive lately about releasing formerly disc only games as pure download and install versions. It's not much, but it's progress...
Agreed. "Linux is about freedom to do what you want with your own hardware and software instead of letting corporate interested dictate what you can do... unless you want to make it look like Windows then f*ck you!"
This happens whenever anyone brings up the possibility of a linux distro or theme that makes things easier for windows users. The same people who speak out of the other side of their mouth about how Linux isn't one single experience, it's whatever you want to make it into are the same people who bitch about any attempt to change the common Linux trappings into something that makes it "less Linux". If it was really about freedom to do what you want, then you can't simply discount what other people want because it's not consistent with some cloistered view of what "real Linux" should be. And then they act all confused about why people don't all switch just because some people on Slashdot said that Windows 7's UI is objectively worse than Linux (which once again, isn't any single OS, UI, use case, etc..).
I use Windows 7 regularly as well as Linux Mint and I simply don't see this clearly, objectively, unavoidably, irrefutably worse UI that people love to assert as given truth passed down by our ancestors (or some other linux people on a different forum).
You completely gloss over the fact that time and time again it's been found that those who pirate the most buy the most.
This is first class apologia. It's not been shown "time and time again" there was one study which showed it for MUSIC. Not for games. It's a very different market. If it's such common knowledge then why don't you show some links to relevant studies about GAMES?
My take on glossy screens is that they look worse than matte in most real world lighting conditions, but noticeably (though not significantly) better in ideal light conditions. I find the the "matte-ness" of a matte screen diffuses the light enough to wash out blacks a tiny bit under ideal light. Matte wins in 95% of situations.
The flaw in your argument is that you don't by a PS3 to play "games" you buy it to play Sony licensed games. I'm not complaining about tyrant Sony because I put a PC game disc into my PS3 and it didn't work. The product that people bought was not a game machine made by Sony, it was a Sony game machine. For playing Sony licensed games and no other games. Freedom was not part of the bargain and you knew that BEFORE you bought the machine. NOBODY is shocked to find that they can't play X-box games on a playstation. We all know that we are buying into a strictly licensed environment. If Sony abuses that and it hurts their business, that's their own fault. But that doesn't mean I get to complain about my freedom, which is something Sony never promised me when I bought a PS3. Apple does the same thing, which is why I don't own any Apple products. And if you read the Steam EULA you will see similar language. Steam is smarter than Sony so they never act on the worst capabilities of a EULA walled garden. But they are there. And they still COULD do the EXACT same thing that Sony is doing now. Read your Steam EULA, it's in there.
Slashdot Mirror
Says the guy who hasn't used Opera in over 3 years.
Seriously. I don't even get where all this Opera hate comes from. It's always had more features than the other browsers. Since Opera 9 it's been extremely stable and since 10.5 it's been one of the fastest performing browsers in most benchmarks.
It's not really an issue of management, but Vista/7's memory management is so superior, I don't remember how I tolerated laptops before it. XP doesn't prefetch commonly used programs into RAM (or at least doesn't do it well as I believe it is technically possible to enable the feature, albeit poorly). As such, XP tends to crawl on laptops with slower HDDs because it had to hit the drive every time you open a program. And this is not some nitpicky benchmark thing. It's very noticeable in everyday use. I've been using 7 for about a year now and I can't see why any person or business would chose XP instead.
Personally, I seriously doubt that it was the Linux that caused the problem. My guess is open office. While I generally prefer windows to Linux, I'm a big fan of open source software. Open Office is the very worst the open source ecosystem has to offer though. It's buggy, poor compatibility, slow, limited features, features not working like they should. Most people treat it like software that gets the basics done admirably but struggles with advanced features. I totally disagree with that. Open Office gets almost nothing done admirably. I think if they had tried to switch to Linux/Google Docs they might have found more purchase. I have seen OO torpedo lots more people's opinions of the quality of open source software than I have seen any other package elevate them.
If you had payed attention reading the comic, you'd have seen that chronologically Dr. M choses to wear less and less clothing. Going from a jumpsuit to some shorts to some weird thong looking thing to just the full monty. It's a metaphor for his decreasing concern for humanity and it's silly rules and taboos. He becomes less emotionally attached to people and wears less clothing (which is a very human custom compared to any other animal) as an outward display of that. I'll admit that the connection was not as clear in the movie as it was in the original comic so if you had only seen the movie it would have just seemed like excessive nudity.
