The games are too expensive... this one requires faith. If the price is that high due to piracy, then we should see the price of pirate free games come down.
Faith ? Anyone who still has faith in the game industry is either young or naive. It is a business, they charge whatever the market will bear. The only reason some games are sold at a lower price point, is because they would NOT sell at the higher price.
Portal is great fun, but it's damned short, buggy and looks dated. If they were charging $60, it wouldn't sell nearly as much. Sure, a handful of do-gooders would snap it up and blog about it, but the rest of us would rather spend the same money on a product that offers more hours of entertainment. Once you beat Portal, it's beat. You can play the challenge levels, but even those will only tide you over for another day or two, and then you're bored again.
I frankly don't think DRM does much good for the game industry. It does a lot of "good" for the DRM industry, but that's about it. Everything of value gets cracked. Even Mass Effect was blown wide open within a week, despite the modern copy protection. From my point of view as a small-time developer, Bioware wasted a ton of money on SecuROM, a product that failed within a week and probably didn't net them many sales.
The thing is, it's a freakin' game. It's not the cure for cancer, it's not a stock market projection, it's a simple entertainment product. You can pay $60 to have it now, or wait a few days for a working crack and play it for free. If you really want the game, you'll buy it, but if you're on the fence, you'll probably save your money and wait for it to show up in alt.binaries. To most people, the money matters more than the legality issue, because it is seen as a victimless crime.
Many people I know think of piracy as an alternative to rental. They try the thing, most of the time it sucks, and they wipe it from their hard drive. A rental would have cost $5.00, but that money still doesn't go to the game developers, it goes to the rental chain. If that game gets rented every night for a whole year, the devs still get only one sale out of it, while the rental chain makes a small fortune off the developers' backs.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep the $5.00 and spend it elsewhere, than give it to some profiteering rental outfit that thrives on overpriced candy and underpaid teenagers. Save up your $5.00 bills until you can buy a good game, you'll be doing the industry more good that way.
Yep I had muted everything, it made absolutely no difference. Mind you, I can hear the same color of noise if I crank up the gains on my mixer... this is for my onboard audio (ADI1988A, I believe). The DACs pick up all sorts of garbage from the computer, very noticeable if I'm running any graphically-intensive process since the audio chip is right next to the first PCI-E slot.
That noise is the main reason why so many people are moving to outboard Firewire-hosted audio interfaces. Move the DACs outside the PC chassis, and the noise is gone, plus you can shield the hell out of a rackmount chassis when all it houses is a teeny weeny sound card.
Perhaps this has changed in the last couple of years, but the old Linksys routers I've had the displeasure of using, they liked to die on torrent traffic. I don't know the exact details, but if I tried to run torrents, the router would gradually slow down and eventually lock up within an hour or so.
I guessed it was trying to do connection tracking, filling up its tables and stupidly dying from the heavy connection load of torrent traffic. DD-WRT firmware seemed to fix this, though I certainly didn't test it much.
What gets me is I have this crappy old Pentium-90 with 32mb ram, that I've used as a NAT box for.. oh I dunno, at least 6-7 years now. It has perfect uptime, no noticeable slowdowns, and despite having a hard drive, it's been pretty resilient to power outages and my breaker-busting kilowatt workstation.
Why can't these skinless bastards (Linksys) take what I have on that dusty old PC, shove it on a cellphone-sized device with bunch of ethernet jacks, and deliver a "router" that actually works ? The technology is decades old, all you need is Linux + iptables and a simple web interface.
There's a company that sells kits, which I hope someone can name for me, built around either a P5 or ARM processor on a tiny board - kind of like the Gumstix, but the one I'm thinking of is specifically built for network appliances... they have multiple ethernet jacks and I think they even sell Linksys-router shaped enclosures for them. Anyone with iptables experience should be able to build a bulletproof NAT box into one of those kits. Perhaps the problem (for Linksys), is they couldn't build such a quality device for the cheap-ass $30 market they've dug themselves into.
Since when has any Mac software let you do what you wanted ? It goes against the philosophy of the platform. They simplify everything, leave with you a single way to do stuff, and it just so happens that one way usually works pretty well. In a sense, Macs are kind of like game consoles.
