My personal opinion is it's a combination of everything mentioned so far.
1) Most tech sites suck (Poorly designed, poorly laid out, too many ads). This sets a really low bar for surpassing the tech site with an elegantly simple layout with fewer ads. 2) Most tech writers are writers not techies. They write about stuff they don't really understand. This means mainstream tech coverage is rarely insightful, and mostly regurgitation suitable only for people who aren't interested in reading it. This sets a really low bar for not-professional-journalists to surpass when writing about tech. 3) The people with interesting things to say about technology are almost always not journalists, and thanks to the internet they don't need journalists to allow them to occasionally say things in interviews, especially since their audience knows who they are can use a search engine well enough to find their personal web site.
So essentially the tech media is dying out because they've created an environment where the barrier to entry is so small anyone can literally enter the market. It's capitalism at work. Eventually someone will figure out how to make a decent tech site that will keep people reading the tech news they have. Maybe they'll call it "News for Nerds" or something...
Actually, anytime a company focuses on a "New Demographic" they, by necessity abandon the old. The Wii isn't going to cater to "hardcore" gamers because it's not designed to do that. Nintendo's selling a lot of them to seniors and parents and you're going to mostly see software that caters to the most common owners of the system.
Everyone's been crowing about how the Wii is expanding the market, but in doing so they had to choose to abandon the current market. Why? Because what they were producing for the current market wasn't expanding the market. The Wii doesn't appeal to me at all, and not that much to my friends either. That's ok, we're not the target demographic for the Wii. We already have consoles. The Wii was never designed to appeal to us, and the only way it will ever appeal to us is if the games we want become exclusive to it. That's unlikely to happen, both the 360 and PS3 are designed to appeal to us by carrying the games we like to play and offering an experience that appeals to us.
So, yes, Nintendo abandonned the hardcore gamers years ago, but that's ok, we don't expect everyone to cater to our tastes. I don't expect the hardcore games to go to the Wii no matter how well it performs in the marketplace. Even if they try to sell them for the Wii at some point the developers of hardcore games will realize that the casual players who own a Wii won't buy their games because they're not looking for those games, they're looking for easy, casual games.
This is nothing new, it's been an obvious consequence of Nintendo's "new direction" since the Wii was released.
I don't know, some of the Republican candidates are likely to be irrational and destructive like Bush.
Brownback, Huckabee and Tancredo indicated they don't believe in Evolution. That indicates to me that if any of them were to become president they would ignore any scientific evidence that doesn't agree with their preconceived view of reality. That's a fatal flaw in a leader.
You have to understand the Bush/Republican view of things. If you plug your ears and shout loud enough the bad things won't happen.
We've known that Bush and his administration have been actively censoring and editing the "facts" since he was elected. This isn't really anything new, but it people should be outraged about it. The problem is a large minority of Americans believe as Bush does that talking about these things makes them worse. Of course, they also believe that as long as the Republican party (and it's spokespeople) don't acknowledge the problems, they don't actually exist.
It's a scart world full of people who refuse to believe evidence because it doesn't support the conclusions they want to draw.
Similar games are available on every other system, plus games types which are in very limited availability on the 360, without the hardware problems the xbox 360 has.
The only market the 360 servers well is the Halo-playing, shooter fan. For everyone other group the console is expected to have a relatively poor game selection. My friends were sold on the original Xbox on the promise of 16 player (4 Xboxes) lan party games. Unfortunately, Halo was the only game that ever came through on that promise. A couple of others tried, but they could only do 1 or 2 players per Xbox.
So given that you know that you should expect an Xbox 360 to fail (they've bugeted $100 per Xbox to fix failures this year), and that the game selection is limited and focused on a very small group of players, why buy one?
"I hate Sony and everything they do" doesn't make it wrong either.
We won't be able to judge for sure whether MS (in deciding that DVD is big enough) or Sony (in deciding that more space is needed for future games) is correct until much later in the cycle. It'll probably be at least 2 more years before we know for sure. Of course, if Sony's right, Microsoft will be unveiling the Xbox Cubed at that point with a built-in HD-DVD or Blu Ray and beginning the next console generation early again.
Seriously, this is because the American system of government is almost the worst democratic system in the world. What's worse? Dictators who claim to be democratically elected where the opposition is legally barred under threat of execution for treason.
There are so many games American officials play to undermine the electorate that it's not funny. Gerrymandering, fake voter registration organizations, fake notification letters tell people to go to the wrong place to vote, playing games with the number of voting terminals based on district voting histories.
