The one thing I loved about the single player Battlefield 1942 bots is that in addition to complete lack of combat strategy, they would steal vehicles you were about to get into and rush off refusing your "request for pickup" command. Just like playing online with live players!
I don't suffer from spyware problems either. But I also don't download random free stupid programs. I also update my Windows software and don't browse dubious websites with an old version of Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, a lot of people do. I'd go so far as to say most people do install random crap. I've had to deal with a computer so messed up that it took 20 minutes to go from login prompt to desktop. It had about 2000 spyware items on it.
"Let's say you could download a magic file and have OSX on your PC tomorrow"
Well, you can actuallly. The magic file does exist. Seeing as it isn't endorsed by Apple however once you install you will have to play the game of chase that Apple and the x86 OS X hackers are involved in. You may not have drivers, you won't be able to update applications unless you get a hacked update. This would be the same situation on a Dell x86 running OS X. The real question I guess is, would I pay to get an Apple branded x86 if it can run OS X, Linux and Windows. Hell, I don't know. On top of maintaining two OSes (not really a big deal if you are say booting to Windows solely for gaming) you would limited by Apple's selection of hardware options. I'm sure there are a lot of people who might do it though. People who want OS X's lack of spyware but want to be able to run some Windows software for work or play.
Just because a company could install the OS on it's hardware does not make it legal. Dell cannot sell computers with OS X on them without consent from Apple. I seriously DOUBT they would secretly make it so that OS X would run on Dells. To do so would violate the DMCA and would not be able to be passed of as an accident.
WoW PVP servers have 3 types of zones, Alliance, Horde and contested. If you are a Horde and you enter an Alliance zone you are fair game, but you can only attack people who have "flagged" themselves for PVP. Vice versa for an Alliance character in a Horde zone. In a contested zone anyone can be attacked. The lower level zones are all pretty much controlled by one faction or the other (keeping ganking to a minimum). Both factions have quests in the contested zones, so after a certain level PVP encounters become pretty common. WoW also has battlegrounds which are instanced PVP "matches" that you join and fight until one faction wins the match. There is a capture the flag match and ones based on capturing and holding resources. In a non-PVP server, PVP is entirely consensual. You have to "flag" yourself to become attackable. There are a few ways to do this accidentally (i.e. buffing or healing someone who is flagged, or attacking a flagged person of the opposite faction) if you aren't clear on the PVP rules. PVP flags will disappear after 5 minutes with no PVP action.
Uh actually not only do you pay one fee for both games, the PVP zones are designed for Hero vs Villain combat. CoV is not entirely a new game, it's more like a standalone expansion. You can buy it to play villain only if you don't have CoH or you can buy it to add the new features to your CoH account and play both heroes and villains.
Well that depends on how long you use Cedega's service for versus how long you use your copy of Windows. Cedega is $5 month/$60 a year. Windows cost is from $85 for OEM XP Home up to $200 for non OEM XP Pro. If you are dual booting in to Linux and just gaming on Windows, XP Home should be fine. And let's figure you keep using your copy of Windows for 3 years. Well with Cedega after 3 years you'd be at $180, and so with the OEM Windows XP home you would save $95.
Cedega's a monthly subscription fee. You'll pay $60 a year for it. So let's say you update Windows once every 3 years - lets say you pay $200 or so for it. You'd pay $180 for the Cedega service. Cedega will let you play some Windows games, some with glitches, some with reduced performance but some quite well. Windows lets you play all Windows games excepting a few that are more than about 7 years old. Oh and Windows will let you run other Windows software as well. So is that worth the $20 over Cedega? I guess that depends on who you are. Don't want Windows on your system no matter what? Well than Cedega is as good as you are going to get. Don't mind dual-booting? Perhaps Windows is a better option. Don't care about running Linux? Well maybe Windows is definately a better option. Cedega is for people who want to use Linux as their desktop OS and don't want to leave it to play a game. Everyone else will probably have an easier time just running the game on Windows.