Your DVDs play well, and have been doing so for longer than the PC players - you don't need to download your DVD playing software from some idiotic Chinese software company that couldn't even write a goddamned Solitaire clone without crashing:P
Besides, there are other ways to get screen grabs from video - like using a video editor!
Yep it's ridiculous but true. For all you disbelievers, try recording "silence" on your Stereo Mix. Not so silent now, is it ?
I actually hadn't used this feature in ages, but I did a few weeks ago to rip a friend's tune on some lame-ass artist site... the MP3 download was "disabled" and the guy wasn't answering his phone, so I just recorded the streamed output from my onboard sound. Hello noise! I was seeing -48db peaks, maybe -58db average; it's almost inaudible but still not what I expected.
So just to be sure it wasn't the actual source file that was noisy, I did the same thing via my old M-Audio Audiophile 2496, using its "Monitor Mixer", and that one was perfectly clean. I would expect any card with an Envy24 chip to perform the same, as it does this virtual mixing at the digital stage, right on the chip.
There used to be a nice "virtual audio cable" freeware, but Google only turns up some $30 whoreware offering that's clogging up the index.
The no-refund policy leads to horrible products with fantastic marketing budgets. What's a scorned gamer to do, sue the company ? On what grounds ? You can't prove "lack of fun" in court.
I'm of the opinion that piracy / software theft / whatever you wanna call it, helps the good game houses and hurts the bad ones. The whole try-before-you-buy excuse is a very valid one IMHO. There's a crapload of software out there, that I would have never heard of, were it not for some illiterate little shit in Norway posting it on Usenet. Not just games but apps too... prime example: O&O Defrag. I saw it on some FTP eons ago, gave it a whirl, and have been a paying user for over eight years now. Why the *&@^ am I paying for a defrag tool ? Because I like the damned thing, that's why. Had it not been pirated, I would still be cursing at MS Defrag / Diskeeper on a daily basis.
Same thing applies to games. You mentioned Blizzard, well a long long time ago, when I was just a teenager with lots of BBS accounts, I stumbled upon the original Warcraft. I had no clue what this game was, nor did any of my friends, but it was an addictive little thing. Chop wood, mine gold, kill stuff - FUN! Warcraft 2 came out, I trotted down to EB and picked up the War2 battlechest. Then Starcraft, War3, and WoW.
Had it not been for that pirated copy of the original Warcraft, I would never have bought the 2nd and 3rd installments.
The same is true for a bunch of Lucasarts games... Day of the Tentacle, anyone ? If it weren't for those massively distributed copies of Monkey Island, I would not have been hooked, and they would have sold $250 less games to this one guy alone.
Meanwhile, when companies release shitty games, the kind that's not even worth pirating, you can be damned sure I'll never buy their stuff, and I won't bother downloading it either.
If games didn't cost $60-70 to "try", maybe they would sell more. There are very few shops that release demos anymore, and the ones that do, often pull a Hollywood on us, where the full product only adds filler with no substance. The business model needs to be redesigned from the ground up - new distribution, new (smaller) budgets, greater emphasis on gameplay... it's not so hard, just look at all the runaway hits of recent years like Portal or Sam & Max - inexpensive to make and tons of fun.
Blizzard has been "le suck" since WoW came out. The MMO business model has changed them, for the worse. Merging with Activision is really just one last nail in the coffin.
The only thing I can think of, that would be even worse than this merger, is for Valve to sell out to EA.
The day that happens, I'll sell my graphics card and go back to Minesweeper. The moment a small, agile game house grows too big (or sells out), it loses all artistic control and starts producing formulaic garbage. There's no avoiding it, that's the nature of capitalism.
Yep you nailed it. The gas prices we're seeing have less to do with scarcity, and more to do with a captive market - well, that and the fact that the majority of oil producing countries are literally overrun by the OPEC cartels, which is what inevitably happens when you stick a trillion-dollar business in a 3rd world country.
I agree, we don't need fuel efficiency, we need a whole new form of fuel. One that doesn't shackle every civilized nation to every uncivilized oil producer.
If they were really concerned about the damage caused by spam, they'd make this configuration manual, and include a very clear explanation of the consequences part of the process.
To enable spam bounces to foreign hosts, please insert both testicles into the Barracuda Nutcracker DRM device and press the "big red button".
