I don't want to post the website out of princple. There was a Slashdot article on it earlier. Basically there are some douchebags in Sweeden who talk about supporting FOSS (free open source software) and the Pirate Party (a political party in Sweeden, Google it if you're interested), and they want software on Android to be free (which they interpret unfortunately as free as in beer instead of free as in speech). They charge $9.99 for access to all the pirated apps.
As I'm totally on board with what you're saying, I do have to bring up that Google doesn't make the process of purchasing an app on your Android device as easy as it could be. Using a web browser on your PC is easier than purchasing an app on your Android phone.
I believe the core premise is not entirely correct. While software that costs $500 (Adobe and Microsoft stuff) will be pirated because of costs, $1 MP3s and $1 apps aren't. They are pirated because of ease of use of obtaining them. The reason online music works now is because Apple made it easy for users to find music. (Before it was easy with Napster).
So, this article regards the Android marketplace. It is not that easy to use, and it is apparently easy to get pirated software. Google can and should fix this.
Not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I can't stress that enough. Make the most of what you have instead of making mountains out of molehills.
You must feel really good about all the software you pirate, because you wouldn't have bought it anyways, right?
Anyways, the point is that the Android Marketplace is more of a wild west market. The economy of the Apple app store is many many millions. The best selling apps on the Google Marketplace have sales in the thousands. Although not everyone discloses their data, I've read on two separate blogs about how they broke 5000 sales, and those two apps were in the Top 10. So, if we didn't have a control group to compare the marketplace to (i.e. the Apple app store), people like you could be snarky and claim that "this is just the way it is". Apple has proven you wrong, and that piracy actually does affect the economy of software developers. People are willing to purchase software, but when piracy becomes so easy, people stop purchasing software.
Finally, this isn't a molehill to many people. To many people, it is their careers. One may have that anti-capitalist inclination to say "oh these developers just want to get rich." Well, actually many of these developers just make 5 figures (i.e. $40,000 to $99,999 a year), which is not rich in the U.S. So 5,000 sales vs. 10,000 sales really is a mountain to many people.
This is quite depressing. I am currently in the process of writing a game for Android right now. I am paying an artist $1000 and a music guy $100, so I actually have a little more financial stake in this than the average hobby app maker. The worst part is, there are pirating web sites that aren't just giving away pirated apps, they're SELLING them.
I was hoping to make a few thousand bucks. I'm now just hoping that I can recoup my losses. Too bad I am going to spend hundreds of hours of my free time working for maybe close to nothing.
Have you not read the Old Testament? Canaan? Jericho? They were at least as warlike as any other culture at the time, probably moreso.
That doesn't really say much. Everyone was warlike. The Hebrews from the BC's did not give leave our current Western civilization (nor any other modern civilization) anything original, anything that wasn't founded before. "Thou shalt not kill" exists in every society. I know there's more to it than the 10 commandments, but I'm oversimplifying. They didn't leave us any lasting imprint such as the Socrates method, law, medicine, math, etc. Please feel free to counter this argument because I would never pretend to know everything, but there's not much the ancient Hebrews left us other than some stories from the Torah. And even those stories weren't that original. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
Hope this conversation doesn't lead to any people or civilizations being destroyed!
You may not believe this, but I still have the original disks (needed for copy protection) from King's Quest 1 - 5, Space Quest 1-4, and tons of others. In these old Sierra games from the early 80s, you needed the original disk to pass a copy protection test. A regular disk copy would not copy a certain sector on the disk, so if you made copies of the disks the copies wouldn't pass the copy protection (which was an encryption key of some kind). Even though I have these disks, I cannot play these games with the regular copy protection scheme because I no longer have a 3.5 inch floppy drive on my computer.:) Fortunately, I can easily play using other methods (i.e. the Internet). I wonder if all the sanctimonious DRM haters out there would have also refused to have purchased King's Quest 1 in 1981, because in 30 years there would no longer be 1981 PCs.
I also refuse to "license" a game unless it's an MMO. This is a single-player game with a multi-player component. Therefore, I refuse to purchase this game (or license it, however you choose to label it).