What kind of video card are you running? FPS in World of Warcraft seems to be all over the place due to the number of players in your current area, but I average about 60FPS in 1280x1024 on a 6800GT in Windows.
Yep. And he takes his aggresion out on all the jibber-jabbering folks around them by flinging random objects at them. But alas! To no avail, for they also must be heavily drugged as they don't even flinch when you bean a toilet off their heads.
Yes it's not Dell support per se, but local companies doing the repairs. I don't use them for software troubleshooting, strictly hardware replacement. We pay about $250-$300 for the 3 year service and I consider it well worth it for "road warrior" laptops. Laptops that are primarily sitting on a desktop usually won't get as much wear and tear. It's also easier for me to manage, because when something breaks I don't have to go to accounting and get funds to replace a part, they spent the money up front with the system purchase, so less hassle. We pretty much run a 3 year lifecycle on laptops, but it's more like 3 years + time until it finally craps out, which has been about 5 years on average. I've had laptops under warranty which have had their entire cases replaced, which helps with any structural problems. Apple's hardware is generally very good, but I still consider Apple care a must have for the laptops. Occasionally nasty design flaws arise such as the problem with the Powerbook hinges a few models ago (models with a hinge on either side of the screen). As for the crap on the installs, with the business division models you don't get as much and when I order I do say "no I don't want any trial crap", but we still dump a fresh image on them (with whatever updated drivers are necessary). Just keeps out any unknowns from the system.
Well, just as in the real world if you get invaded you need to defend. You CAN however develop peaceful relations with your immediate neighbors, Civ 4 adds additional means to make this more feasible (more things to trade, spreading your religion to your neighbors). If you focus on defense of your borders and building your cities specifically to focus on cultural development, you can avoid most conflict. If you also concentrate on technology, you can insure that your military will be sufficiently advanced to dissuade attackers. So it's true you probably would never have a game of Civ without any war, but considering it's a game about how cultures grow and civilization develops, well history shows us war is a large part of that. It's just that YOU don't have to be the warmongering slaughterer of nations, unless you choose to be.
"The simple part is to stop portraying characters as easy stereotypes - muscle-bound heroic men or stick-thin women with cavernous cleavage."
That's one thing I liked about Half Life 2, Gordon Freeman isn't your typical bad ass muscle bound soldier type and Alyx Vance doesn't look like a cover girl from a Heavy Metal magazine. A simple touch, but the whole game would have been cornier if not for little things like that. (Ok, so the absent minded professor in the game is certainly a stereotype)
"Or even worse, the sort of abstract slaughter of a civ"
To give it credit where the credit is due, Civilization 3 and now 4 made victory through peace much more possible. In Civilization 4 there are 3 seperate peaceful victory possibilities, winning by generating a huge amount of "culture" (points you get by creating wonders and promoting things like art), building the space ship and getting to Alpha Centauri or being elected head of the United Nations. In comparison there are only 2 military victory conditions, dominating the map or wiping out everyone else. The peaceful victory conditions are completely viable, and it's quite interesting to play with these goals in mind.
Yep - all computers have their problems. It just erks me when I hear the chorus of "It Just Works(TM)" - because I'm the guy everyone goes to when "It Just Doesn't Work".
The Apple store (if you live by one) has been a big boon for service. Previously we had to rely of small Mac shop owners of varying quality (ok for some reason they mostly suck around here). However, in a business environment the Dell machines are easier to fix than Apple. Why? Well, I don't have to go in to the Apple store and drop off that laptop. The service tech shows up within 4 hours and does the part install on the spot. For desktops the component is shipped next day air and my staff does the install (cheaper warranty option). I'm sure Dell's service is shittier for their consumer division, but for business support the cost is not much more than the Apple Care service to get onsite. Well worth it for laptops.
Piggybacking on freeware applications. This is the source of most spyware on Windows. The installation gives you the program you wanted to install plus additional fun spyware components. Odds are agreeing to install the spyware is mentioned in some language no one would understand buried deep in the EULA no one reads.
