I was at a presentation NVidia held here in San Francisco where they talked about it, and my vague understanding (they mentioned the PS3 mostly just to keep the crowd whipped up) was that the PS3 card was based on the 6800 model, though it would still support stuff like Shader Model 3.0, and possibly their High Dynamic Range rendering, too.
Purists will never be happy, I guess. You don't need a GM giving you cookies to make it a "true" rpg. Especially when all quests are instanced, you can progress through things in your own manner, interjecting additional content as you see fit. You are still forced at some point to come back to the game design, but that's the tradeoff of a game that you, and everyone like you, can play with all of your friends.
This reply is probably too late, but attempting to justify bit torrents by saying that they helped viewership is very short-sighted.
Use of bit torrents is an early-adopter practice right now. It is primarily in use by opinion leaders, and so these people have a lot of influence. This mechanism won't exist when more and more people adopt Bit Torrent as a means to get their software.
Your latency is higher, your last-mile service is less reliable, and your throughput is due to change based on your neighbors' usage of the shared bandwidth pool. The other more important issue you already touched on: The only problem are(sic) the outages
You don't even need special lenses. You can simply walk to the lookout point on the Hill and look, and because the tower is probably 1/4th the distance from you as the major buildings downtown, it simply looks bigger.
Let me put it to you this way. I played 2 and a half hours and got about 450 kills last night. My guildmates who played *all day* got that much leading up to that 2.5 hour spurt. I won't reach the top rank (and if you aren't willing to put in a lot of time, you're not going to reach the top rank in PvE either - by the time you get through Molten Core, all 6-8 hours that'll take you if you don't wipe once - Blackwing Lair will be in, and other raid instances will start to trickle in as well. Have you been to southern Silithus? You don't even have to see it populated to gawk at how huge the place is, and presumably how hard the fights will be.
If the casual user can get the 'uber armor' its not going to be very uber is it? You suggest maybe WoW just become an FPS that you have to wait 3-4 months to fully activate?
Funny how many casual players seem to have this sense of bitterness to the players who can play more (jealous? I am. I have guildmates who play more than I work in a week, and if I could get away with it, I might too.)
By suggesting that Blizzard's honor system somehow moves to alienate the casual fanbase, you're also suggesting that they have a single track in mind, which is incorrect. There is already a set of diminishing returns on PvP honor. The first few ranks go quickly, then they slow down as you get higher. It's just like leveling. Do you know how slow? No, you probably don't - because nobody does. So why complain until its in effect - is the sky really falling, or are you just jerking that knee of yours?
Sadly, casual players ARENT WoW's strengths. Casual players tend to play for a bit, then cancel. For those that don't, that "insane 5%" generates a community and a game economy that trickles down to the casual players and eventually gives those casual players a means to raise the bar for their own characters.
Your mistake, and I use the same rhetoric you have for full ironic effect, is that you think WoW is somehow lacking in early/mid-level content. It's not. It's really, truly, not. What it IS lacking is high-end content. Right now guilds can clear out the entire gamut of high-end content (sans Ragnaros himself) in 2 days, and probably less if they want to spend the whole day doing it. They can't go back and do it the next day, though, they have to wait 2-7 days to do any of it again. There needs to be more high-end content to drive the story development. You aren't expected or obligated or even required to keep up.
If you want to enjoy being a casual player, you can continue to do so at no additional cost or risk to yourself. Just because the hardcore players are out there having fun doesn't mean you suddenly aren't. You're worried the hardcore players will get all this special PvP gear you can't get? They probably already have PvE gear you can't get too, so why the sudden issue?
If you want rewards based off of pure skill, then play FPS games. If you don't want people being rewarded for the time they spend developing their character WHY ARE YOU PLAYING AN RPG?
It's not yours, or anyone else's, position to judge what someone wants to do with their time. Do you smoke? Do you drive over the speed-limit? Do you drink at all? Do you neglect to wear sun screen on sunny days? Do you work too much? Do you avoid socializing with your co-workers because you don't like people? Are you REALLY that prepared to tell people that they're doing something unhealthy with their lives? Please, the 'playing too many video games is BAD' argument is trite and over-played, and nobody's been able to come up with a good reason why.