That's your fault. You don't have a real reason to be mad or even correctly sanctimonious about this decision. It is only in your head that "licensing a single-player game with a multi-player component" is wrong.
I hate to pick on you, but I just don't believe that's the reason you're not buying it. You admit that the Steam bloat may be small. In fact, it's practically non-existent. I don't like the bloat that the intro video brings, so what?
LOL. BTW, Monotheism itself likely wasn't invented by Hebrews. But, in the end, we do have billions of people in this world with religions based on a few tribes of nomads called the Hebrews. Maybe the counter argument to this is that they took religion out of the game anyways!
(2) Civic management is basically a leveling system, with minor consequences on your civ
(3) No ability to change tax or research rates directly
(4) No pollution from production
(5) Happiness is nation wide, one doesn't manage individual cities
I didn't think these things were that bad. Slightly different, but not bad per se.
(6) The AI is REALLY REALLY BAD AT WAR. After a single play through, one can confidently go to war at anytime with any other civilization on the "harder" difficulty settings. After 3 games I have yet to see an AI civ use naval units
Very true!
(7) Naval transport units have been eliminated, any unity can move through water. How dumb is that?
Wow, to me this was the best thing that is ever happened in a Civ! I LOVE IT! I'm not joking, either; naval transport was the most annoying micromanagement thing you ever had to do. I always ended up choosing maps with no large bodies of water.
Take all of these changes together without any substantial additions, and you have a boring easy game that takes forever to play.
On an i7 with a geforce 330m, all graphics turned to minimum, a single turn on a standard size map takes 20-30 seconds at the end of the game.
As a long time Civ player (yes longtime... I think it's common place for everyone to think Civ 2 was the best, although there are definite welcome improvements in the later games), I'm sadly disappointed.
The good
1. You no longer need transports to cross oceans, which is AWESOME. And it was implemented very well. I had a few frigates which hammered down and destroyed most of Catherine of Russia's fleet of pikemen and knights coming to invade my shores, once I destroyed her only assisting caravels. Also late game it was easy to click an infantry man to an island somewhere for some reason. It used to be annoying and detrimental to the fun of the game when you had to move a transport vessel from far away, taking up many turns, just to get to a unimportant part of your empire for one measly unit to transport the infantry man to wherever I needed to go.
2. Your 21st century cities don't automatically get capped by a Pikeman anymore. Finally. The cities themselves have health points and ranged attacks. Awesome, and it worked great in my game. When trying to invade Egypt and deep into their territory, my invading armies would get hammered by the cities before i even made it to their walls.
3. The Social progression is a really cool way to let you customize your play style, other than simply choosing a civilization trait. I loved it so much that my next game will be completely focused on culture.
4. You may not think the "only 1 tile per square" thing is cool, but after you actually play it, it is great and adds a cool strategic value that didn't exist before. Invading through a mountain pass was very hard.
The bad
1. The game just feels so slow. I'm not talking about FPS, I'm talking about scrolling, zooming, clicking items, making orders, menus. There's always a half-second to sometimes more than a second delay, even when you've got 30 FPS or more. If you thought that you were about to click on "Unit needs orders" you might be wrong, because the UI might not be updated to "Next turn" and BAM! You just clicked the wrong thing! The Help menu is accessible via a tiny font "help" in the corner of the screen, hard to navigate to. I didn't see any key shortcuts for menu items (i.e. demographics), and I looked. If they exist, they've been changed from previous civs. It really changes the feel and excitement of the game when you feel like you're crawling instead of running through the ages.
2. Quicksave is F11, Quickload is F12. Please don't make me explain why this is a stupid fucking idea.
3. The age progression is bad. In the regular game that I played, you simply didn't have enough time to improve your cities and build armies. It was one or the other. Building a knight takes 10 turns, building a Temple takes 10 turns. You either have to choose to build armies or one or two city improvements. If you are next to a hostile civilization, you have no choice but to build armies, and ignore your city improvements. It's hard to explain, but you never felt like you had enough time to get anything done. By the time you could build something, it was obsolete. I mean, you could research your way through an age in 40 turns, but it would take 100 turns just to build 1 item from everything in the age.
