Actually a long time prior to this--I wasn't really all that clued in; I just had a vague suspicion that magazine reviews were skewed somewhat. And then a few months ago I received my copy of PC Gamer that had Valve's "The Orange Box" plastered on the front cover with an exclusive review inside. I'd been anticipating this title for a while and I pretty much knew it was going to be pretty good based on Valve's track record. I got around to reading the review a few days later and figured that if it was already in a printed magazine then the game surely must be out on the store shelves. I decided I would go out later that day and buy the box. This was October 8th.
Guess what! When I went into the store looking for the game, I learned it wasn't due out yet for another couple of days! With a slow sinking feeling I realized that there was no way a magazine that is planned months in advance would be able to review a retail copy of a game when the game's ship date is later than the magazine's. Had I known the ship date I probably would have spotted the disparity right away, but alas-- I knew it was some time in October and that was all. Hmmph. Anyway, in my mind, review = available for purchase while preview = early build not available to public. Since the game shipped on the 10th of October and I got my magazine on the 6th, the mag was probably finalized at least ten days earlier, say September 26. That "review" was written at least two whole weeks before the game was available for purchase, and I'm a damned sight sure that Best Buy hadn't been sitting on it since the end of September.
Sure, maybe PCG did get a pre-shipped retail copy reserved exclusively for the print media, and maybe it was all above-board in that respect, and thirdly yes I understand that "the big scoop" is what makes or breaks any periodical, especially those trying stupidly enough to compete with electronic media. But. This was just blatant, and I'm sure it wasn't the first time and won't be the last time something like this goes down...
Luckily for everyone involved, the game (or games I guess) turned out to be a smash success (and I have really grown attached to my weighted companion cube), otherwise we probably would have heard some negative press about this a while ago. Valve was lucky in that they knew that they were sitting on solid gold, and PC Gamer was lucky that they also knew this when they accepted Valve's big pile of cash for the review and magazine cover. This may all be obvious in retrospect, but I guess my cynicism towards "the man" is still in the growing stages (dangit. I've cultivated it for a number of years now, how didn't I spot this?) I'm walking away from this whole experience feeling kind of duped and disheartened and I don't think I'll be renewing my PC Gamer subscription again. Or GFW. Or MaxPC. Or, now, buying anything produced by Ziff Davis.
Growing up sucks. Disillusionment sucks. Rampant and obvious greed sucks. I guess I'm starting to fall in the demographic that has learned that all advertizing is crap so maybe, hopefully I'll be able to spot it more easily in the future when it masquerades as legitimate journalism. Time to tune my filters I guess; all the while it will be interesting to watch how this unfolds--I'm just sad to finally realize that I've been not only blind to it but also a part of it for so long.
why today's Sesame Street just doesn't seem to be quite the show I remembered growing up. I mean, I can fully understand why those old Loony Tunes cartoons from the 40's and 50's aren't shown anymore, but this was a freaking kid's show! Also, isn't it about time for the people who grew up watching Sesame Street to be assuming rolls of power in our society? I mean, who grows up and decides that all those happy memories aren't appropriate for today's youth? Someone who didn't like the show, that's who.
Anyway, here's a quick fix if you need it: the Yip Yip aliens. I'm guessing these guys probably don't make the grade anymore either...
but when I'm VPN'd with Outlook over my Aircard to my home office, I'd like to be able to shut the lid and have it suspend immediately. And then when I open the lid again, it'd be nice if it auto-reconnected behind the scenes, or maybe gave me a little popup asking me if I want to do that. This would negate the hallways full of people rushing about with their laptops cracked open. Nothing frustrates me more with my laptop at work then the following scenario:
Office buddy: Hey, let's go chat in a conference room. Me: Ok. Hold on while I disconnect from VPN...done. Now let me disconnect from Verizon...done. Cancel Outlook's reconnecting attempts, close Outlook, close the lid, Ok I'm ready to go..hey where'd everybody go?
That's about my only gripe with my Thinkpad, and yeah it's pretty small but when you have to do it five or six times a day it adds up; otherwise I like it a lot. Meh, I guess that's mostly a software thing come to think of it, but still.
those rentable carts you see at the mall or the airport. It's an interesting idea but I think this will go the way of the Seguay... It's a neat idea in theory and on paper (and it works with the aforementioned carts) but IMHO people are going to reject such contrivances on a mass scale in our individualistic society. As I said, IMHO mind you, I'm not about to give up the option of picking up my girl/kid with my throaty V-8 coupe at the airport/bar/school/work/etc over some envirocentric/socialist's wet dream of public/personal transport. I can see this in an amusement park ride ala Ebcot center maybe, but as an every-day contrivance? Nah, sorry, pass.