Multi-player video games are social (not anti-social behavior). They're not as 'social' as going to a bar with your friends, but then again you don't get a DUI for running too fast to the bathroom to take a bio break between pulls in Molten Core.
Multi-player (competitive) video games inspire creativity and critical thinking (they do not rot your brain). You aren't going to beat the other guy doing the same damn thing every time. Better learn how to do things differently, or you're going to lose again.
Multi-player video games inspire teamwork (not anti-social behavior). You can't beat another team in Counter-strike all by yourself, every round. You can't capture the flag w/o teammates playing defense (or teammates getting the flag, should you be a flag d type). You can't do it by yourself, so you better learn how to play nice.
Multi-player video games do NOT encourage physical activity. Correct. Then again, neither does watching foreign films, wine tasting, cooking, reading books, blogging, or any number of other hobbies that nobody would dare question as 'unhealthy' (except maybe blogging, for psychological reasons). There are a lot of physical hobbies that don't encourage half of the skillsets that video games do, too, but nobody seems to worry too much if someone spends all their free time working on their car, for example.
There's also the notion that playing video games somehow denies you the ability to go hiking, do 30 minutes of cardio a day, undertake yoga/pilates/tae bo/kick-boxing, etc. I don't know where it came from. Several of the 'pro gamers' in the US make a point of getting physical exercise, even though they barely make enough to pay any bills, often have to work another job, etc.
Of course. Any bug is a problem. The question is how much of a problem, and can it actually be attributed to the aggressive patching schedule, or in this case, will the aggressive patching schedule exacerbate the problem?
Issue 1) seems like a hardware/network related issue that could be highly exclusive to specific configurations - though those configurations themselves may not be erroneous, which would make it even harder to find.
Issue 2) was attributed to 3rd party software. Tricky, but not something any overworked QA department is likely to have a lot of time to troubleshoot variants of.
Issue 3) is one I've noticed several times, but as a priest I hardly ever rez people's pets - the hunters have their own means to do that, and I'm usually low on mana anyway.
Basically, none of these issues seem like something you shouldn't expect to see in an early series of game patches.
There wasn't an underlying change in the work ethic at Blizzard. What changed was that they set deadlines in a different way, such that instead of trying to lump every finished product into one large patch, they began doing rolling patches. This just means if a project isn't done in time for a patch, it's not in until the next one.
Lastly, if their QA department doesn't have enough time to test things, that's a failure of their project management, not of their different schedule. Utilizing a short-term schedule with deliverables that scale down from the original schedule shouldn't result in a dramatic increase in bugginess (though it will result in some, invariably). If it does, this is something that needs to be addressed by proper allocation of time to their QA department (try not to laugh - I work in QA, I know how rarely this happens).
This is a pretty big chance of pace for Blizzard. It took 90 days for their first content patch to come out - they had originally promised new content every month.
Additionally, up until now, WoW's PvP system was seen as largely pointless. This provides tangible benefits (and not just OMG POINTS!) to succesful PvP ventures. It should be exciting. Anyone who plays now can test this patch out a bit by copying a character over to the (grossly over-populated) test server. The disadvantage, as I stated, is that there are way too many people on it, and can get very laggy if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. This isn't a major concern for me, though, because the server population is immense compared to an average server, and they've already made another sub-patch to improve performance, with noticable improvement. There's still a LOT of room for more improvement. For example, player corpses should disappear after a certain point, or you should have the ability to not display them. Without that ability, you can run across a field that is just littered with corpses of dead players, and while it's a visceral joy to look at, it's also a huge network performance hit.
I don't disagree that education standards are lower, but I don't think Netspeak is entirely an indicator, either. The people on the internet are a lot younger than anyone who has spoken in this thread can genuinely conceive of. People often tease each other online, rather than doing it in school. What? I grew up using the internet as a place to get away from the people I couldn't stand, and most of that was less than a decade ago.
Kids are on the internet, and the compulsion for reading comprehension is right there, in your face. I doubt most kids even looked at the newspaper before their mid/early-teens in my generation (sans the Sports section), and now kids have easy and ready access to everything from rotten.com and free porn (hooray!) to the BBC and Al-Jazeera.