4. Great People aren't that powerful; I ended up always using them for Golden Ages. Maybe I am speaking too soon, as I haven't played enough.
5. It was SO frustrating that you could not preview how far a ranged unit could fire. The reason it was so frustrating is that some units require you to set them up (i.e. before they fire, you have to use one of their moves). Apparently it is affected by mountains and other terrain. So it's really hard to tell. It doesn't even tell you the range in the tooltip. (BTW, I may be wrong about this).
6. It crashes on startup when I changed the video settings in the previous game. You have to clear out the.ini files in the app's data folder.
Totally agreed. Everything else is easy to compare, but not graphics card. Maybe if they specified "XXX MB YYY Processor Speed" for graphics cards, it would be easier.
Before you mod me down for being harsh, I'd like to point out this is about a couple of comedians mocking the hundreds of thousands of people who showed up to Beck's rally and enjoyed it.
I don't think you're harsh, but I do think you're wrong. It isn't about making fun of those people, it's about more than that. Also, professional crowd talliers think that it wasn't hundreds of thousands. http://stevedoig.com/archives/250
One of the core factors here is the unexamined assumption that lefties are both far more intelligent and moral than anyone who holds conservative opinions
Who said that? I've only heard sentiments like that from conservatives, who contend that lefties say such things.
Unfortunately, for all their supposed intellect and compassion, they are utterly unable to fathom how any decent people could hold an opinion contrary to theirs without assigning 'fear' or 'ignorance' as the cause.
Once again, this is an unfounded statement. "They" are unable to fathom this? All debate that "lefties" don't agree with is from 'fear' or 'ignorance'? You seem to have very broadly encompassing prejudices against "lefties". How does this prejudice form? From stuff that Fox News tells you? From a real life person you know? Because it certainly doesn't come from any news sources I read.
the only weapon they really have to fall back on is mockery... In your mockery, you display the true intellectual level you operate on, and it's not a flattering picture
Once again, a very broad prejudice. Is satire a politically left issue, lefties all use mockery as weapons, which is in fact an ugly intellectual level?
Honestly, from reading stuff like this, it seems like you know a person in your life that is a "lefty". All of this stuff you talk about seems like you're talking about that one person, and then applying your perception of this one person to all people. Or, even worse, this is a picture you've painted in your mind which isn't in fact based on real people at all.
How can you call it a march for moderates when the only person who has every voted for a Republican will be the lone comedy reporter from Fox News?
What do you think the definition of a "moderate" is? People who vote for Republicans? Or a crowd that is 50% Democrat voters and 50% Republican voters?
If so, you've missed the point. What he seems to be thinking "moderate" is the people who may disagree with some politicians, but wouldn't call them Hitler.
Guessing numbers is a dangerous game. The Million Man March had somewhere between 300,000 - 400,000 people at their rally, and the D.C. parks and monuments organization were sued by the promoters of the event. Now they no longer measure numbers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Nils-Axel Mörner saying that for the past 300 years, there has been no significant trend in the levels of the sea? That doesn't have anything to do with what would happen if Antarctica completely melted.
Re:Cooking for Engineers
on
Cooking For Geeks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
False advertising. What kind of engineer prefers US customary units over metric?
I'm not being a troll, I honestly mean this: those tips/experiences aren't that great. How the heck did someone think this important enough to be put on Slashdot? It's oriented towards someone's very specific experience, which for the most part doesn't translate well to other people.
Wow, your job sucks! I love writing software. I don't have to deal with inflated egos, because the teams I work in are run well and not subject to any one person's whims. And "no chicks in the office" is a totally different subject, but you should have other places in life to see chicks.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to post the website out of princple. There was a Slashdot article on it earlier. Basically there are some douchebags in Sweeden who talk about supporting FOSS (free open source software) and the Pirate Party (a political party in Sweeden, Google it if you're interested), and they want software on Android to be free (which they interpret unfortunately as free as in beer instead of free as in speech). They charge $9.99 for access to all the pirated apps.