Seriously, every time I see Barracuda backscatter, I hate them a tiny bit more. Incompetence should be punishable by castration!
Maybe I'm just prescient, but didn't we already know this as fact ? Luthiers are a weird bunch, but it's pretty well accepted that what makes certain classic instruments sound so unique is the special attributes of the wood - heavy, dense, and often doped with crude chemicals of the era to make them even richer.
If people today were to make instruments like they did back then, they would probably sound very similar. Problem is, there's a whole lot more money in mass-producing pine bodies in 1/4000th of the time.
The feature itself is a good idea, it's the implementation that's a shameful mess. Google does it, and Firefox does it - both do it without client-side spidering. They have their own server-side index, which means each site gets spidered only once per refresh cycle.
The way it is now, AVG is acting not unlike a number of bots, and costing a whole lot of people a whole lot of money in excess bandwidth. They deserve to be blocked, this is the wrong way to do things.
I know I'm being an ass here, but if you've been living with the person, chances are you've already caught (or fought) the infection. Either way, you won't catch it again from a "dirty" laptop.
This whole infection paranoia just leads to weaker humans. Have some freakin' balls!
You seem to live in a world where all thieves are super-thieves and there's a distinct absence of random stupid idiot thieves... must be nice!
They walked off with a computer. That doesn't automatically make them geniuses. If they were, the first thing to do would have been to wipe the disk and start over. There are TONS of phone-home apps on the market, any semi-professional thief would know this.
We require licenses of many different professions, doctors, medical professionals, accountants even.
Okay, I'll get your stupid license when I'm earning as much as doctors, medical professionals, and corporate accountants.
The big reason why we have licensing is because certain careers bear a greater responsibility. Doctors hold patients' lives in their hands, accountants can screw up the economy (hint: they do it anyway). A PC repair guy can shaft you no worse than a mechanic. In a sense, we're computer mechanics.
That Geek Squad twit won't give you an infection (unless you have open-wound sex with it). The obnoxious asian dude at the store won't cause you to get audited by the tax office (they're especially good at dodging those). My overclocking wizardry certainly won't get you arrested and jailed - no speed limits in cyberspace!
The real problem with random PC repair guys is some of them have no goddamned integrity. I personally don't give a flying fuck what you store on your computer. Warez, pr0n, 2 terabytes of Kenny G videos - I care not. I fix the problem, I collect payment, and I move on to the next job.
An underworked nosey bastard, with a PI license, is just going to be even nosier. They will make up stories "I'm mandated to inspect your files for contraband, here's my license!" Long story short, don't do business with dishonest pricks.
Unless Texas figures out a way to identify dishonest pricks with a piece of paper, there is nothing they can realistically do to help the people.
If he had studied Bridge Building, got his degree and yet considered himself a poor engineer, would we want this person to be in charge of the good engineers ?
I don't think so.
The important thing is he studied CS for a reason. He needs to find that reason, research the opportunities and find the one that fits.
That said, if he did what a lot of tards do, and went into CS "for the money", then he should bow his head and stroll back to the burger joint. CS doesn't pay much anymore, so if you don't love it, *AND* you're underpaid, you need to GTFO.
Slashdot Mirror
The games are too expensive... this one requires faith. If the price is that high due to piracy, then we should see the price of pirate free games come down.
Faith ? Anyone who still has faith in the game industry is either young or naive. It is a business, they charge whatever the market will bear. The only reason some games are sold at a lower price point, is because they would NOT sell at the higher price.
Portal is great fun, but it's damned short, buggy and looks dated. If they were charging $60, it wouldn't sell nearly as much. Sure, a handful of do-gooders would snap it up and blog about it, but the rest of us would rather spend the same money on a product that offers more hours of entertainment. Once you beat Portal, it's beat. You can play the challenge levels, but even those will only tide you over for another day or two, and then you're bored again.
I frankly don't think DRM does much good for the game industry. It does a lot of "good" for the DRM industry, but that's about it. Everything of value gets cracked. Even Mass Effect was blown wide open within a week, despite the modern copy protection. From my point of view as a small-time developer, Bioware wasted a ton of money on SecuROM, a product that failed within a week and probably didn't net them many sales.