Good points, all, and thanks for the honest reply. I have to tell you though that while most of the time I do actually shut down the torrents after I get them (Usual Daily show/Colbert Report torrents have plenty of seeds), I let one for Top Gear upload until I had seeded more than I had downloaded. I tend to do that if the file is important to me and if there aren't that many seeders (like, less than 100) so in that respect I must say that my upload rate was pretty constant. And while I did not seed 1:1 for the entire Ubuntu d/l, I did seed at least 1/2 of it and like I said before, there were plenty of other seeds enough that I did not feel the slightest bit guilty cutting my connection.
Perhaps I'll take snapshots the next time I d/l then seed content, because I still haven't seen any degrading of my connection... Of course, YMMV and also it does depend on what one chooses to d/l...
Jeez, just how hardcore are you guys? I tend to d/l about 8 half-hour tv shows per week. Let's see, that's roughly 1.4gb. Just last week I d/l three game betas/demos, 1.4gb, 1.3gb, and 800mb. I'm up to about 5gb now in one week. And all throughout, I watched maybe a couple dozen tv shows courtesy of nbc.com, abc.com, and cbs.com but I don't know how much bandwidth that used. Oh, and the latest Ubuntu, though I haven't installed it yet. Plus all my teamspeak, ventrillo, and game traffic, plus my vonage, which the wife is on for several hours every other night. I'm guessing I topped out at about 6gb downloaded (maybe 1gb uploaded) just last week. Granted it was a banner week, but I bet I average about 1-3gb downloaded per week, with about half of that coming via BT.
And yet! My service rocks?! I'm still waiting for the first shoe to drop but the couple of times I've had to call Comcast, my problem has been resolved to my satisfaction. My BT download speeds haven't really changed from what they were a year ago and I haven't noticed my ping go up or down in my favorite game servers.
What are you guys doing different from me that are experiencing problems so I can maybe avoid the same? You know, like lessons learned?
I don't care if this is modded off topic, I'd like to know, seriously.
is traveling abroad, and I told her that FEMA had staged a press conference, with all the gory details, over a Skype chat. She thought I was joking... but it didn't take as much to convince her as I thought it would, and that... that is what happens when cynicism=real life. What. The. Fuck.
She's in Shanghai right now giving company training, getting disrespect from her students because she's 5'4", blond, and female (most of all); and there's nothing she can do about it because the double standard nowadays is that we as Americans MUST respect everyone else's culture but they are allowed to do fuck all to us in their homeland and in ours and we must respect that lest they perceive insult... When our own government makes a mockery of itself in full view of it's constituents then how are we any different from any hard-line, third-world, dictator state?
Wow that went south in a hurry. Sorry for that. Fema sucks.
I actually hate to say this for a superstitious fear that it will come back to bite me in the ass... but I've had nothing but good experiences with Comcast. I'm lucky because they are the only game in my town besides DSL. Anyhow, I've never experienced an outage in the nearly two years I've had them, and they recently sent us a flier telling us about channel changes and that we would be not receiving a couple of channels that we currently get (due to the need to provide more bandwidth to hi-def channels or something). Get this, they updated our cable box and gave us $20 off for a year! Then next year the bill only goes up $1 over our current plan. All it took was a little phone wrangling and they were very understanding and helpful.
The only thing I don't get from them is phone service because Vonage is still cheaper. Hopefully it stays that way but I fear for Vonage's future.
In any case, I haven't noticed any real slowdown in my BT traffic but I'm not a really heavy user. I download about 8-10 hours worth of TV shows per week and the odd distro now and then. I also find that it helps to know which seeds to pick--yes that might be a no-brainer to us but not necessarily to the average Joe Schmoe who reads about this in the newspaper.
production costs? I'm not sure that they couldn't have been in the multi-million dollar range. Anybody have that data so we actually have something to compare the profits to? Also, how much net profit does your average top-40 album produce? These would be a lot more useful than some random dollar ammount.
Doesn't it depend on the definition of "single market"? For example, Clearchannel owns radio stations all over the country. Would a single market be defined as the number of stations they own in:
a) a specific city or county or region or b) the number of stations of a specific genre or c) the number of stations of a specific genre in a specific area?
How are the media market sectors defined? In addition to those categories I mentioned above, you also have ethno-centric programming and demographics to contend with. This is akin to opening pandora's box imho.