As I'm totally on board with what you're saying, I do have to bring up that Google doesn't make the process of purchasing an app on your Android device as easy as it could be. Using a web browser on your PC is easier than purchasing an app on your Android phone.
This is something that I hope Google fixes.
Wow, I just posted something very similar to what you said. Totally agree!
I believe the core premise is not entirely correct. While software that costs $500 (Adobe and Microsoft stuff) will be pirated because of costs, $1 MP3s and $1 apps aren't. They are pirated because of ease of use of obtaining them. The reason online music works now is because Apple made it easy for users to find music. (Before it was easy with Napster).
So, this article regards the Android marketplace. It is not that easy to use, and it is apparently easy to get pirated software. Google can and should fix this.
Not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I can't stress that enough. Make the most of what you have instead of making mountains out of molehills.
You must feel really good about all the software you pirate, because you wouldn't have bought it anyways, right?
Anyways, the point is that the Android Marketplace is more of a wild west market. The economy of the Apple app store is many many millions. The best selling apps on the Google Marketplace have sales in the thousands. Although not everyone discloses their data, I've read on two separate blogs about how they broke 5000 sales, and those two apps were in the Top 10. So, if we didn't have a control group to compare the marketplace to (i.e. the Apple app store), people like you could be snarky and claim that "this is just the way it is". Apple has proven you wrong, and that piracy actually does affect the economy of software developers. People are willing to purchase software, but when piracy becomes so easy, people stop purchasing software.
Finally, this isn't a molehill to many people. To many people, it is their careers. One may have that anti-capitalist inclination to say "oh these developers just want to get rich." Well, actually many of these developers just make 5 figures (i.e. $40,000 to $99,999 a year), which is not rich in the U.S. So 5,000 sales vs. 10,000 sales really is a mountain to many people.
This is quite depressing. I am currently in the process of writing a game for Android right now. I am paying an artist $1000 and a music guy $100, so I actually have a little more financial stake in this than the average hobby app maker. The worst part is, there are pirating web sites that aren't just giving away pirated apps, they're SELLING them.
I was hoping to make a few thousand bucks. I'm now just hoping that I can recoup my losses. Too bad I am going to spend hundreds of hours of my free time working for maybe close to nothing.
Exactly. It's not that hard to figure out, and if you have IP addresses you know what country they come from.
Have you not read the Old Testament? Canaan? Jericho? They were at least as warlike as any other culture at the time, probably moreso.
That doesn't really say much. Everyone was warlike. The Hebrews from the BC's did not give leave our current Western civilization (nor any other modern civilization) anything original, anything that wasn't founded before. "Thou shalt not kill" exists in every society. I know there's more to it than the 10 commandments, but I'm oversimplifying. They didn't leave us any lasting imprint such as the Socrates method, law, medicine, math, etc. Please feel free to counter this argument because I would never pretend to know everything, but there's not much the ancient Hebrews left us other than some stories from the Torah. And even those stories weren't that original. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth
Hope this conversation doesn't lead to any people or civilizations being destroyed!
This game was DEFINITELY released too early. Civ 4 was an awesome game, about 4-6 months after it was released :)
You may not believe this, but I still have the original disks (needed for copy protection) from King's Quest 1 - 5, Space Quest 1-4, and tons of others. In these old Sierra games from the early 80s, you needed the original disk to pass a copy protection test. A regular disk copy would not copy a certain sector on the disk, so if you made copies of the disks the copies wouldn't pass the copy protection (which was an encryption key of some kind). Even though I have these disks, I cannot play these games with the regular copy protection scheme because I no longer have a 3.5 inch floppy drive on my computer. :) Fortunately, I can easily play using other methods (i.e. the Internet). I wonder if all the sanctimonious DRM haters out there would have also refused to have purchased King's Quest 1 in 1981, because in 30 years there would no longer be 1981 PCs.