The thing is, it's a freakin' game. It's not the cure for cancer, it's not a stock market projection, it's a simple entertainment product. You can pay $60 to have it now, or wait a few days for a working crack and play it for free. If you really want the game, you'll buy it, but if you're on the fence, you'll probably save your money and wait for it to show up in alt.binaries. To most people, the money matters more than the legality issue, because it is seen as a victimless crime.
Many people I know think of piracy as an alternative to rental. They try the thing, most of the time it sucks, and they wipe it from their hard drive. A rental would have cost $5.00, but that money still doesn't go to the game developers, it goes to the rental chain. If that game gets rented every night for a whole year, the devs still get only one sale out of it, while the rental chain makes a small fortune off the developers' backs.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep the $5.00 and spend it elsewhere, than give it to some profiteering rental outfit that thrives on overpriced candy and underpaid teenagers. Save up your $5.00 bills until you can buy a good game, you'll be doing the industry more good that way.
Yep I had muted everything, it made absolutely no difference. Mind you, I can hear the same color of noise if I crank up the gains on my mixer... this is for my onboard audio (ADI1988A, I believe). The DACs pick up all sorts of garbage from the computer, very noticeable if I'm running any graphically-intensive process since the audio chip is right next to the first PCI-E slot.
That noise is the main reason why so many people are moving to outboard Firewire-hosted audio interfaces. Move the DACs outside the PC chassis, and the noise is gone, plus you can shield the hell out of a rackmount chassis when all it houses is a teeny weeny sound card.
Perhaps this has changed in the last couple of years, but the old Linksys routers I've had the displeasure of using, they liked to die on torrent traffic. I don't know the exact details, but if I tried to run torrents, the router would gradually slow down and eventually lock up within an hour or so.
I guessed it was trying to do connection tracking, filling up its tables and stupidly dying from the heavy connection load of torrent traffic. DD-WRT firmware seemed to fix this, though I certainly didn't test it much.
What gets me is I have this crappy old Pentium-90 with 32mb ram, that I've used as a NAT box for.. oh I dunno, at least 6-7 years now. It has perfect uptime, no noticeable slowdowns, and despite having a hard drive, it's been pretty resilient to power outages and my breaker-busting kilowatt workstation.
Why can't these skinless bastards (Linksys) take what I have on that dusty old PC, shove it on a cellphone-sized device with bunch of ethernet jacks, and deliver a "router" that actually works ? The technology is decades old, all you need is Linux + iptables and a simple web interface.
There's a company that sells kits, which I hope someone can name for me, built around either a P5 or ARM processor on a tiny board - kind of like the Gumstix, but the one I'm thinking of is specifically built for network appliances... they have multiple ethernet jacks and I think they even sell Linksys-router shaped enclosures for them. Anyone with iptables experience should be able to build a bulletproof NAT box into one of those kits. Perhaps the problem (for Linksys), is they couldn't build such a quality device for the cheap-ass $30 market they've dug themselves into.
Cheap Chinese mass-produced gadgets fail to perform as advertised, C-list Slashdot editor posts trollish story, film at 11!
The code wizard commandos at the iPhone Dev Team
Code. Wizard. Commandos.
So when is Thinkgeek going to start selling camo-patterned electroluminescent Pong robes ?
Since when has any Mac software let you do what you wanted ? It goes against the philosophy of the platform. They simplify everything, leave with you a single way to do stuff, and it just so happens that one way usually works pretty well. In a sense, Macs are kind of like game consoles.
Your DVDs play well, and have been doing so for longer than the PC players - you don't need to download your DVD playing software from some idiotic Chinese software company that couldn't even write a goddamned Solitaire clone without crashing :P
Besides, there are other ways to get screen grabs from video - like using a video editor!
Yep it's ridiculous but true. For all you disbelievers, try recording "silence" on your Stereo Mix. Not so silent now, is it ?
I actually hadn't used this feature in ages, but I did a few weeks ago to rip a friend's tune on some lame-ass artist site... the MP3 download was "disabled" and the guy wasn't answering his phone, so I just recorded the streamed output from my onboard sound. Hello noise! I was seeing -48db peaks, maybe -58db average; it's almost inaudible but still not what I expected.