This also worries me: "We should first address the appalling lack of ownership of media outlets by women and people of color." Does this mean that congress will be asked to pass affirmative action laws against media corporations? That's just silly, and also might be an ominous inroad towards state-controlled media. *shudder*
What motives prompted this, i.e.: Is Kevin Martin in somebody's pocket, or does he have a personal stake in it? Why else propose something so ludicrous? I'm all for ensuring against monopolies but isn't it a little too late and/or drastic to propose something like this?
You seem to be in the same boat that I am; I give the latest release a go every so often just to check out the state of things, and then go back to what works specifically for me when it gets too tedious or too frustrating to get a simple thing to work. I used Edgy Eft a lot before slowly returning back to the dark side over the period of a month after trying futilely to get Eve Online to work under Wine, and also the other game I was hot for at the time, BF 2142 wouldn't work at all. So I figured I'd let it go for then. (I understand EO is working on a Linux distro, and that more success has been made with Wine since then.)
You have to admit though, every time a new distro/kernel is released, even if they only get incrementally better, there is progress being made. I'd point at the "upgrade" from WinXP as an example of the alternative *cough cough*. So give it some time, and maybe a few iterations down the road and your card will be supported from the get-go with no compiling needed. And hey you still can't beat the price.
I actually agree with you, and also I'm impressed that they were able to get the rockets to light off in sync. Just from watching the Mythbusters try to launch multi-rocket projectiles you can see how hard it is for amateurs to do that sort of thing. I hope they build another.
Another thought occurred to me as well--that this was an expected outcome right from the start.
I promise I'll RTFA, but the first thought that came to mind was "Oh boy! Modern medicine can ease my pain... with FLAMING HOT NUCLEAR CODE RED WING SAUCE" followed by "GOOD LORD I'M NEVER SHITTING AGAIN."
Anyhow I just read the review in the newest CPU and they gave it what could best be described as a "meh". Give it a few more iterations and then we might have a respectable competitor to the current top-shelf Nvidia offering, but of course by then there will be something better out...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually a long time prior to this--I wasn't really all that clued in; I just had a vague suspicion that magazine reviews were skewed somewhat. And then a few months ago I received my copy of PC Gamer that had Valve's "The Orange Box" plastered on the front cover with an exclusive review inside. I'd been anticipating this title for a while and I pretty much knew it was going to be pretty good based on Valve's track record. I got around to reading the review a few days later and figured that if it was already in a printed magazine then the game surely must be out on the store shelves. I decided I would go out later that day and buy the box. This was October 8th.
Guess what! When I went into the store looking for the game, I learned it wasn't due out yet for another couple of days! With a slow sinking feeling I realized that there was no way a magazine that is planned months in advance would be able to review a retail copy of a game when the game's ship date is later than the magazine's. Had I known the ship date I probably would have spotted the disparity right away, but alas-- I knew it was some time in October and that was all. Hmmph. Anyway, in my mind, review = available for purchase while preview = early build not available to public. Since the game shipped on the 10th of October and I got my magazine on the 6th, the mag was probably finalized at least ten days earlier, say September 26. That "review" was written at least two whole weeks before the game was available for purchase, and I'm a damned sight sure that Best Buy hadn't been sitting on it since the end of September.
Sure, maybe PCG did get a pre-shipped retail copy reserved exclusively for the print media, and maybe it was all above-board in that respect, and thirdly yes I understand that "the big scoop" is what makes or breaks any periodical, especially those trying stupidly enough to compete with electronic media. But. This was just blatant, and I'm sure it wasn't the first time and won't be the last time something like this goes down...
Luckily for everyone involved, the game (or games I guess) turned out to be a smash success (and I have really grown attached to my weighted companion cube), otherwise we probably would have heard some negative press about this a while ago. Valve was lucky in that they knew that they were sitting on solid gold, and PC Gamer was lucky that they also knew this when they accepted Valve's big pile of cash for the review and magazine cover. This may all be obvious in retrospect, but I guess my cynicism towards "the man" is still in the growing stages (dangit. I've cultivated it for a number of years now, how didn't I spot this?) I'm walking away from this whole experience feeling kind of duped and disheartened and I don't think I'll be renewing my PC Gamer subscription again. Or GFW. Or MaxPC. Or, now, buying anything produced by Ziff Davis.
Growing up sucks. Disillusionment sucks. Rampant and obvious greed sucks. I guess I'm starting to fall in the demographic that has learned that all advertizing is crap so maybe, hopefully I'll be able to spot it more easily in the future when it masquerades as legitimate journalism. Time to tune my filters I guess; all the while it will be interesting to watch how this unfolds--I'm just sad to finally realize that I've been not only blind to it but also a part of it for so long.