While it isn't correct to say that OS X is just BSD with a pretty face (which among other things trivializes the hard work in user interface design Apple has done), it is also completely incorrect to say that it has only as much BSD in it as Windows does. Let's explore the issue and Apple's stance on it. The core of OS X, Darwin is built off of the Mach kernal and BSD UNIX (including the BSD kernal) as Apple will tell you themselves:
Pay special attention to the section on "DARWIN'S STRUCTURE". Some key points:
"At its foundation is Darwin, which actually contains two layers of its own: the Mach kernel and the BSD subsystem wrapped around it."
And..
"Darwin also incorporates a full implementation of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) UNIX, welded on top of the Mach kernel. The hybrid BSD architecture adopted by Darwin embodies its historical association with the BSD code base and underscores both the project's strong relationship with the various BSD organizations and its strong cultural affinity with the open source developer community."
And...
"Darwin wraps a customized version of 4.4 BSD-Lite2 kernel and userspace around Mach. It includes many of the POSIX APIs, exporting them to user-space, and abstracts Darwin's file system and networking. Darwin's BSD also provides the process model, basic security policies, and threading support for Mac OS X."
Ok, so we have a BSD kernal and userspace wrapped around the Mach kernal core. We have "Darwin's BSD" providing the process model, threading and security policies. BSD of course also provided TCP/IP for the OS. Just a touch more BSD than Windows, I'd say. What does Apple say? Let's see:
"Darwin's Roots
The Darwin team is indebted to a diverse collection of open source projects, including the following:
- Mach, which was originally developed by Project Mach at Carnegie-Mellon University, and later enhanced by the Open Software Foundation (now The Open Group).
- 4.4BSD-Lite2, originated in UC Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group and developed by a large number of contributors:
* FreeBSD, the primary reference platform for Darwin's BSD kernel development.
* NetBSD, the upstream source for a significant portion of Darwin's user-space commands and tools.
* OpenBSD, with its focus on robustness and security and its integrated cryptography, provides OpenSSH for secure remote access.
- Apache HTTPD, the world's most popular web server, is included as part of the Darwin distribution, making Apple the largest distributor of Apache."
OK, so we have Mach, Apache and 3 flavors of BSD credited - that the Darwin team feels "indebted to". A substantial portion of OS X comes from BSD. Not even Apple refutes that, so why do you?
"All I can say is, once you go Mac OS X, everything else seems inferior. And I mean EVERYTHING.:-)"
This is a subjective opinion. I like OS X but I don't like everything about it and in fact I have Mac users who constantly get confused by some of the basic OS concepts (i.e. closing all the windows does not close the application) - even though they have been Mac users all their lives and some of the conventions are the same. While OS X does tend to be a very stable and reliable system, it also occasionally "goes weird" and requires some under the hood tinkering to fix. It's easy for computer savvy users to manage, but when it wanks it can be just as confusing to average users as Windows.
Yeah I'm completely annoyed at this pump it out for Christmas shit. I usually play PC games and all summer I futilely looked for something to play - and then whammo! Tons of good releases. How in hell am I supposed to play Age of Empires, Civ 4, Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, City of Villains, Black and White 2 etc. etc. Grrrr.
The tiny amount of real life violence resulting from people playing MMOs is just a fact of people playing competitive games. This can happen no matter what game is being played. Someone accuses another player of cheating in a high stakes game of poker, someone ends up dead. Any type of "oh no we must stop this" reaction neglects the fact that it's human nature at work and you can't change that with a law. Just as some states ban gambling to curb violence associated with it, the gambling still goes on. If there is value and risk in a game at some point someone is going to get hurt.
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The one thing I loved about the single player Battlefield 1942 bots is that in addition to complete lack of combat strategy, they would steal vehicles you were about to get into and rush off refusing your "request for pickup" command. Just like playing online with live players!