So just to be sure it wasn't the actual source file that was noisy, I did the same thing via my old M-Audio Audiophile 2496, using its "Monitor Mixer", and that one was perfectly clean. I would expect any card with an Envy24 chip to perform the same, as it does this virtual mixing at the digital stage, right on the chip.
There used to be a nice "virtual audio cable" freeware, but Google only turns up some $30 whoreware offering that's clogging up the index.
where's the +1, Semi-obscure ?
If it weren't for the OPEC nations, Bush wouldn't be in the middle east. They'd be up here, in Canada, within poutine-flinging range of my home.
And I make one mean greasy poutine! :)
I'm just waiting for Web 4.0 to do away with HTML entirely, going 'round full-circle back to ActiveX binaries. Screw CSS, I'm using GDI primitives!
+50, Nailed it!
The no-refund policy leads to horrible products with fantastic marketing budgets. What's a scorned gamer to do, sue the company ? On what grounds ? You can't prove "lack of fun" in court.
I'm of the opinion that piracy / software theft / whatever you wanna call it, helps the good game houses and hurts the bad ones. The whole try-before-you-buy excuse is a very valid one IMHO. There's a crapload of software out there, that I would have never heard of, were it not for some illiterate little shit in Norway posting it on Usenet. Not just games but apps too... prime example: O&O Defrag. I saw it on some FTP eons ago, gave it a whirl, and have been a paying user for over eight years now. Why the *&@^ am I paying for a defrag tool ? Because I like the damned thing, that's why. Had it not been pirated, I would still be cursing at MS Defrag / Diskeeper on a daily basis.
Same thing applies to games. You mentioned Blizzard, well a long long time ago, when I was just a teenager with lots of BBS accounts, I stumbled upon the original Warcraft. I had no clue what this game was, nor did any of my friends, but it was an addictive little thing. Chop wood, mine gold, kill stuff - FUN! Warcraft 2 came out, I trotted down to EB and picked up the War2 battlechest. Then Starcraft, War3, and WoW.
Had it not been for that pirated copy of the original Warcraft, I would never have bought the 2nd and 3rd installments.
The same is true for a bunch of Lucasarts games... Day of the Tentacle, anyone ? If it weren't for those massively distributed copies of Monkey Island, I would not have been hooked, and they would have sold $250 less games to this one guy alone.
Meanwhile, when companies release shitty games, the kind that's not even worth pirating, you can be damned sure I'll never buy their stuff, and I won't bother downloading it either.
If games didn't cost $60-70 to "try", maybe they would sell more. There are very few shops that release demos anymore, and the ones that do, often pull a Hollywood on us, where the full product only adds filler with no substance. The business model needs to be redesigned from the ground up - new distribution, new (smaller) budgets, greater emphasis on gameplay... it's not so hard, just look at all the runaway hits of recent years like Portal or Sam & Max - inexpensive to make and tons of fun.
Sure, blockbusters can be good too, but so many of them flop because the money takes over, release dates get bumped up and salaries get chopped. What, you actually believe those no-experience foreign sweat shops with mile-long resumés are going to cut development costs while delivering a superior product ? Ever heard of EA and Activision ? Ever seen them release a top-quality product ?
The game industry is fucked, much like the music industry. Pointing fingers will not change that.
Blizzard has been "le suck" since WoW came out. The MMO business model has changed them, for the worse. Merging with Activision is really just one last nail in the coffin.
The only thing I can think of, that would be even worse than this merger, is for Valve to sell out to EA.
The day that happens, I'll sell my graphics card and go back to Minesweeper. The moment a small, agile game house grows too big (or sells out), it loses all artistic control and starts producing formulaic garbage. There's no avoiding it, that's the nature of capitalism.
There is a good chance that you have heard about "Web 2.0"
WTF is this, 2002 ? Is this book written for the Amish ?
Web 2.0 is now old hat. The magpies have moved on to bigger, shinier garbage like AIR and Silverlight.
Yep you nailed it. The gas prices we're seeing have less to do with scarcity, and more to do with a captive market - well, that and the fact that the majority of oil producing countries are literally overrun by the OPEC cartels, which is what inevitably happens when you stick a trillion-dollar business in a 3rd world country.