It should all be illegal, pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison illegal. The American government seems to have largely forgotten that they serve the electorate, they seem to think they control it now. When some cheating politician gets lynched in the streets, that's when they'll wake up from their daydream.
Perhaps this Doom and Gloom is unwarranted? Surely if Zap2It could provide listings someone else could do so as well. It might be a little work to figure out how to make money off it, but I think for someone this represents an opportunity to make a little money.
There seem to be some practical issues with vertical farming... One being that the interior of a city isn't the best place to get sunlight from, that means the plants are going to need to have artificial lighting to keep them growing, you'll also have fairly intensive use of water. I'm not sure that city infrastructure would be ready to support a vertical farm, and that's before considering the issues of produce quality and marginal cost. As long as foreign produce is competing at price that is much lower than the price of produce produced in a vertical farm, then you've got problems. The vertical farm is almost certain bound to fail unless substancial duties are imposed on imported food.
Of course, then you have a host of follow up issues such as the effect on increased food prices on the poor, and the distorting effect those prices may have on eating patterns and subsequently the health of the population...
I think you've got it. In any circumstances it's always better to have a politician who is principled, experienced, intelligent and willing to work with both his allies and opponents, regardless of whether you agree with their beliefs. It is even better if you do agree with them.
However, voting for someone who claims to believe as you do and yet you know to be unprincipled, incompetent or stupid is just foolish. Inexperience in a politician is a flaw that varies in severity with the power of the position. It is always best to try an unknown on lesser challenges where less damage can be done by incompetence.
Obviously, it would be better to get an unprinciple, inexperienced, dumbass who only works with his cronies...
Oh wait, you already have that.
Seriously, those are all good qualities to have in a politician even if you disagree with their policies. If you intend to convince people that there are better choices, you might want to try raising the bar instead of lowering it.
I understand the feeling because I'm sick of seeing people who don't seem to understand the first Amendment:
" Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
You are right it's not a first amendment issue, the government has passed no law governing what the reporter in question can say. However, you are wrong on your reasoning for why it's not a first amendment issue. Your basic rights, such as the freedom of speech don't change whether you're on private or public property. You don't loose your rights because you're on private property, you just have no right to be on private property if the owner doesn't want you there (ignoring, of course, the exceptions to this general rule). So yes, you can kick someone out of your house for saying something you dislike, that's your right as the owner of private property, however, you can't legally do anything to prevent them from saying something you dislike (other than threatening to eject them from your property, trying to convince them not to say it, or binding them into a contractual agreement not to say it).
The government cannot bestow rights upon an individual or a corporation. Rights either exist or they don't. Governments can choose whether or not to enforce rights, however. But that is their primary (and in the end, only just) purpose, to ENFORCE and PROTECT rights. In this case the NCAA has a Copyright on broadcasting of their games. They can choose to license or not license that right as they see fit. It's theirs. There's nothing in the first amendment that says they have to let you sit in the stands and report on their games if they don't want you there. That has nothing to do with the government bestowing any monopoly power upon them. It's THEIR game. If you don't like it, go somewhere else.
That's not right. First, only governments can grant rights. Rights do not exist until they are recognized in law by a government. Until a right is recognized it's a principle, not a right.
Secondly, the NCAA does not have a copyright on the broadcasting of their games. They have a private property right to control access to their property. Therefore they can choose who they allow to stay and who they require to leave subject to the usual anti-discrimination laws. They sell the right to broadcast the game to a television network by enforcing their private property rights against anyone who hasn't paid for a broadcast licence. The licensors then own a copyright on the recording they make of the game.
As for the rest, the person you're responding to is a little overly distraught but functionally correct, the American media is owned by corporate interests. Sure journalists can write whatever they want, but they have editors who control what gets published and they do risk losing their jobs if they try to get the "wrong" writing published. He's not saying anyone with a press pass has sold out, he's saying the entire media is failing to fulfill it's responsibilities. The public relies on the fourth estate to be vigilant on it's behalf, to watch the government and the corporations, and to make their failures known. The mainstream American media is afraid to criticize corporations because they might loose advertising dollars and afraid to criticize government because it might be unpopular. It's part of the reason why there's so much celebretainment and crime coverage. Both topics are lurid and safe.
I just thought I would explain that since you seem to be failing to understand that a diatribe against the media in general is just that. It has little to do with this particular event.
As to the particular event at hand, while the NCAA has the right to eject anyone they wish from their game for violating their rules, the rule itself seems petty and ignorant. Petty because textual coverage of the game is insignificant in terms of revenue generation, and ignorant because it flies in the face of the new reality of pervasive computing. It's clearly not a free speech issue, but it is notable because the NCAA's actions make them look like money-grubbing thugs.