Cheers~
the executive branch of our government for some reason...
Yup, mod me down for that one, I deserve it.
why today's Sesame Street just doesn't seem to be quite the show I remembered growing up. I mean, I can fully understand why those old Loony Tunes cartoons from the 40's and 50's aren't shown anymore, but this was a freaking kid's show! Also, isn't it about time for the people who grew up watching Sesame Street to be assuming rolls of power in our society? I mean, who grows up and decides that all those happy memories aren't appropriate for today's youth? Someone who didn't like the show, that's who.
Anyway, here's a quick fix if you need it: the Yip Yip aliens. I'm guessing these guys probably don't make the grade anymore either...
but when I'm VPN'd with Outlook over my Aircard to my home office, I'd like to be able to shut the lid and have it suspend immediately. And then when I open the lid again, it'd be nice if it auto-reconnected behind the scenes, or maybe gave me a little popup asking me if I want to do that. This would negate the hallways full of people rushing about with their laptops cracked open. Nothing frustrates me more with my laptop at work then the following scenario:
Office buddy: Hey, let's go chat in a conference room.
Me: Ok. Hold on while I disconnect from VPN...done. Now let me disconnect from Verizon...done. Cancel Outlook's reconnecting attempts, close Outlook, close the lid, Ok I'm ready to go..hey where'd everybody go?
That's about my only gripe with my Thinkpad, and yeah it's pretty small but when you have to do it five or six times a day it adds up; otherwise I like it a lot. Meh, I guess that's mostly a software thing come to think of it, but still.
those rentable carts you see at the mall or the airport. It's an interesting idea but I think this will go the way of the Seguay... It's a neat idea in theory and on paper (and it works with the aforementioned carts) but IMHO people are going to reject such contrivances on a mass scale in our individualistic society. As I said, IMHO mind you, I'm not about to give up the option of picking up my girl/kid with my throaty V-8 coupe at the airport/bar/school/work/etc over some envirocentric/socialist's wet dream of public/personal transport. I can see this in an amusement park ride ala Ebcot center maybe, but as an every-day contrivance? Nah, sorry, pass.
Good points, all, and thanks for the honest reply. I have to tell you though that while most of the time I do actually shut down the torrents after I get them (Usual Daily show/Colbert Report torrents have plenty of seeds), I let one for Top Gear upload until I had seeded more than I had downloaded. I tend to do that if the file is important to me and if there aren't that many seeders (like, less than 100) so in that respect I must say that my upload rate was pretty constant. And while I did not seed 1:1 for the entire Ubuntu d/l, I did seed at least 1/2 of it and like I said before, there were plenty of other seeds enough that I did not feel the slightest bit guilty cutting my connection.
Perhaps I'll take snapshots the next time I d/l then seed content, because I still haven't seen any degrading of my connection... Of course, YMMV and also it does depend on what one chooses to d/l...
Cheers~
Jeez, just how hardcore are you guys? I tend to d/l about 8 half-hour tv shows per week. Let's see, that's roughly 1.4gb. Just last week I d/l three game betas/demos, 1.4gb, 1.3gb, and 800mb. I'm up to about 5gb now in one week. And all throughout, I watched maybe a couple dozen tv shows courtesy of nbc.com, abc.com, and cbs.com but I don't know how much bandwidth that used. Oh, and the latest Ubuntu, though I haven't installed it yet. Plus all my teamspeak, ventrillo, and game traffic, plus my vonage, which the wife is on for several hours every other night. I'm guessing I topped out at about 6gb downloaded (maybe 1gb uploaded) just last week. Granted it was a banner week, but I bet I average about 1-3gb downloaded per week, with about half of that coming via BT.
And yet! My service rocks?! I'm still waiting for the first shoe to drop but the couple of times I've had to call Comcast, my problem has been resolved to my satisfaction. My BT download speeds haven't really changed from what they were a year ago and I haven't noticed my ping go up or down in my favorite game servers.
What are you guys doing different from me that are experiencing problems so I can maybe avoid the same? You know, like lessons learned?
I don't care if this is modded off topic, I'd like to know, seriously.
Unfortunately, "breaking the law" seems to be more subjective than objective these days, especially when it comes to the government. Just sayin.
I don't think the fact that we have nukes makes it any better, and nor should it... unless we were willing to use them on ourselves. ...
Shush...
is traveling abroad, and I told her that FEMA had staged a press conference, with all the gory details, over a Skype chat. She thought I was joking... but it didn't take as much to convince her as I thought it would, and that... that is what happens when cynicism=real life. What. The. Fuck.