I think the music selection single handedly murdered the film. Great visuals, good enough acting (what was anybody really expecting?), pretty good story telling and pacing (stuck too strictly to the source which didn't always work well in film but ok), absolutely terribly music selection. A good half of the movie had music playing that was inappropriate for the scene and distractingly so, the much maligned sex scene was only the worst of many offenders in this regard. I'd love to see a Phantom Edit style recut of the film that fixes that particular problem.
Very true. Something like 11% of people polled are happy with Congress right now. If China invaded the U.S. to "save us from Congress" we wouldn't be happy about it. We would respond with extraordinary violence to protect that Congress which 89% of us don't like in the first place.
I believe he was suggesting that the items were in his carry on, not his person. Thus the TSA spent so much time looking at his junk they missed the two "daggers" in his carry-on. Or something to that effect.
The "entering a new area" insta-death was my personal favorite.
I couldn't get into 9. The protagonist is just such an asshat. I'm assuming that he "grows" through out the game as always, but I just couldn't stomach it long enough to get that far. FF protagonists always start the game as something of an asshole/douche bag/whiney brat/etc. and then grow up during the game, but 9's was just petty and annoying.
Just in case anybody is confused, that is cool as shit. That's all.
As far as the economic woes, seems like as good a way to create jobs as any. It's basically just stimulus money that happens to be taking care of a long term issue at the same time.
Also, I'm pretty sure that phalanx formation was used almost exclusively with spears as weapon, not swords. So being able to draw a sword while in phalanx formation would be irrelevant. Though again, I'm not any kind of expert.
Not that I'm any expert, but it was alway my understanding that the Roman Legion favored short swords because they spent so much time fighting the Gauls and other barbarian tribes around Europe who favored long and heavy weapons that needed to be swung for momentum or brought down from overhead, which left them extremely vulnerable to someone who closed in fast with a short blade. I thought the Gauls also favored chain mail armor, which is easier to punch through with a small blade than to chop through with a heavy one. But the main reason was the first one, that it's almost impossible to actually use something like a claymore against someone who's less than two arm's lengths from you despite what it looked like in Braveheart.
You believe those people are informed, rational and impartial. I doubt all three of those assumptions. Don't forget that DRM is an industry all in itself, there are people out there working full-time just on convincing those developers that DRM is a necessity. Not because it is, but because the company they work for sells DRM products.
And it's sooo much easier to justify pirating games when we decide for no reason other than we want to believe it, that the entire industry is full of nitwits who have no idea what so ever how to do their jobs. It's a convenient guess at best and at worst it's self serving "Robin Hood" fiction that paints game pirates as noble.
You oversimplify. In most cases, people do like the game offering. They dislike the additional baggage. Ok, most of them dislike the price tag, but we don't need to talk about those, you won't turn them into customers anyway, no matter what DRM or not you do, so for this discussion they're irrelevant.
Which is precisely why DRM is such a failure. You're trying to force people into buying something that most of them will never buy. If the industry were to find a perfect DRM system tomorrow, I predict they would be very unhappy by next week, when they realize that it doesn't help sales one bit. It reduces piracy rate, but the number of additional sales it generates is vanishingly small.
So, as a game producer, you have to get your priorities straight. Do you first and foremost want to make money, or make something people enjoy? In the first case, forget about DRM because it doesn't help you make money. In the second case, forget about DRM because it doesn'tmake anyone happy. One way or the other, the way to both profit and happiness is to make an offering people want. I don't see anyone on the customer side complaining that games don't have enough DRM.
Publishers sell a product. You don't get to steal it just because you don't like some aspect of it. You don't get to steal movies that you like just because the music during the credits bothers you. You don't get to steal books because the author killed your favorite character. Like it or not, DRM is part of the package. Deciding you have the right to steal something just because you don't like the package it comes in is extremely immature. You can make any rationalizations you want to, but if you really hated DRM you'd boycott those products instead of contributing to the market dynamic that made DRM seem like a good idea in the first place. Also, you're assertion that uncracked games don't lead to increased sales is demonstrably false. You really think World of Warcraft would make anywhere near as much money if cracks were as easy to execute as most games? The piracy rate for the game is tiny and it's the most profitable video game in history. Console game sales remain significantly higher than PC sales for just that reason. If you look at Nvidia and ATI GPU sales, you'll see a huge game playing base on the PC that simply doesn't pay for their games compared to harder-to-crack console games.