Is the level of expected reading comprehension being ramped up to meet this new demand? It sure doesn't seem like it. That's the problem. Netspeak? Who cares - let kids do what they want with the lifestyle and culture they have access to.
Okay, so I started two paragraphs with "the point is". The truth is (hah) that there were many points to make, and the contradictory nature of the whole issue makes me fighting mad. Basically, we have a demographic whose majority, as self-professed geeks, were often mocked and misunderstood as children because they were strange, and people thought they "just didn't get it". This throbbing mass of geekhood then proceeds to rail on today's youth because it is doing something strange, and they "just don't get it".
Is it as big a deal in the context of this article as I make it out to be? Probably not; but it is indicative of the sometimes duplicitous nature of the hallowed and sacred geek archetype.
Unfortunately, "we" are *not* talking about telling kids how to write correctly. Most of "us" are sitting here criticizing and villifying "netspeak".
I have no judgement whatsoever on your quality as a father, but I have a childhood of my own to reflect upon, and think "Damn, how often did people like myself sit there as a child, lamenting that adults thought I was stupid because I didn't <dress|act|talk|enjoy music|whatever> like an adult?" This was a pretty common experience in our generation, and, well.. I hear it was pretty common when our parents were kids too.
The point is, and I stand by how vehemently I believe this, it's not l337sp33k, the tendency to abbreviate every common phrase into an acronym (omghi2u!), or any other social virus creeping through the minds of children that makes a child stupid. It's poor education, poor parenting, and a lack of reinforcement that makes them stupid. If you're on the same page as me here, we don't have much to talk about.
The point is that leet-speak is just a way of expression that is ultimately formed by the media it is most commonly used on. It is nothing more.
If you haven't read through the pages of discussion here yet, maybe you should - this otherwise innocuous form of communication is being subtly turned into everything from the cause of youth illiteracy to the next "script kiddies" bugaboo - what antisocial adults who hated their childhood complain about when there's nothing else handy, and use to stereotype a bunch of children who're often in the same shoes they were in as kids.
If kids can't spell, it's not the internet's fault. The internet is where kids basically end up practicing their writing, and if they're not given proper fundamentals then they won't recognize the difference between the no-wasted-keystroke approach of SMS/IMs and the wildly entertaining world of professional-level literacy (which is a whole different story - I've seen some pretty awful samples of literacy amongst "business professionals").
This principle has been suggested several times so far, but a few roaming trolls seem to have missed this insight, and carry on flailing away. Then they get modded up funny, and the idea propogates.
I'm (not) sorry, but it strikes me as incredibly arrogant and history-repeated for a bunch of 30-something "those damn kids these days!" geeks to be chastising teenagers for their terrible and foolish Netspeak.
You don't have to use it. You don't have to accomodate people who do. You also have NOT been nominated to police the thoughts and minds of America's youth, and thank heavens you haven't, because I fear the results.
Let me clue some of you old farts into something: these are kids. Kids do not give a rat's ass about being professional. How long ago was it that you were a kid, scoffing at how those silly suits thought they could force you to be something you didn't want to be? One way or another, either you or those suits learned the truth, and life carried on. These kids will too.
Until you understand this point, please refrain from addressing this bugbear you call Netspeak like it's anything more than another display of youthful rebelliousness. Most of you probably spelled as poorly as these kids do now, you just didn't have or use a place like IRC or AIM to put your own incapacity under the microscope, or if you did, nobody ever called you on it either.
(Background: I'm a 25 year old software engineer who's been using the internet as a social and creative outlet for 12 years. I play video games and I often use netspeak as an enjoyable and exaggerated self-parody. Yet I still seem perfectly capable of writing in complete, moderately articulate sentences - I'd gladly put my literacy up against anyone else's who felt they had something to prove. I'm not terribly impressed with kids who use netspeak as a means to communicate with me about anything serious, but I certainly don't feel impelled or called upon to level heavy-handed judgements upon their wayward youthful souls.)
It's interesting that people both complain that ISPs are too lax in what they let their users do, but when big companies come along with usage policies that restrict their customers' ability to set up things like their own mail server (read: open relay ahoy!), we gripe and start wondering if there should be a YRO post about it.