I don't suffer from spyware problems either. But I also don't download random free stupid programs. I also update my Windows software and don't browse dubious websites with an old version of Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, a lot of people do. I'd go so far as to say most people do install random crap. I've had to deal with a computer so messed up that it took 20 minutes to go from login prompt to desktop. It had about 2000 spyware items on it.
"Let's say you could download a magic file and have OSX on your PC tomorrow"
Well, you can actuallly. The magic file does exist. Seeing as it isn't endorsed by Apple however once you install you will have to play the game of chase that Apple and the x86 OS X hackers are involved in. You may not have drivers, you won't be able to update applications unless you get a hacked update. This would be the same situation on a Dell x86 running OS X.
The real question I guess is, would I pay to get an Apple branded x86 if it can run OS X, Linux and Windows. Hell, I don't know. On top of maintaining two OSes (not really a big deal if you are say booting to Windows solely for gaming) you would limited by Apple's selection of hardware options. I'm sure there are a lot of people who might do it though. People who want OS X's lack of spyware but want to be able to run some Windows software for work or play.
I think Harrison Ford and the band Aerosmith have been preselected for the crew.
Fix your sig, it's Zardoz not Zordoz.
Just because a company could install the OS on it's hardware does not make it legal. Dell cannot sell computers with OS X on them without consent from Apple. I seriously DOUBT they would secretly make it so that OS X would run on Dells. To do so would violate the DMCA and would not be able to be passed of as an accident.
WoW PVP servers have 3 types of zones, Alliance, Horde and contested. If you are a Horde and you enter an Alliance zone you are fair game, but you can only attack people who have "flagged" themselves for PVP. Vice versa for an Alliance character in a Horde zone. In a contested zone anyone can be attacked. The lower level zones are all pretty much controlled by one faction or the other (keeping ganking to a minimum). Both factions have quests in the contested zones, so after a certain level PVP encounters become pretty common.
WoW also has battlegrounds which are instanced PVP "matches" that you join and fight until one faction wins the match. There is a capture the flag match and ones based on capturing and holding resources.
In a non-PVP server, PVP is entirely consensual. You have to "flag" yourself to become attackable. There are a few ways to do this accidentally (i.e. buffing or healing someone who is flagged, or attacking a flagged person of the opposite faction) if you aren't clear on the PVP rules. PVP flags will disappear after 5 minutes with no PVP action.
"but how is a MS product release anything like Burning Man, other than possibly being in the desert?"
Simple. As long as you take a lot of drugs you'll have a good time at either event.
Uh actually not only do you pay one fee for both games, the PVP zones are designed for Hero vs Villain combat. CoV is not entirely a new game, it's more like a standalone expansion. You can buy it to play villain only if you don't have CoH or you can buy it to add the new features to your CoH account and play both heroes and villains.
Well that depends on how long you use Cedega's service for versus how long you use your copy of Windows. Cedega is $5 month/$60 a year. Windows cost is from $85 for OEM XP Home up to $200 for non OEM XP Pro. If you are dual booting in to Linux and just gaming on Windows, XP Home should be fine. And let's figure you keep using your copy of Windows for 3 years. Well with Cedega after 3 years you'd be at $180, and so with the OEM Windows XP home you would save $95.
Cedega's a monthly subscription fee. You'll pay $60 a year for it. So let's say you update Windows once every 3 years - lets say you pay $200 or so for it. You'd pay $180 for the Cedega service. Cedega will let you play some Windows games, some with glitches, some with reduced performance but some quite well. Windows lets you play all Windows games excepting a few that are more than about 7 years old. Oh and Windows will let you run other Windows software as well. So is that worth the $20 over Cedega? I guess that depends on who you are. Don't want Windows on your system no matter what? Well than Cedega is as good as you are going to get. Don't mind dual-booting? Perhaps Windows is a better option. Don't care about running Linux? Well maybe Windows is definately a better option.
Cedega is for people who want to use Linux as their desktop OS and don't want to leave it to play a game. Everyone else will probably have an easier time just running the game on Windows.