She's in Shanghai right now giving company training, getting disrespect from her students because she's 5'4", blond, and female (most of all); and there's nothing she can do about it because the double standard nowadays is that we as Americans MUST respect everyone else's culture but they are allowed to do fuck all to us in their homeland and in ours and we must respect that lest they perceive insult... When our own government makes a mockery of itself in full view of it's constituents then how are we any different from any hard-line, third-world, dictator state?
Wow that went south in a hurry. Sorry for that. Fema sucks.
Vector graphics are so 1980's... oh wait
Then call me a happy native. :)
I actually hate to say this for a superstitious fear that it will come back to bite me in the ass... but I've had nothing but good experiences with Comcast. I'm lucky because they are the only game in my town besides DSL. Anyhow, I've never experienced an outage in the nearly two years I've had them, and they recently sent us a flier telling us about channel changes and that we would be not receiving a couple of channels that we currently get (due to the need to provide more bandwidth to hi-def channels or something). Get this, they updated our cable box and gave us $20 off for a year! Then next year the bill only goes up $1 over our current plan. All it took was a little phone wrangling and they were very understanding and helpful.
The only thing I don't get from them is phone service because Vonage is still cheaper. Hopefully it stays that way but I fear for Vonage's future.
In any case, I haven't noticed any real slowdown in my BT traffic but I'm not a really heavy user. I download about 8-10 hours worth of TV shows per week and the odd distro now and then. I also find that it helps to know which seeds to pick--yes that might be a no-brainer to us but not necessarily to the average Joe Schmoe who reads about this in the newspaper.
I'll second this.
It's depressing for my entire family, that's who. We're all on Vonage. :(
production costs? I'm not sure that they couldn't have been in the multi-million dollar range. Anybody have that data so we actually have something to compare the profits to? Also, how much net profit does your average top-40 album produce? These would be a lot more useful than some random dollar ammount.
Doesn't it depend on the definition of "single market"? For example, Clearchannel owns radio stations all over the country. Would a single market be defined as the number of stations they own in:
a) a specific city or county or region or
b) the number of stations of a specific genre or
c) the number of stations of a specific genre in a specific area?
How are the media market sectors defined? In addition to those categories I mentioned above, you also have ethno-centric programming and demographics to contend with. This is akin to opening pandora's box imho.
This also worries me: "We should first address the appalling lack of ownership of media outlets by women and people of color." Does this mean that congress will be asked to pass affirmative action laws against media corporations? That's just silly, and also might be an ominous inroad towards state-controlled media. *shudder*
What motives prompted this, i.e.: Is Kevin Martin in somebody's pocket, or does he have a personal stake in it? Why else propose something so ludicrous? I'm all for ensuring against monopolies but isn't it a little too late and/or drastic to propose something like this?
You seem to be in the same boat that I am; I give the latest release a go every so often just to check out the state of things, and then go back to what works specifically for me when it gets too tedious or too frustrating to get a simple thing to work. I used Edgy Eft a lot before slowly returning back to the dark side over the period of a month after trying futilely to get Eve Online to work under Wine, and also the other game I was hot for at the time, BF 2142 wouldn't work at all. So I figured I'd let it go for then. (I understand EO is working on a Linux distro, and that more success has been made with Wine since then.)
You have to admit though, every time a new distro/kernel is released, even if they only get incrementally better, there is progress being made. I'd point at the "upgrade" from WinXP as an example of the alternative *cough cough*. So give it some time, and maybe a few iterations down the road and your card will be supported from the get-go with no compiling needed. And hey you still can't beat the price.
Just sayin'.
I wonder if they are planning on taking a closer look at the backside. Look it up, seriously.
I actually agree with you, and also I'm impressed that they were able to get the rockets to light off in sync. Just from watching the Mythbusters try to launch multi-rocket projectiles you can see how hard it is for amateurs to do that sort of thing. I hope they build another.
Another thought occurred to me as well--that this was an expected outcome right from the start.
What's this "digg" you speak of?
Ignore the goatse.cz. It's not there, honest.
when games become as fun as they are pretty to look at. Till then I'll be off playing Defcon and Peggle.
I promise I'll RTFA, but the first thought that came to mind was "Oh boy! Modern medicine can ease my pain... with FLAMING HOT NUCLEAR CODE RED WING SAUCE" followed by "GOOD LORD I'M NEVER SHITTING AGAIN."
...just pokin' fun atcha shiny :)
Anyhow I just read the review in the newest CPU and they gave it what could best be described as a "meh". Give it a few more iterations and then we might have a respectable competitor to the current top-shelf Nvidia offering, but of course by then there will be something better out...