I worked support at Speakeasy Networks for a little while. Speakeasy is well-reputed for letting users do whatever they want with their connection (sans the obviously illegal/unsavory) and you would not believe how many people set up email servers and then leave relays wide open for anyone to utilize. Then they would get mad at Speakeasy for shutting them down until the relay was closed.
Yes, but how much has this actually affected the gaming industry's profit, sales, and growth?
I'm mostly interested in the third aspect. Up until noise was being made about violent video games, there really was nothing that even pretended to stem the growth of the industry, and it seemed to be growing faster every year as PCs and the internet became more and more commonplace, and as consoles became more available (console games have cost approximately $40-50 each since the mid-1980s, as I recall).
If this 'video games are the devil!' movement - which seems awfully late, by the way, since they've pretty much proliferated as far as they possibly can - is actually affecting video game sales significantly, which I'm not entirely sure it is, then is it affecting it negatively enough to stem the continued growth of the industry, or is it just a bump in the road?
What I don't understand is that, in spite of endless harping and railing by People With Nothing Better To Do (PWNBTD), has the gaming industry *EVER* been impacted by the complaints? Can someone provide a list of tangible side-effects of all of this criticism? It seems like the gaming industry just keeps chugging along.
It's also interesting to note that these statements made by Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, come with no knowledge of what Firefox has to offer as he admits not even installing or using Firefox.
Not.. really..
He probably doesn't have time to. He probably relies on analysts and employees to give him a summary of whether or not there are differing features. This is, dare I say, common?
I mean, sure, it's not the MOST informed he could be, but in the end this is just another ridiculous inflammatory anti-MS quote that's probably just going to slip under people's "common sense" radar - and it will do so for precisely the same thing most people hate MS for: blind arrogance towards its competition.
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I was at a presentation NVidia held here in San Francisco where they talked about it, and my vague understanding (they mentioned the PS3 mostly just to keep the crowd whipped up) was that the PS3 card was based on the 6800 model, though it would still support stuff like Shader Model 3.0, and possibly their High Dynamic Range rendering, too.
Purists will never be happy, I guess. You don't need a GM giving you cookies to make it a "true" rpg. Especially when all quests are instanced, you can progress through things in your own manner, interjecting additional content as you see fit. You are still forced at some point to come back to the game design, but that's the tradeoff of a game that you, and everyone like you, can play with all of your friends.
This reply is probably too late, but attempting to justify bit torrents by saying that they helped viewership is very short-sighted.
Use of bit torrents is an early-adopter practice right now. It is primarily in use by opinion leaders, and so these people have a lot of influence. This mechanism won't exist when more and more people adopt Bit Torrent as a means to get their software.
I recommend waiting a day to transfer your character over. It's totally logjammed at the moment.
Your latency is higher, your last-mile service is less reliable, and your throughput is due to change based on your neighbors' usage of the shared bandwidth pool. The other more important issue you already touched on: The only problem are(sic) the outages
You don't even need special lenses. You can simply walk to the lookout point on the Hill and look, and because the tower is probably 1/4th the distance from you as the major buildings downtown, it simply looks bigger.
Let me put it to you this way. I played 2 and a half hours and got about 450 kills last night. My guildmates who played *all day* got that much leading up to that 2.5 hour spurt. I won't reach the top rank (and if you aren't willing to put in a lot of time, you're not going to reach the top rank in PvE either - by the time you get through Molten Core, all 6-8 hours that'll take you if you don't wipe once - Blackwing Lair will be in, and other raid instances will start to trickle in as well. Have you been to southern Silithus? You don't even have to see it populated to gawk at how huge the place is, and presumably how hard the fights will be.
If the casual user can get the 'uber armor' its not going to be very uber is it? You suggest maybe WoW just become an FPS that you have to wait 3-4 months to fully activate?
Funny how many casual players seem to have this sense of bitterness to the players who can play more (jealous? I am. I have guildmates who play more than I work in a week, and if I could get away with it, I might too.)
By suggesting that Blizzard's honor system somehow moves to alienate the casual fanbase, you're also suggesting that they have a single track in mind, which is incorrect. There is already a set of diminishing returns on PvP honor. The first few ranks go quickly, then they slow down as you get higher. It's just like leveling. Do you know how slow? No, you probably don't - because nobody does. So why complain until its in effect - is the sky really falling, or are you just jerking that knee of yours?