I also refuse to "license" a game unless it's an MMO. This is a single-player game with a multi-player component. Therefore, I refuse to purchase this game (or license it, however you choose to label it).
That's your fault. You don't have a real reason to be mad or even correctly sanctimonious about this decision. It is only in your head that "licensing a single-player game with a multi-player component" is wrong.
I hate to pick on you, but I just don't believe that's the reason you're not buying it. You admit that the Steam bloat may be small. In fact, it's practically non-existent. I don't like the bloat that the intro video brings, so what?
LOL. BTW, Monotheism itself likely wasn't invented by Hebrews. But, in the end, we do have billions of people in this world with religions based on a few tribes of nomads called the Hebrews. Maybe the counter argument to this is that they took religion out of the game anyways!
(1) No religion
Didn't notice it was gone.
(2) Civic management is basically a leveling system, with minor consequences on your civ (3) No ability to change tax or research rates directly (4) No pollution from production (5) Happiness is nation wide, one doesn't manage individual cities
I didn't think these things were that bad. Slightly different, but not bad per se.
(6) The AI is REALLY REALLY BAD AT WAR. After a single play through, one can confidently go to war at anytime with any other civilization on the "harder" difficulty settings. After 3 games I have yet to see an AI civ use naval units
Very true!
(7) Naval transport units have been eliminated, any unity can move through water. How dumb is that?
Wow, to me this was the best thing that is ever happened in a Civ! I LOVE IT! I'm not joking, either; naval transport was the most annoying micromanagement thing you ever had to do. I always ended up choosing maps with no large bodies of water.
Take all of these changes together without any substantial additions, and you have a boring easy game that takes forever to play.
On an i7 with a geforce 330m, all graphics turned to minimum, a single turn on a standard size map takes 20-30 seconds at the end of the game.
True! Sucks!
As a long time Civ player (yes longtime... I think it's common place for everyone to think Civ 2 was the best, although there are definite welcome improvements in the later games), I'm sadly disappointed.
The good
1. You no longer need transports to cross oceans, which is AWESOME. And it was implemented very well. I had a few frigates which hammered down and destroyed most of Catherine of Russia's fleet of pikemen and knights coming to invade my shores, once I destroyed her only assisting caravels. Also late game it was easy to click an infantry man to an island somewhere for some reason. It used to be annoying and detrimental to the fun of the game when you had to move a transport vessel from far away, taking up many turns, just to get to a unimportant part of your empire for one measly unit to transport the infantry man to wherever I needed to go.
2. Your 21st century cities don't automatically get capped by a Pikeman anymore. Finally. The cities themselves have health points and ranged attacks. Awesome, and it worked great in my game. When trying to invade Egypt and deep into their territory, my invading armies would get hammered by the cities before i even made it to their walls.
3. The Social progression is a really cool way to let you customize your play style, other than simply choosing a civilization trait. I loved it so much that my next game will be completely focused on culture.
4. You may not think the "only 1 tile per square" thing is cool, but after you actually play it, it is great and adds a cool strategic value that didn't exist before. Invading through a mountain pass was very hard.
The bad
1. The game just feels so slow. I'm not talking about FPS, I'm talking about scrolling, zooming, clicking items, making orders, menus. There's always a half-second to sometimes more than a second delay, even when you've got 30 FPS or more. If you thought that you were about to click on "Unit needs orders" you might be wrong, because the UI might not be updated to "Next turn" and BAM! You just clicked the wrong thing! The Help menu is accessible via a tiny font "help" in the corner of the screen, hard to navigate to. I didn't see any key shortcuts for menu items (i.e. demographics), and I looked. If they exist, they've been changed from previous civs. It really changes the feel and excitement of the game when you feel like you're crawling instead of running through the ages.
2. Quicksave is F11, Quickload is F12. Please don't make me explain why this is a stupid fucking idea.
3. The age progression is bad. In the regular game that I played, you simply didn't have enough time to improve your cities and build armies. It was one or the other. Building a knight takes 10 turns, building a Temple takes 10 turns. You either have to choose to build armies or one or two city improvements. If you are next to a hostile civilization, you have no choice but to build armies, and ignore your city improvements. It's hard to explain, but you never felt like you had enough time to get anything done. By the time you could build something, it was obsolete. I mean, you could research your way through an age in 40 turns, but it would take 100 turns just to build 1 item from everything in the age.