What kind of video card are you running?
FPS in World of Warcraft seems to be all over the place due to the number of players in your current area, but I average about 60FPS in 1280x1024 on a 6800GT in Windows.
Yeah well I bet I just get socks!
Yep. And he takes his aggresion out on all the jibber-jabbering folks around them by flinging random objects at them. But alas! To no avail, for they also must be heavily drugged as they don't even flinch when you bean a toilet off their heads.
Yes it's not Dell support per se, but local companies doing the repairs. I don't use them for software troubleshooting, strictly hardware replacement. We pay about $250-$300 for the 3 year service and I consider it well worth it for "road warrior" laptops. Laptops that are primarily sitting on a desktop usually won't get as much wear and tear. It's also easier for me to manage, because when something breaks I don't have to go to accounting and get funds to replace a part, they spent the money up front with the system purchase, so less hassle. We pretty much run a 3 year lifecycle on laptops, but it's more like 3 years + time until it finally craps out, which has been about 5 years on average. I've had laptops under warranty which have had their entire cases replaced, which helps with any structural problems.
Apple's hardware is generally very good, but I still consider Apple care a must have for the laptops. Occasionally nasty design flaws arise such as the problem with the Powerbook hinges a few models ago (models with a hinge on either side of the screen).
As for the crap on the installs, with the business division models you don't get as much and when I order I do say "no I don't want any trial crap", but we still dump a fresh image on them (with whatever updated drivers are necessary). Just keeps out any unknowns from the system.
Well, just as in the real world if you get invaded you need to defend. You CAN however develop peaceful relations with your immediate neighbors, Civ 4 adds additional means to make this more feasible (more things to trade, spreading your religion to your neighbors). If you focus on defense of your borders and building your cities specifically to focus on cultural development, you can avoid most conflict. If you also concentrate on technology, you can insure that your military will be sufficiently advanced to dissuade attackers.
So it's true you probably would never have a game of Civ without any war, but considering it's a game about how cultures grow and civilization develops, well history shows us war is a large part of that. It's just that YOU don't have to be the warmongering slaughterer of nations, unless you choose to be.
"The simple part is to stop portraying characters as easy stereotypes - muscle-bound heroic men or stick-thin women with cavernous cleavage."
That's one thing I liked about Half Life 2, Gordon Freeman isn't your typical bad ass muscle bound soldier type and Alyx Vance doesn't look like a cover girl from a Heavy Metal magazine. A simple touch, but the whole game would have been cornier if not for little things like that.
(Ok, so the absent minded professor in the game is certainly a stereotype)
"Or even worse, the sort of abstract slaughter of a civ"
To give it credit where the credit is due, Civilization 3 and now 4 made victory through peace much more possible. In Civilization 4 there are 3 seperate peaceful victory possibilities, winning by generating a huge amount of "culture" (points you get by creating wonders and promoting things like art), building the space ship and getting to Alpha Centauri or being elected head of the United Nations. In comparison there are only 2 military victory conditions, dominating the map or wiping out everyone else.
The peaceful victory conditions are completely viable, and it's quite interesting to play with these goals in mind.
Yep - all computers have their problems. It just erks me when I hear the chorus of "It Just Works(TM)" - because I'm the guy everyone goes to when "It Just Doesn't Work".
The Apple store (if you live by one) has been a big boon for service. Previously we had to rely of small Mac shop owners of varying quality (ok for some reason they mostly suck around here).
However, in a business environment the Dell machines are easier to fix than Apple. Why? Well, I don't have to go in to the Apple store and drop off that laptop. The service tech shows up within 4 hours and does the part install on the spot. For desktops the component is shipped next day air and my staff does the install (cheaper warranty option).
I'm sure Dell's service is shittier for their consumer division, but for business support the cost is not much more than the Apple Care service to get onsite. Well worth it for laptops.