Sadly, casual players ARENT WoW's strengths. Casual players tend to play for a bit, then cancel. For those that don't, that "insane 5%" generates a community and a game economy that trickles down to the casual players and eventually gives those casual players a means to raise the bar for their own characters.
Your mistake, and I use the same rhetoric you have for full ironic effect, is that you think WoW is somehow lacking in early/mid-level content. It's not. It's really, truly, not. What it IS lacking is high-end content. Right now guilds can clear out the entire gamut of high-end content (sans Ragnaros himself) in 2 days, and probably less if they want to spend the whole day doing it. They can't go back and do it the next day, though, they have to wait 2-7 days to do any of it again. There needs to be more high-end content to drive the story development. You aren't expected or obligated or even required to keep up.
If you want to enjoy being a casual player, you can continue to do so at no additional cost or risk to yourself. Just because the hardcore players are out there having fun doesn't mean you suddenly aren't. You're worried the hardcore players will get all this special PvP gear you can't get? They probably already have PvE gear you can't get too, so why the sudden issue?
If you want rewards based off of pure skill, then play FPS games. If you don't want people being rewarded for the time they spend developing their character WHY ARE YOU PLAYING AN RPG?
It's not yours, or anyone else's, position to judge what someone wants to do with their time. Do you smoke? Do you drive over the speed-limit? Do you drink at all? Do you neglect to wear sun screen on sunny days? Do you work too much? Do you avoid socializing with your co-workers because you don't like people? Are you REALLY that prepared to tell people that they're doing something unhealthy with their lives? Please, the 'playing too many video games is BAD' argument is trite and over-played, and nobody's been able to come up with a good reason why.
Multi-player video games are social (not anti-social behavior). They're not as 'social' as going to a bar with your friends, but then again you don't get a DUI for running too fast to the bathroom to take a bio break between pulls in Molten Core.
Multi-player (competitive) video games inspire creativity and critical thinking (they do not rot your brain). You aren't going to beat the other guy doing the same damn thing every time. Better learn how to do things differently, or you're going to lose again.
Multi-player video games inspire teamwork (not anti-social behavior). You can't beat another team in Counter-strike all by yourself, every round. You can't capture the flag w/o teammates playing defense (or teammates getting the flag, should you be a flag d type). You can't do it by yourself, so you better learn how to play nice.
Multi-player video games do NOT encourage physical activity. Correct. Then again, neither does watching foreign films, wine tasting, cooking, reading books, blogging, or any number of other hobbies that nobody would dare question as 'unhealthy' (except maybe blogging, for psychological reasons). There are a lot of physical hobbies that don't encourage half of the skillsets that video games do, too, but nobody seems to worry too much if someone spends all their free time working on their car, for example.
There's also the notion that playing video games somehow denies you the ability to go hiking, do 30 minutes of cardio a day, undertake yoga/pilates/tae bo/kick-boxing, etc. I don't know where it came from. Several of the 'pro gamers' in the US make a point of getting physical exercise, even though they barely make enough to pay any bills, often have to work another job, etc.
How in the hell do I get modded as a troll? Who are these mods? I'm a friendly guy! I'm a people person! What's wrong with you people!?!?
Of course. Any bug is a problem. The question is how much of a problem, and can it actually be attributed to the aggressive patching schedule, or in this case, will the aggressive patching schedule exacerbate the problem?
One man's impatience is another man's low tolerance for pointless repetition.
Issue 1) seems like a hardware/network related issue that could be highly exclusive to specific configurations - though those configurations themselves may not be erroneous, which would make it even harder to find.
Issue 2) was attributed to 3rd party software. Tricky, but not something any overworked QA department is likely to have a lot of time to troubleshoot variants of.
Issue 3) is one I've noticed several times, but as a priest I hardly ever rez people's pets - the hunters have their own means to do that, and I'm usually low on mana anyway.
Basically, none of these issues seem like something you shouldn't expect to see in an early series of game patches.