It wasn't so much that the stuff in BC was better, it was that the items you didn't have to work for were often better than ones you had invested a lot of time and effort into getting. It was kind of a slap in the face to dedicated players.
Also if they follow up on their promise to release a new expansion every year until you can hit level 100, well then in six months everyone is going to be facing the exact same need to regrind every reputation and regear up to raid/do heroic dungeons. It just feels empty and hollow knowing that you can't really make any progress by playing, the best thing to do is stop playing until they finish releasing the expansions that increase the level cap.
It is a lot like the rest of WoW and that, I suppose, was part of the problem. I have a number of reasons, but I helped form an build a casual raiding guild. I'd already been through the gearing up to raid phase once, and I couldn't shake the feeling that the expansion was just a big waste of time. I disliked the absolute reset on gear presented by it, the gap between level 70 gear and level 60 gear was so great that it rendered all previous time investments worthless (unless, of course, you just kept the gold). Even the BC level 58 green gear dropping in the very first area of BC was better than most of the level 60 blue gear.
Beyond that the introduction of so many new reputations that you had to grind, and the tedious collect the whatchamcallit quests where the beasties only drop them 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 just felt like tedious penalties. I don't play a game to work, I play to enjoy myself, and Blizzard introduced too many time sinks between me and my goals. The last straw was the pointless "mage do too much damage" nerf (In my case that increased the time for me to solo the average mob by more than 33%). It showed me that current developers didn't even understand the game their supposed to be running.
They claim they can make a game that doesn't have a tanking-healing-dps model by making every class a dps class. That's retarded, that doesn't change the model it just makes the classes that can only fill the dps slots the worst classes to play from "I-want-get-in-a-group" frame of reference. So combine the assine behaviour of their customer representatives with what appears to be a vendetta against the mage class in particular*, and a quantum increasing in reputation grinding and I completely lost interest in the game. There are just so many other things I could be wasting my time on, that I don't to participate in one I can no longer enjoy.
In the end it didn't seem to introduce anything new and just left me feeling like they had taken 6 months of progess in the game away so that they could suck an additional 6 months of subscription fees from everyone, so I quit.
* I know it's subjective, but I think it's also objectively true that mages had the most negative combination of nerfs and buffs. I also played a paladin, a druid, a warlock, and a hunter. I found the differences in the way the classes were treated to be huge. For all of those other classes, the developers were willing to make changes and give them new powers that were obviously great, and then reduce them down later if they were too good, mages on the other hand were always offered powers that were terrible and only after thousands of posts about how utterly useless the new abilities were (with a few suck-ups loudly declaring that anyone who dared criticize the work of the great Blizzard was a traitor to WoW), would the developers change them a little to make them suck slightly less. It was consistently infuriating and something I tired of watching happen over and over.
In fact there are a host of other issues which the RIAA major labels completely ignore in favor of going after the one factor that irks them. You see to greedy assholes who routinely bite the hand that feeds them, the fact that anyone is listening to "their music" for free is galling. The ignore factors like entertainment diversification, the consistent growth of independent labels (yes, independent labels have increasing CD sales not decreasing sales), the negative publicity associated with lying, cheating, stealing, bribing, price-fixing being exposed to the public, the end of an upgrade cycle (sales declines are compared to the top ever sales level of the music industry ignoring the cyclical and temporary nature of upgrade cycles), and the narrowing of industry channels through the disappearance of retail music stores and do we even need to go into the general agreement that the major labels have been producing inferior albums for years?
There are plenty of reasons for falling revenues, the problem is the only reason that doesn't put the blame on the executives in charge of the music industry is the only one that given any credence by the music industry. That's in their own selfish best interest (not that of the music companies or the music industry), if they admit to making huge mistakes and covering them up years, then they could lose their cushy jobs. I understand why they do it, I just am not willing to tolerate it.
Hell, considering how little artists get paid for music the coming changes in the efficiency of music distribution are long overdue. The CD system of the music distribution is insane in a digital world. Completely insane and since the wholesale price of CD sales is the determining factor for the "size" of the music industry it's no wonder they're falling. At best the artists get to split $1 of a CD sale between them. Often it's less, I've heard of the musicians earning less than one cent per copy sold. So the rest of the $15-$20 of the CD price is overhead. That means 75%-95% of the "industry" revenues are waste. We should expect the revenues to fall dramatically as they shift from traditional distribution to digital. However, these are professional money grubbers here, you can also expect profits to rise once they've finally admitted they have to do this and have begun to figure out how to work the system. Right now, the major labels all still appear to be in denial.