Piggybacking on freeware applications. This is the source of most spyware on Windows. The installation gives you the program you wanted to install plus additional fun spyware components. Odds are agreeing to install the spyware is mentioned in some language no one would understand buried deep in the EULA no one reads.
Christ I think that right now whenever I hear the radio crap driven soundtrack of most EA games. Especially the sports and racing stuff.
While it isn't correct to say that OS X is just BSD with a pretty face (which among other things trivializes the hard work in user interface design Apple has done), it is also completely incorrect to say that it has only as much BSD in it as Windows does. Let's explore the issue and Apple's stance on it.
The core of OS X, Darwin is built off of the Mach kernal and BSD UNIX (including the BSD kernal) as Apple will tell you themselves:
The Evolution of Darwin
Pay special attention to the section on "DARWIN'S STRUCTURE". Some key points:
"At its foundation is Darwin, which actually contains two layers of its own: the Mach kernel and the BSD subsystem wrapped around it."
And..
"Darwin also incorporates a full implementation of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) UNIX, welded on top of the Mach kernel. The hybrid BSD architecture adopted by Darwin embodies its historical association with the BSD code base and underscores both the project's strong relationship with the various BSD organizations and its strong cultural affinity with the open source developer community."
And...
"Darwin wraps a customized version of 4.4 BSD-Lite2 kernel and userspace around Mach. It includes many of the POSIX APIs, exporting them to user-space, and abstracts Darwin's file system and networking. Darwin's BSD also provides the process model, basic security policies, and threading support for Mac OS X."
Ok, so we have a BSD kernal and userspace wrapped around the Mach kernal core. We have "Darwin's BSD" providing the process model, threading and security policies. BSD of course also provided TCP/IP for the OS.
Just a touch more BSD than Windows, I'd say. What does Apple say? Let's see:
"Darwin's Roots
The Darwin team is indebted to a diverse collection of open source projects, including the following:
- Mach, which was originally developed by Project Mach at Carnegie-Mellon University, and later enhanced by the Open Software Foundation (now The Open Group).
- 4.4BSD-Lite2, originated in UC Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group and developed by a large number of contributors:
* FreeBSD, the primary reference platform for Darwin's BSD kernel development.
* NetBSD, the upstream source for a significant portion of Darwin's user-space commands and tools.
* OpenBSD, with its focus on robustness and security and its integrated cryptography, provides OpenSSH for secure remote access.
- Apache HTTPD, the world's most popular web server, is included as part of the Darwin distribution, making Apple the largest distributor of Apache."
OK, so we have Mach, Apache and 3 flavors of BSD credited - that the Darwin team feels "indebted to". A substantial portion of OS X comes from BSD. Not even Apple refutes that, so why do you?
"All I can say is, once you go Mac OS X, everything else seems inferior. And I mean EVERYTHING. :-)"
This is a subjective opinion. I like OS X but I don't like everything about it and in fact I have Mac users who constantly get confused by some of the basic OS concepts (i.e. closing all the windows does not close the application) - even though they have been Mac users all their lives and some of the conventions are the same.
While OS X does tend to be a very stable and reliable system, it also occasionally "goes weird" and requires some under the hood tinkering to fix. It's easy for computer savvy users to manage, but when it wanks it can be just as confusing to average users as Windows.
Yeah I'm completely annoyed at this pump it out for Christmas shit. I usually play PC games and all summer I futilely looked for something to play - and then whammo! Tons of good releases. How in hell am I supposed to play Age of Empires, Civ 4, Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, City of Villains, Black and White 2 etc. etc.
Grrrr.
The tiny amount of real life violence resulting from people playing MMOs is just a fact of people playing competitive games. This can happen no matter what game is being played. Someone accuses another player of cheating in a high stakes game of poker, someone ends up dead.
Any type of "oh no we must stop this" reaction neglects the fact that it's human nature at work and you can't change that with a law. Just as some states ban gambling to curb violence associated with it, the gambling still goes on.
If there is value and risk in a game at some point someone is going to get hurt.