There wasn't an underlying change in the work ethic at Blizzard. What changed was that they set deadlines in a different way, such that instead of trying to lump every finished product into one large patch, they began doing rolling patches. This just means if a project isn't done in time for a patch, it's not in until the next one.
Lastly, if their QA department doesn't have enough time to test things, that's a failure of their project management, not of their different schedule. Utilizing a short-term schedule with deliverables that scale down from the original schedule shouldn't result in a dramatic increase in bugginess (though it will result in some, invariably). If it does, this is something that needs to be addressed by proper allocation of time to their QA department (try not to laugh - I work in QA, I know how rarely this happens).
This is a pretty big chance of pace for Blizzard. It took 90 days for their first content patch to come out - they had originally promised new content every month.
Additionally, up until now, WoW's PvP system was seen as largely pointless. This provides tangible benefits (and not just OMG POINTS!) to succesful PvP ventures. It should be exciting. Anyone who plays now can test this patch out a bit by copying a character over to the (grossly over-populated) test server. The disadvantage, as I stated, is that there are way too many people on it, and can get very laggy if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. This isn't a major concern for me, though, because the server population is immense compared to an average server, and they've already made another sub-patch to improve performance, with noticable improvement. There's still a LOT of room for more improvement. For example, player corpses should disappear after a certain point, or you should have the ability to not display them. Without that ability, you can run across a field that is just littered with corpses of dead players, and while it's a visceral joy to look at, it's also a huge network performance hit.
I don't disagree that education standards are lower, but I don't think Netspeak is entirely an indicator, either. The people on the internet are a lot younger than anyone who has spoken in this thread can genuinely conceive of. People often tease each other online, rather than doing it in school. What? I grew up using the internet as a place to get away from the people I couldn't stand, and most of that was less than a decade ago.
Kids are on the internet, and the compulsion for reading comprehension is right there, in your face. I doubt most kids even looked at the newspaper before their mid/early-teens in my generation (sans the Sports section), and now kids have easy and ready access to everything from rotten.com and free porn (hooray!) to the BBC and Al-Jazeera.
Is the level of expected reading comprehension being ramped up to meet this new demand? It sure doesn't seem like it. That's the problem. Netspeak? Who cares - let kids do what they want with the lifestyle and culture they have access to.
Okay, so I started two paragraphs with "the point is". The truth is (hah) that there were many points to make, and the contradictory nature of the whole issue makes me fighting mad. Basically, we have a demographic whose majority, as self-professed geeks, were often mocked and misunderstood as children because they were strange, and people thought they "just didn't get it". This throbbing mass of geekhood then proceeds to rail on today's youth because it is doing something strange, and they "just don't get it".
Is it as big a deal in the context of this article as I make it out to be? Probably not; but it is indicative of the sometimes duplicitous nature of the hallowed and sacred geek archetype.
Unfortunately, "we" are *not* talking about telling kids how to write correctly. Most of "us" are sitting here criticizing and villifying "netspeak".
.. I hear it was pretty common when our parents were kids too.
I have no judgement whatsoever on your quality as a father, but I have a childhood of my own to reflect upon, and think "Damn, how often did people like myself sit there as a child, lamenting that adults thought I was stupid because I didn't <dress|act|talk|enjoy music|whatever> like an adult?" This was a pretty common experience in our generation, and, well
The point is, and I stand by how vehemently I believe this, it's not l337sp33k, the tendency to abbreviate every common phrase into an acronym (omghi2u!), or any other social virus creeping through the minds of children that makes a child stupid. It's poor education, poor parenting, and a lack of reinforcement that makes them stupid. If you're on the same page as me here, we don't have much to talk about.
The point is that leet-speak is just a way of expression that is ultimately formed by the media it is most commonly used on. It is nothing more.
If you haven't read through the pages of discussion here yet, maybe you should - this otherwise innocuous form of communication is being subtly turned into everything from the cause of youth illiteracy to the next "script kiddies" bugaboo - what antisocial adults who hated their childhood complain about when there's nothing else handy, and use to stereotype a bunch of children who're often in the same shoes they were in as kids.