Here's a good reason not to act like a criminal. Because it makes things worse for the next release. If everybody who complains about DRM simply refused to buy the game and (like we do with most everything else) didn't steal it on top of that, developers would get a much better picture of how to fix their industry. Right now games with or without DRM have pretty much the same piracy rates, the only thing that changes is the rate of people on forums claiming they did it because of the DRM. Publishers aren't so stupid. If stronger DRM actually led to MORE piracy, they would notice and identify the problem. However, more DRM doesn't lead to more piracy, just to more pirates being self-righteous about it. That's your problem right there. If people actually just didn't play games that they don't think are worth the money instead of stealing them, publishers might actually have some incentive to make the product better instead of making stronger DRM. The problem is the sense of entitlement amongst gamers. They are all entitled to play the game, and entitled to steal it if publishers don't do what THEY want. It's infantile and counter productive. If you don't like a publisher's game offering, for whatever reason, then don't play it! It's so easy that you already do it with most products you encounter.
I really don't understand why this continues to be anything other than curbside trash. The original game was terrible. The sequel was likely to be just as bad. 10 years later people are still excited about it? Really? The only people who liked the original were 12 years old at the time. Does anybody honestly give a crap about this?
"the lucrative market of video communications" This seems wrong to me, but I guess I don't actually know. Skype's profits are actually pretty small, Face time is considered a fun gimmick rather than a major selling point for iPhone4. Aside from major commercial installations, like for web based university classes, I don't really see anybody who is interested in paying actual money for video communications over what they pay for voice communications. Who's actually paying to make this market so lucrative?
They didn't forget. They all chose to pretend that it means something else. And by their definition, Wikileaks is most definitely not journalism. Wikileaks has never mentioned Lady Gaga even once! On a similar note, I highly recommend this from The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/video/time-announces-new-version-of-magazine-aimed-at-ad,17950/
Blu-ray discs are TOTALLY scratchable. Worse than DVDs actually. Netflix released their data on it and found that Blu-ray discs are damaged far more often than DVDs suffering the same treatment in their envelopes and by their customers. Other than that, I mostly agree with you. Backups is code for piracy for 99.5% of the people claiming it as fair use. Especially considering Sony has been pretty progressive lately about releasing formerly disc only games as pure download and install versions. It's not much, but it's progress...
Agreed. "Linux is about freedom to do what you want with your own hardware and software instead of letting corporate interested dictate what you can do... unless you want to make it look like Windows then f*ck you!"
This happens whenever anyone brings up the possibility of a linux distro or theme that makes things easier for windows users. The same people who speak out of the other side of their mouth about how Linux isn't one single experience, it's whatever you want to make it into are the same people who bitch about any attempt to change the common Linux trappings into something that makes it "less Linux". If it was really about freedom to do what you want, then you can't simply discount what other people want because it's not consistent with some cloistered view of what "real Linux" should be. And then they act all confused about why people don't all switch just because some people on Slashdot said that Windows 7's UI is objectively worse than Linux (which once again, isn't any single OS, UI, use case, etc..).
I use Windows 7 regularly as well as Linux Mint and I simply don't see this clearly, objectively, unavoidably, irrefutably worse UI that people love to assert as given truth passed down by our ancestors (or some other linux people on a different forum).
(Confirmation Bias) + (Rich Idiots) - (A Double Blind Trial) + (Reality) = Hilarity! I find that this is almost always true.
You completely gloss over the fact that time and time again it's been found that those who pirate the most buy the most.
This is first class apologia. It's not been shown "time and time again" there was one study which showed it for MUSIC. Not for games. It's a very different market. If it's such common knowledge then why don't you show some links to relevant studies about GAMES?
Please read the first amendment before posting things like this. Seriously, it's ONE sentence.
My take on glossy screens is that they look worse than matte in most real world lighting conditions, but noticeably (though not significantly) better in ideal light conditions. I find the the "matte-ness" of a matte screen diffuses the light enough to wash out blacks a tiny bit under ideal light. Matte wins in 95% of situations.
The flaw in your argument is that you don't by a PS3 to play "games" you buy it to play Sony licensed games. I'm not complaining about tyrant Sony because I put a PC game disc into my PS3 and it didn't work. The product that people bought was not a game machine made by Sony, it was a Sony game machine. For playing Sony licensed games and no other games. Freedom was not part of the bargain and you knew that BEFORE you bought the machine. NOBODY is shocked to find that they can't play X-box games on a playstation. We all know that we are buying into a strictly licensed environment. If Sony abuses that and it hurts their business, that's their own fault. But that doesn't mean I get to complain about my freedom, which is something Sony never promised me when I bought a PS3. Apple does the same thing, which is why I don't own any Apple products. And if you read the Steam EULA you will see similar language. Steam is smarter than Sony so they never act on the worst capabilities of a EULA walled garden. But they are there. And they still COULD do the EXACT same thing that Sony is doing now. Read your Steam EULA, it's in there.