I agree, we don't need fuel efficiency, we need a whole new form of fuel. One that doesn't shackle every civilized nation to every uncivilized oil producer.
If they were really concerned about the damage caused by spam, they'd make this configuration manual, and include a very clear explanation of the consequences part of the process.
To enable spam bounces to foreign hosts, please insert both testicles into the Barracuda Nutcracker DRM device and press the "big red button".
Seriously, every time I see Barracuda backscatter, I hate them a tiny bit more. Incompetence should be punishable by castration!
a guy who I won't name* was sitting in a car parked on the street across from his place, watching his significant other getting it on with his brother
So instead of barging in and snapping photo evidence, he just sat there like a coward ? Fail!
Anyway, I'm a former Quebecer too, so that may well be why I'm pro-privacy :)
Maybe I'm just prescient, but didn't we already know this as fact ? Luthiers are a weird bunch, but it's pretty well accepted that what makes certain classic instruments sound so unique is the special attributes of the wood - heavy, dense, and often doped with crude chemicals of the era to make them even richer.
If people today were to make instruments like they did back then, they would probably sound very similar. Problem is, there's a whole lot more money in mass-producing pine bodies in 1/4000th of the time.
The feature itself is a good idea, it's the implementation that's a shameful mess. Google does it, and Firefox does it - both do it without client-side spidering. They have their own server-side index, which means each site gets spidered only once per refresh cycle.
The way it is now, AVG is acting not unlike a number of bots, and costing a whole lot of people a whole lot of money in excess bandwidth. They deserve to be blocked, this is the wrong way to do things.
I know I'm being an ass here, but if you've been living with the person, chances are you've already caught (or fought) the infection. Either way, you won't catch it again from a "dirty" laptop.
This whole infection paranoia just leads to weaker humans. Have some freakin' balls!
You seem to live in a world where all thieves are super-thieves and there's a distinct absence of random stupid idiot thieves... must be nice!
They walked off with a computer. That doesn't automatically make them geniuses. If they were, the first thing to do would have been to wipe the disk and start over. There are TONS of phone-home apps on the market, any semi-professional thief would know this.
Precisely: I like reading about the edge cases, because Joe Random is a freaking moron when it comes to electronics.
The whole "me too" effect is a huge part of today's marketing. That's why everyone and their mother wants a freaking iPod/iPhone.
Chief Insult Officer, that's me.
"Go snort a moose, you snorkel-bleaching thimble monger!"
That's why I get paid the big bucks.
We require licenses of many different professions, doctors, medical professionals, accountants even.
Okay, I'll get your stupid license when I'm earning as much as doctors, medical professionals, and corporate accountants.
The big reason why we have licensing is because certain careers bear a greater responsibility. Doctors hold patients' lives in their hands, accountants can screw up the economy (hint: they do it anyway). A PC repair guy can shaft you no worse than a mechanic. In a sense, we're computer mechanics.
That Geek Squad twit won't give you an infection (unless you have open-wound sex with it). The obnoxious asian dude at the store won't cause you to get audited by the tax office (they're especially good at dodging those). My overclocking wizardry certainly won't get you arrested and jailed - no speed limits in cyberspace!
The real problem with random PC repair guys is some of them have no goddamned integrity. I personally don't give a flying fuck what you store on your computer. Warez, pr0n, 2 terabytes of Kenny G videos - I care not. I fix the problem, I collect payment, and I move on to the next job.
An underworked nosey bastard, with a PI license, is just going to be even nosier. They will make up stories "I'm mandated to inspect your files for contraband, here's my license!" Long story short, don't do business with dishonest pricks.
Unless Texas figures out a way to identify dishonest pricks with a piece of paper, there is nothing they can realistically do to help the people.
Do you go around replying to ALL of twitters posts ?
I dub thee: "Bizarro Twitter"
[dun-dun-dun!]
If he had studied Bridge Building, got his degree and yet considered himself a poor engineer, would we want this person to be in charge of the good engineers ?
I don't think so.
The important thing is he studied CS for a reason. He needs to find that reason, research the opportunities and find the one that fits.
That said, if he did what a lot of tards do, and went into CS "for the money", then he should bow his head and stroll back to the burger joint. CS doesn't pay much anymore, so if you don't love it, *AND* you're underpaid, you need to GTFO.