>but keep all the largesse of the whole scam firmly in their pockets.
Very soon after the incidents occured Best Buy corporate stated that anyone who purchased a bundle could return any/all parts of the bundle to any Best Buy and get a full refund on the purchase price, even if the items were opened.
Yest Best Buy is evil. Yes Best Buy sucks. But, in this at least, when corporate found out about what was going on they attempted to rectify the situation to the benefit of the customers.
* Skype - Download it, install it, run. If need be, purchase calling minutes and/or a phone number w/ voicemail directly from Skype.com. If desirable, purchase any of a number of USB based handsets and/or webcams that are certified to work with Skype. If all else fails go to RadioShack where you can buy ready to go setups.
* Asterisk - Set up a dedicated server, download Asterisk, learn obtuse configuration, buy (hopefully the right) add in cards, buy handsets, edit obtuse configurations, purchase local number service from a SIP compatible VOIP provider so landline folks can call you, edit obtuse configurations again, try to use existing in-house wiring with new handsets and add in cards, edit obtuse configurations again, ad nauseum.
No. The first barrier to your idea is that for 99.9999% of the computer using population setting up, configuring, and maintaining a second computer, let alone a dedicated server, is either a terrifying proposition or something of 0 interest.
Just to clarify, the article said 10,400 players active on the servers. In other words, 10,400 logged on at that moment.
The general rule of thumb is that at any point you can expect about 10% of the playerbase to be playing. So the 10,400 active number means SWG has ~104,000 players, give or take. While not outstanding, 104K is a decent number. Without knowing the cost of development, the size of the current team, and the costs for the hardware to run SWG there's no way to determine if 104K paying subscribers is enough to keep the game in the black, though.
Personally, I think that PS is beginning to show its age, and that something with a more elegant UI and a lightweight codebase will take off and surpass photoshop in the next few years
Like what? PhotoPaint didn't fit the bill, neither did PaintShop Pro. Design professionals could care less about intangibles like "lightweight codebase". They care even less for different UIs because they've already spent the time and money to learn the current UI.
For a start, Adobe could start using newer versions of the OS toolkits on Windows and Mac. Photoshop is one of the only remaining Carbon applications out there.
Adobe has been steadily moving all of their applications to the QT toolkit for the past couple of years. Choosing Carbon over Cocoa is a moot point for them because it still leaves them in the position of having to write a completely different GUI system for Windows or any other platform they might support.
We have't gone to a three year presidential term. The President was innagurated for a second term on 1/2005. He won't leave office until 1/2009. He has three more years in office.
The facts are not copyrighted, it's the presentation of the facts that are under copyright.
Almost all classical music is within the public domain. That doesn't mean I can go out and start broadcasting or charging admission to hear Beethoven's 9th off of a CD I just purchased at Sam Goody. The music is copyright free but the performance by the orchestra that recorded the CD is copyrightable. If I want a truly free version of the music I have to either buy a royalty free version of it or hire my own orchestra to perform it.
I was pointing out that that the parent poster's assumption that you have to throw away old stuff is wrong. Tossing Windows and starting over from scratch is not the correct way to fix problems. It would introduce just as many (if not more) problems than it would fix. Read why refactoring is bad. Apple tried just that approach with Copland and languished for years trying to get it all to work correctly. They eventually had to go buy NeXT because they were out of time, money, and options. They didn't go to what we now know as OS X for modern security reasons. They went to it because they had to do something or else they would've gone out of business. That OS X is secure has nothing to do with the fact that it is newer than OS 9 (it isn't, really). It has to do with the fact that the code it's based on has been maintained and updated over the years instead of being tossed and rewritten everytime a flaw was found.
There's no money in going after a group of teenagers who are accomplishing something on their own. There's too much sympathy for those teens if he goes after them. "Next on the news, Jack Thompson attempts to censor local teens!" just doesn't make him sound positive. "Next on the news, Jack Thompson goes after corrupt gaming company" works much better for his goal of self-promotion. So, yes, in his mind, games have to be made by companies. If they aren't then they aren't suitable for his needs.
He didn't ask about streaming music. He asked about playing sounds remotely. Your solution does nothing to, say, play the sounds from a game on a different machine.