4. Great People aren't that powerful; I ended up always using them for Golden Ages. Maybe I am speaking too soon, as I haven't played enough.
5. It was SO frustrating that you could not preview how far a ranged unit could fire. The reason it was so frustrating is that some units require you to set them up (i.e. before they fire, you have to use one of their moves). Apparently it is affected by mountains and other terrain. So it's really hard to tell. It doesn't even tell you the range in the tooltip. (BTW, I may be wrong about this).
6. It crashes on startup when I changed the video settings in the previous game. You have to clear out the .ini files in the app's data folder.
Other stuff
No sleep tonight!
Totally agreed. Everything else is easy to compare, but not graphics card. Maybe if they specified "XXX MB YYY Processor Speed" for graphics cards, it would be easier.
Before you mod me down for being harsh, I'd like to point out this is about a couple of comedians mocking the hundreds of thousands of people who showed up to Beck's rally and enjoyed it.
I don't think you're harsh, but I do think you're wrong. It isn't about making fun of those people, it's about more than that. Also, professional crowd talliers think that it wasn't hundreds of thousands. http://stevedoig.com/archives/250
One of the core factors here is the unexamined assumption that lefties are both far more intelligent and moral than anyone who holds conservative opinions
Who said that? I've only heard sentiments like that from conservatives, who contend that lefties say such things.
Unfortunately, for all their supposed intellect and compassion, they are utterly unable to fathom how any decent people could hold an opinion contrary to theirs without assigning 'fear' or 'ignorance' as the cause.
Once again, this is an unfounded statement. "They" are unable to fathom this? All debate that "lefties" don't agree with is from 'fear' or 'ignorance'? You seem to have very broadly encompassing prejudices against "lefties". How does this prejudice form? From stuff that Fox News tells you? From a real life person you know? Because it certainly doesn't come from any news sources I read.
the only weapon they really have to fall back on is mockery... In your mockery, you display the true intellectual level you operate on, and it's not a flattering picture
Once again, a very broad prejudice. Is satire a politically left issue, lefties all use mockery as weapons, which is in fact an ugly intellectual level?
Honestly, from reading stuff like this, it seems like you know a person in your life that is a "lefty". All of this stuff you talk about seems like you're talking about that one person, and then applying your perception of this one person to all people. Or, even worse, this is a picture you've painted in your mind which isn't in fact based on real people at all.
In a country of 250 million plus
It's been 300 million plus for over a year.
How can you call it a march for moderates when the only person who has every voted for a Republican will be the lone comedy reporter from Fox News?
What do you think the definition of a "moderate" is? People who vote for Republicans? Or a crowd that is 50% Democrat voters and 50% Republican voters?
If so, you've missed the point. What he seems to be thinking "moderate" is the people who may disagree with some politicians, but wouldn't call them Hitler.
Guessing numbers is a dangerous game. The Million Man March had somewhere between 300,000 - 400,000 people at their rally, and the D.C. parks and monuments organization were sued by the promoters of the event. Now they no longer measure numbers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Nils-Axel Mörner saying that for the past 300 years, there has been no significant trend in the levels of the sea? That doesn't have anything to do with what would happen if Antarctica completely melted.
False advertising. What kind of engineer prefers US customary units over metric?
An American one?
I'm not being a troll, I honestly mean this: those tips/experiences aren't that great. How the heck did someone think this important enough to be put on Slashdot? It's oriented towards someone's very specific experience, which for the most part doesn't translate well to other people.
Wow, your job sucks! I love writing software. I don't have to deal with inflated egos, because the teams I work in are run well and not subject to any one person's whims. And "no chicks in the office" is a totally different subject, but you should have other places in life to see chicks.
Totally... she really could have written that damn book in 1/4 of the pages.