Your opening position should be "The average pay for my job is double what I'm currently earning". Make sure you bring some documentation with you. Seriously, according to that site, on average system admins with no experience earn about 41,000 USD / year.
On of my friends has a wii, the only game we play when he brings it out is Bomberman. We're all gamers, we've tried his other games and every other game just seems to suck.
I, personally, have no interest in the Wii, there just are too few games that I want to play for it, and I don't expect to see most of the games that I want to play on it.
Frankly, from my experience working in both the private and the public sector, you're just as likely to run into incompetence in either one. In theory, the private sector should be more efficient than the public sector, but that only works as long as no people are involved. Both government and industry are made up of people and both reflect the strengths of weaknesses of people.
Climate change and the environment is turning out to be one of the largest driving factors in Canadian politics. The Conservatives Party is being forced to actually enact some positive changes. I'm not actually sure that the claims of high unemployment from fighting climate change are true. Sure if we shut down every industry that emitted pollution there would be rampant unemployment, but there's also plenty of opportunities (especially for early adopters). There's research to be done. New cleaner power plants have to be built. A carbon trading marketplace to be set up. Regulations to be enforced, and environmentally friendly products to be invented, engineered, marketed, and sold.
The key here is that early action may make reduce or even eliminate the need for later, more dramatic and more costly action. Right now, we have a few groups who are protecting their profits by trying to ensure that the pollution remains "free", but the longer we tolerate their misbehaviour, the more costly the solution becomes.
Actually, we are already feeling the costs of tolerating their bad behaviour. Rising cost of gas? The cost wouldn't be so high and filling your car up wouldn't so expensive if the U.S. Government hadn't kowtowed to car companies that claimed "making our cars more fuel-efficient will cost people their jobs". Now U.S. automakers are in dire straits anyway and they can't sell their cars overseas because they don't meet emissions standards. If something has to be done, "it costs too much" is never a good answer.
Isn't "Super Paper Mario" a "franchise" Mario entry and a sequel to "Paper Mario"? Doesn't that mean it's a franchise of franchise? Does that make it bad, or maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't judge a game to be bad simply because it's a sequel?
Slashdot Mirror
My personal opinion is it's a combination of everything mentioned so far.
1) Most tech sites suck (Poorly designed, poorly laid out, too many ads). This sets a really low bar for surpassing the tech site with an elegantly simple layout with fewer ads.
2) Most tech writers are writers not techies. They write about stuff they don't really understand. This means mainstream tech coverage is rarely insightful, and mostly regurgitation suitable only for people who aren't interested in reading it. This sets a really low bar for not-professional-journalists to surpass when writing about tech.
3) The people with interesting things to say about technology are almost always not journalists, and thanks to the internet they don't need journalists to allow them to occasionally say things in interviews, especially since their audience knows who they are can use a search engine well enough to find their personal web site.
So essentially the tech media is dying out because they've created an environment where the barrier to entry is so small anyone can literally enter the market. It's capitalism at work. Eventually someone will figure out how to make a decent tech site that will keep people reading the tech news they have. Maybe they'll call it "News for Nerds" or something...
Actually, anytime a company focuses on a "New Demographic" they, by necessity abandon the old. The Wii isn't going to cater to "hardcore" gamers because it's not designed to do that. Nintendo's selling a lot of them to seniors and parents and you're going to mostly see software that caters to the most common owners of the system.
Everyone's been crowing about how the Wii is expanding the market, but in doing so they had to choose to abandon the current market. Why? Because what they were producing for the current market wasn't expanding the market. The Wii doesn't appeal to me at all, and not that much to my friends either. That's ok, we're not the target demographic for the Wii. We already have consoles. The Wii was never designed to appeal to us, and the only way it will ever appeal to us is if the games we want become exclusive to it. That's unlikely to happen, both the 360 and PS3 are designed to appeal to us by carrying the games we like to play and offering an experience that appeals to us.
So, yes, Nintendo abandonned the hardcore gamers years ago, but that's ok, we don't expect everyone to cater to our tastes. I don't expect the hardcore games to go to the Wii no matter how well it performs in the marketplace. Even if they try to sell them for the Wii at some point the developers of hardcore games will realize that the casual players who own a Wii won't buy their games because they're not looking for those games, they're looking for easy, casual games.
This is nothing new, it's been an obvious consequence of Nintendo's "new direction" since the Wii was released.
I don't know, some of the Republican candidates are likely to be irrational and destructive like Bush.