Here, sonny, let me correct your statement for you: "The 2600 has an alpha-numeric keypad but nobody uses it. The device didn't ship with the product so, to reach the widest audience, games are created with the assumption that it isn't there--won't the same thing happen for the ROB Family Robot on the NES?"
That is the way to do it only when iDevelopmentBudget >= (extremely large number)
Most game developers don't have the money on hand to say "when it's done" because there's a hard date that comes before then where the company runs out of money. Publishers won't fund a company indefinately for a project because after a point they will have spent more money then they will ever make on the project, regardless of how bug-free it is.
Only indie developers with a long and proven track record of excellent games and enough business smarts to have banked a lot of their previous earnings can stand up and say "When it's done". Epic is one of an extremely small group of developers that have that freedom.
Why do you think there is a need for this? You keep implying that 360s are defective and that Microsoft is to blame and CoolIt is just fixing the problem for them. On what are you basing that assumption?
By your logic AMD and Intel are at fault for poor chip designs because 3rd party companies make water cooling kits for computers.
This is just a gadget for people to waste their money on. There's no absolute need for it, just like there isn't a need for quite a lot of things that companies sell to people.
So every 3rd party XBox controller only exists to fix a flaw in the standard one? Every set of 3rd party cables only serve to cover up some manufacturing flaw?
Companies will make a buck on anything. That this exists doesn't imply Microsoft screwed up. It implies that CoolIt knows there are enough suckers out there that would be interested in buying their product.
It's called trademark. Congress passed laws protecting registered trademarks quite a long time ago. The owner of the Bluetooth trademark is legally obligated to protect their mark. If they don't the mark can be considered as falling into general use and then they will lose any legal protections the trademark currently gives them.
I was pointing out that the parent's claim of Katrina being as bad as it was because of global warming isn't true, as per many studies. I used one other data point to show that Katrina was not the worst hurricane to make landfall in the US. Andrew was worse and it came quite a while ago.
As for Wilma, I know it is one of the strongest on record. That's why I quantified my statements with "strongest to make landfall". Katrina was a cat 5, just like Wilma. Neither were Cat 5s when they hit the US, though. Andrew is still the strongest hurricane to make it ashore here.
You take my comments out of context, insinuating I don't know what the strongest hurricane on record is, claiming I'm making long reaching statements based on a small sample set, and then use the equally assinine statistic of 4 out of 10 storms in the past two years being the strongest ever. Two years. 4 out of 10. Those are very small numbers when considering something on a global scale. Very small indeed.
"c) Even small increases in temperature can cause significant changes in the weather. One word that sums this up well: Katrina."
Climatologists have said that at the current rate of global warming a net change in hurricane severity is still quite a ways off.
Katrina was bad only because of where it hit. Any other category 3 would've done the same thing to the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was a category 4 and tore up large chunks of Florida. Not only would Andrew have done to New Orleans what Katrina did, it probably would've been worse, since Katrina was only a category 3 when it hit land for the second time (it was only a category 1 when it hit Florida).
The strongest recorded storm at the time of landfall between 1992 and 2005 was a category 4 (Andrew), not a category 3 (Katrina). Storm severity was worse 13 years ago, when the globe was marginally cooler. Katrina was not a direct result of global warming, it was just an average storm that hit a very ill prepared area.
MSFS can be used to supliment real training. Both the US Navy and the USAF use it for just such tasks.
When I started my private pilot training I build a fairly accurate representation of my local airport (KCHO) in MSFS. I'd spend my evenings practicing my landings; short field, soft field, crosswind, etc... While my muscle memory wasn't being trained, as the control system was quite different than a real C152 I was able to work through the steps, get the timing down, and always see where I should be relative to the runway at every step.
While the stall modeling in MSFS is pretty bad it is good enough to practice setting up for power-on and power-off stall maneuvers. Those, along with S-turns, turns around a point, steep turns, and engine-outs are all easily practiced in MSFS. I had pre-built flights for all of those basic maneuvers. My own private virtual practice area was always just mouse-clicks away.
I solo'd at 12hrs, whereas the national average is 20+. I took my checkride at 41hrs. The legal minimum of hours necessary before a checkride is 40 and the national average is 50+. You can't tell me that using MSFS didn't help my training.
and it is as versatile as a professional capitalist program like Maya, Lightwave, or 3DS Max.