If kids can't spell, it's not the internet's fault. The internet is where kids basically end up practicing their writing, and if they're not given proper fundamentals then they won't recognize the difference between the no-wasted-keystroke approach of SMS/IMs and the wildly entertaining world of professional-level literacy (which is a whole different story - I've seen some pretty awful samples of literacy amongst "business professionals").
This principle has been suggested several times so far, but a few roaming trolls seem to have missed this insight, and carry on flailing away. Then they get modded up funny, and the idea propogates.
I agree 100%, but I believe the criticism lies largely on the shoulders of educators and the system they are (perhaps unwilling) advocates of.
I wonder if that'll get me modded as Flamebait, too.
I'm (not) sorry, but it strikes me as incredibly arrogant and history-repeated for a bunch of 30-something "those damn kids these days!" geeks to be chastising teenagers for their terrible and foolish Netspeak.
You don't have to use it. You don't have to accomodate people who do. You also have NOT been nominated to police the thoughts and minds of America's youth, and thank heavens you haven't, because I fear the results.
Let me clue some of you old farts into something: these are kids. Kids do not give a rat's ass about being professional. How long ago was it that you were a kid, scoffing at how those silly suits thought they could force you to be something you didn't want to be? One way or another, either you or those suits learned the truth, and life carried on. These kids will too.
Until you understand this point, please refrain from addressing this bugbear you call Netspeak like it's anything more than another display of youthful rebelliousness. Most of you probably spelled as poorly as these kids do now, you just didn't have or use a place like IRC or AIM to put your own incapacity under the microscope, or if you did, nobody ever called you on it either.
(Background: I'm a 25 year old software engineer who's been using the internet as a social and creative outlet for 12 years. I play video games and I often use netspeak as an enjoyable and exaggerated self-parody. Yet I still seem perfectly capable of writing in complete, moderately articulate sentences - I'd gladly put my literacy up against anyone else's who felt they had something to prove. I'm not terribly impressed with kids who use netspeak as a means to communicate with me about anything serious, but I certainly don't feel impelled or called upon to level heavy-handed judgements upon their wayward youthful souls.)
It's interesting that people both complain that ISPs are too lax in what they let their users do, but when big companies come along with usage policies that restrict their customers' ability to set up things like their own mail server (read: open relay ahoy!), we gripe and start wondering if there should be a YRO post about it.
I worked support at Speakeasy Networks for a little while. Speakeasy is well-reputed for letting users do whatever they want with their connection (sans the obviously illegal/unsavory) and you would not believe how many people set up email servers and then leave relays wide open for anyone to utilize. Then they would get mad at Speakeasy for shutting them down until the relay was closed.
From what I can recall the plot went something like "Demons. Bad. Kill them all."...
And what, exactly, is wrong with that, sir?
Irony abounds, in that you got modded +5 Funny, when it should be +5 Absolutely Correct.
Yes, but how much has this actually affected the gaming industry's profit, sales, and growth?
I'm mostly interested in the third aspect. Up until noise was being made about violent video games, there really was nothing that even pretended to stem the growth of the industry, and it seemed to be growing faster every year as PCs and the internet became more and more commonplace, and as consoles became more available (console games have cost approximately $40-50 each since the mid-1980s, as I recall).
If this 'video games are the devil!' movement - which seems awfully late, by the way, since they've pretty much proliferated as far as they possibly can - is actually affecting video game sales significantly, which I'm not entirely sure it is, then is it affecting it negatively enough to stem the continued growth of the industry, or is it just a bump in the road?
What I don't understand is that, in spite of endless harping and railing by People With Nothing Better To Do (PWNBTD), has the gaming industry *EVER* been impacted by the complaints? Can someone provide a list of tangible side-effects of all of this criticism? It seems like the gaming industry just keeps chugging along.
It's also interesting to note that these statements made by Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia's managing director, come with no knowledge of what Firefox has to offer as he admits not even installing or using Firefox.
Not.. really..
He probably doesn't have time to. He probably relies on analysts and employees to give him a summary of whether or not there are differing features. This is, dare I say, common?
I mean, sure, it's not the MOST informed he could be, but in the end this is just another ridiculous inflammatory anti-MS quote that's probably just going to slip under people's "common sense" radar - and it will do so for precisely the same thing most people hate MS for: blind arrogance towards its competition.