No, it's not. In terms of expandability and versatility Max has it beat hands down. Here, do these things in Blender:
Script a new custom helper node that has a private parameter block to hold run-time specific information and uses the exposed viewport drawing commands to create a custom icon and transform gizmo for the helper object. Create a new material that has a global parameter block to hold settings for.FX (or.HLSL or.GLSL) shaders. Have those shaders work in the viewports. Have the settings be easily accessible both by the scripting language and the C++ SDK so that the data can be easily exported. Create the custom helper node and material in a scripting language, not C or C++ w/ an SDK.
Now create an entire bipedal skeleton with head, neck, clavicles, R/L upper arms, R/L lower arms, R/L hands, 4 spin segments, pelvis, R/L upper legs, R/L lower legs, R/L feet, proper IK and joint constraints. Do that in less than 30 seconds.
Still with me?
Keyframe animate the new skeleton over 100 frames. Create a second skeleton of a totally different scale with a different bone count. Now map the animation from skeleton 1 to skeleton 2, taking into acount the differing bone counts and scale. Do that in less than a minute.
Use a cloth simulation to create the animation of a person walking through a curtain. Use an extremely dense mesh for the curtain cloth. Now skin-wrap that animation on to a low-res version of the curtain with an IK bone setup instead of a cloth simulation (since cloth sim can't be use in a real-time engine). Quickly! The skin wrapping needs to be done in a minute or so.
Blender isn't a bad product at all. It's actually a very nice product. That doesn't mean it's more versatile than Max, though. Autodesk has more man hours poured into Max each year than Blender has had for the entire time its been a product. Autodesk has the advantage of a huge customer base and the smarts to talk to those customers and incorporate new features that increase productivity. Max wasn't nearly as versatile 3 years ago as it is now. Except for the biped creation step above it couldn't do any of the things I listed either (except maybe the custom helper node).
There's nothing wrong with "capitalist" software (eyeroll at the bad melodramatic turn of phrase). If Max provides features and options that fit a current or designed workflow and increases productivity then it is well worth the purchase price.
He can't attend a board meeting. At best he can attend the annual shareholders' meeting. Seeing as he'd be the only person at one of those that wouldn't be interested in T2 selling a hojillion copies of GTA4, 5, 6,....., n in order to make bags of cash I doubt very many other people there will welcome his antics.
Slashdot Mirror
Very soon after the incidents occured Best Buy corporate stated that anyone who purchased a bundle could return any/all parts of the bundle to any Best Buy and get a full refund on the purchase price, even if the items were opened.
Yest Best Buy is evil. Yes Best Buy sucks. But, in this at least, when corporate found out about what was going on they attempted to rectify the situation to the benefit of the customers.
* Skype - Download it, install it, run. If need be, purchase calling minutes and/or a phone number w/ voicemail directly from Skype.com. If desirable, purchase any of a number of USB based handsets and/or webcams that are certified to work with Skype. If all else fails go to RadioShack where you can buy ready to go setups.
* Asterisk - Set up a dedicated server, download Asterisk, learn obtuse configuration, buy (hopefully the right) add in cards, buy handsets, edit obtuse configurations, purchase local number service from a SIP compatible VOIP provider so landline folks can call you, edit obtuse configurations again, try to use existing in-house wiring with new handsets and add in cards, edit obtuse configurations again, ad nauseum.
No. The first barrier to your idea is that for 99.9999% of the computer using population setting up, configuring, and maintaining a second computer, let alone a dedicated server, is either a terrifying proposition or something of 0 interest.
The general rule of thumb is that at any point you can expect about 10% of the playerbase to be playing. So the 10,400 active number means SWG has ~104,000 players, give or take. While not outstanding, 104K is a decent number. Without knowing the cost of development, the size of the current team, and the costs for the hardware to run SWG there's no way to determine if 104K paying subscribers is enough to keep the game in the black, though.
Like what? PhotoPaint didn't fit the bill, neither did PaintShop Pro. Design professionals could care less about intangibles like "lightweight codebase". They care even less for different UIs because they've already spent the time and money to learn the current UI.
For a start, Adobe could start using newer versions of the OS toolkits on Windows and Mac. Photoshop is one of the only remaining Carbon applications out there.
Adobe has been steadily moving all of their applications to the QT toolkit for the past couple of years. Choosing Carbon over Cocoa is a moot point for them because it still leaves them in the position of having to write a completely different GUI system for Windows or any other platform they might support.
We have't gone to a three year presidential term. The President was innagurated for a second term on 1/2005. He won't leave office until 1/2009. He has three more years in office.
Almost all classical music is within the public domain. That doesn't mean I can go out and start broadcasting or charging admission to hear Beethoven's 9th off of a CD I just purchased at Sam Goody. The music is copyright free but the performance by the orchestra that recorded the CD is copyrightable. If I want a truly free version of the music I have to either buy a royalty free version of it or hire my own orchestra to perform it.
Ah, didn't realize you were talking about the particular DS in the gamestore you frequent. I thought you were refering to all DSs.
Not counting the two to three times each day you'd have to recharge the DS's battery and turn it back on, right?
I stand corrected. Thank you.
I was pointing out that that the parent poster's assumption that you have to throw away old stuff is wrong. Tossing Windows and starting over from scratch is not the correct way to fix problems. It would introduce just as many (if not more) problems than it would fix. Read why refactoring is bad. Apple tried just that approach with Copland and languished for years trying to get it all to work correctly. They eventually had to go buy NeXT because they were out of time, money, and options. They didn't go to what we now know as OS X for modern security reasons. They went to it because they had to do something or else they would've gone out of business. That OS X is secure has nothing to do with the fact that it is newer than OS 9 (it isn't, really). It has to do with the fact that the code it's based on has been maintained and updated over the years instead of being tossed and rewritten everytime a flaw was found.
No. Apple ditched their code in favor of something that predates Windows.
There's no money in going after a group of teenagers who are accomplishing something on their own. There's too much sympathy for those teens if he goes after them. "Next on the news, Jack Thompson attempts to censor local teens!" just doesn't make him sound positive. "Next on the news, Jack Thompson goes after corrupt gaming company" works much better for his goal of self-promotion. So, yes, in his mind, games have to be made by companies. If they aren't then they aren't suitable for his needs.
He didn't ask about streaming music. He asked about playing sounds remotely. Your solution does nothing to, say, play the sounds from a game on a different machine.
Here, sonny, let me correct your statement for you: "The 2600 has an alpha-numeric keypad but nobody uses it. The device didn't ship with the product so, to reach the widest audience, games are created with the assumption that it isn't there--won't the same thing happen for the ROB Family Robot on the NES?"
Most game developers don't have the money on hand to say "when it's done" because there's a hard date that comes before then where the company runs out of money. Publishers won't fund a company indefinately for a project because after a point they will have spent more money then they will ever make on the project, regardless of how bug-free it is.
Only indie developers with a long and proven track record of excellent games and enough business smarts to have banked a lot of their previous earnings can stand up and say "When it's done". Epic is one of an extremely small group of developers that have that freedom.
By your logic AMD and Intel are at fault for poor chip designs because 3rd party companies make water cooling kits for computers.
This is just a gadget for people to waste their money on. There's no absolute need for it, just like there isn't a need for quite a lot of things that companies sell to people.
Companies will make a buck on anything. That this exists doesn't imply Microsoft screwed up. It implies that CoolIt knows there are enough suckers out there that would be interested in buying their product.
You can get decent quality PSUs with 1 120mm fan in them for ~$100 these days.
It's called trademark. Congress passed laws protecting registered trademarks quite a long time ago. The owner of the Bluetooth trademark is legally obligated to protect their mark. If they don't the mark can be considered as falling into general use and then they will lose any legal protections the trademark currently gives them.
I was pointing out that the parent's claim of Katrina being as bad as it was because of global warming isn't true, as per many studies. I used one other data point to show that Katrina was not the worst hurricane to make landfall in the US. Andrew was worse and it came quite a while ago.
As for Wilma, I know it is one of the strongest on record. That's why I quantified my statements with "strongest to make landfall". Katrina was a cat 5, just like Wilma. Neither were Cat 5s when they hit the US, though. Andrew is still the strongest hurricane to make it ashore here.
You take my comments out of context, insinuating I don't know what the strongest hurricane on record is, claiming I'm making long reaching statements based on a small sample set, and then use the equally assinine statistic of 4 out of 10 storms in the past two years being the strongest ever. Two years. 4 out of 10. Those are very small numbers when considering something on a global scale. Very small indeed.
Learn to not be a hypocrite, dude.
Climatologists have said that at the current rate of global warming a net change in hurricane severity is still quite a ways off.
Katrina was bad only because of where it hit. Any other category 3 would've done the same thing to the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was a category 4 and tore up large chunks of Florida. Not only would Andrew have done to New Orleans what Katrina did, it probably would've been worse, since Katrina was only a category 3 when it hit land for the second time (it was only a category 1 when it hit Florida).
The strongest recorded storm at the time of landfall between 1992 and 2005 was a category 4 (Andrew), not a category 3 (Katrina). Storm severity was worse 13 years ago, when the globe was marginally cooler. Katrina was not a direct result of global warming, it was just an average storm that hit a very ill prepared area.
MSFS can be used to supliment real training. Both the US Navy and the USAF use it for just such tasks.
When I started my private pilot training I build a fairly accurate representation of my local airport (KCHO) in MSFS. I'd spend my evenings practicing my landings; short field, soft field, crosswind, etc... While my muscle memory wasn't being trained, as the control system was quite different than a real C152 I was able to work through the steps, get the timing down, and always see where I should be relative to the runway at every step.
While the stall modeling in MSFS is pretty bad it is good enough to practice setting up for power-on and power-off stall maneuvers. Those, along with S-turns, turns around a point, steep turns, and engine-outs are all easily practiced in MSFS. I had pre-built flights for all of those basic maneuvers. My own private virtual practice area was always just mouse-clicks away.
I solo'd at 12hrs, whereas the national average is 20+. I took my checkride at 41hrs. The legal minimum of hours necessary before a checkride is 40 and the national average is 50+. You can't tell me that using MSFS didn't help my training.
No, it's not. In terms of expandability and versatility Max has it beat hands down. Here, do these things in Blender:
Script a new custom helper node that has a private parameter block to hold run-time specific information and uses the exposed viewport drawing commands to create a custom icon and transform gizmo for the helper object. Create a new material that has a global parameter block to hold settings for .FX (or .HLSL or .GLSL) shaders. Have those shaders work in the viewports. Have the settings be easily accessible both by the scripting language and the C++ SDK so that the data can be easily exported. Create the custom helper node and material in a scripting language, not C or C++ w/ an SDK.
Now create an entire bipedal skeleton with head, neck, clavicles, R/L upper arms, R/L lower arms, R/L hands, 4 spin segments, pelvis, R/L upper legs, R/L lower legs, R/L feet, proper IK and joint constraints. Do that in less than 30 seconds.
Still with me?
Keyframe animate the new skeleton over 100 frames. Create a second skeleton of a totally different scale with a different bone count. Now map the animation from skeleton 1 to skeleton 2, taking into acount the differing bone counts and scale. Do that in less than a minute.
Use a cloth simulation to create the animation of a person walking through a curtain. Use an extremely dense mesh for the curtain cloth. Now skin-wrap that animation on to a low-res version of the curtain with an IK bone setup instead of a cloth simulation (since cloth sim can't be use in a real-time engine). Quickly! The skin wrapping needs to be done in a minute or so.
Blender isn't a bad product at all. It's actually a very nice product. That doesn't mean it's more versatile than Max, though. Autodesk has more man hours poured into Max each year than Blender has had for the entire time its been a product. Autodesk has the advantage of a huge customer base and the smarts to talk to those customers and incorporate new features that increase productivity. Max wasn't nearly as versatile 3 years ago as it is now. Except for the biped creation step above it couldn't do any of the things I listed either (except maybe the custom helper node).
There's nothing wrong with "capitalist" software (eyeroll at the bad melodramatic turn of phrase). If Max provides features and options that fit a current or designed workflow and increases productivity then it is well worth the purchase price.
He can't attend a board meeting. At best he can attend the annual shareholders' meeting. Seeing as he'd be the only person at one of those that wouldn't be interested in T2 selling a hojillion copies of GTA4, 5, 6, ....., n in order to make bags of cash I doubt very many other people there will welcome his antics.