Brownback, Huckabee and Tancredo indicated they don't believe in Evolution. That indicates to me that if any of them were to become president they would ignore any scientific evidence that doesn't agree with their preconceived view of reality. That's a fatal flaw in a leader.
You have to understand the Bush/Republican view of things. If you plug your ears and shout loud enough the bad things won't happen.
We've known that Bush and his administration have been actively censoring and editing the "facts" since he was elected. This isn't really anything new, but it people should be outraged about it. The problem is a large minority of Americans believe as Bush does that talking about these things makes them worse. Of course, they also believe that as long as the Republican party (and it's spokespeople) don't acknowledge the problems, they don't actually exist.
It's a scart world full of people who refuse to believe evidence because it doesn't support the conclusions they want to draw.
I think you missed the point:
Similar games are available on every other system, plus games types which are in very limited availability on the 360, without the hardware problems the xbox 360 has.
The only market the 360 servers well is the Halo-playing, shooter fan. For everyone other group the console is expected to have a relatively poor game selection. My friends were sold on the original Xbox on the promise of 16 player (4 Xboxes) lan party games. Unfortunately, Halo was the only game that ever came through on that promise. A couple of others tried, but they could only do 1 or 2 players per Xbox.
So given that you know that you should expect an Xbox 360 to fail (they've bugeted $100 per Xbox to fix failures this year), and that the game selection is limited and focused on a very small group of players, why buy one?
"I hate Sony and everything they do" doesn't make it wrong either.
We won't be able to judge for sure whether MS (in deciding that DVD is big enough) or Sony (in deciding that more space is needed for future games) is correct until much later in the cycle. It'll probably be at least 2 more years before we know for sure. Of course, if Sony's right, Microsoft will be unveiling the Xbox Cubed at that point with a built-in HD-DVD or Blu Ray and beginning the next console generation early again.
Seriously, this is because the American system of government is almost the worst democratic system in the world. What's worse? Dictators who claim to be democratically elected where the opposition is legally barred under threat of execution for treason.
There are so many games American officials play to undermine the electorate that it's not funny. Gerrymandering, fake voter registration organizations, fake notification letters tell people to go to the wrong place to vote, playing games with the number of voting terminals based on district voting histories.
It should all be illegal, pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison illegal. The American government seems to have largely forgotten that they serve the electorate, they seem to think they control it now. When some cheating politician gets lynched in the streets, that's when they'll wake up from their daydream.
Perhaps this Doom and Gloom is unwarranted? Surely if Zap2It could provide listings someone else could do so as well. It might be a little work to figure out how to make money off it, but I think for someone this represents an opportunity to make a little money.
There seem to be some practical issues with vertical farming... One being that the interior of a city isn't the best place to get sunlight from, that means the plants are going to need to have artificial lighting to keep them growing, you'll also have fairly intensive use of water. I'm not sure that city infrastructure would be ready to support a vertical farm, and that's before considering the issues of produce quality and marginal cost. As long as foreign produce is competing at price that is much lower than the price of produce produced in a vertical farm, then you've got problems. The vertical farm is almost certain bound to fail unless substancial duties are imposed on imported food.
Of course, then you have a host of follow up issues such as the effect on increased food prices on the poor, and the distorting effect those prices may have on eating patterns and subsequently the health of the population...
Still it's an interesting idea.
I think you've got it. In any circumstances it's always better to have a politician who is principled, experienced, intelligent and willing to work with both his allies and opponents, regardless of whether you agree with their beliefs. It is even better if you do agree with them.
However, voting for someone who claims to believe as you do and yet you know to be unprincipled, incompetent or stupid is just foolish. Inexperience in a politician is a flaw that varies in severity with the power of the position. It is always best to try an unknown on lesser challenges where less damage can be done by incompetence.
Obviously, it would be better to get an unprinciple, inexperienced, dumbass who only works with his cronies...
Oh wait, you already have that.
Seriously, those are all good qualities to have in a politician even if you disagree with their policies. If you intend to convince people that there are better choices, you might want to try raising the bar instead of lowering it.
I understand the feeling because I'm sick of seeing people who don't seem to understand the first Amendment:
" Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
You are right it's not a first amendment issue, the government has passed no law governing what the reporter in question can say. However, you are wrong on your reasoning for why it's not a first amendment issue. Your basic rights, such as the freedom of speech don't change whether you're on private or public property. You don't loose your rights because you're on private property, you just have no right to be on private property if the owner doesn't want you there (ignoring, of course, the exceptions to this general rule). So yes, you can kick someone out of your house for saying something you dislike, that's your right as the owner of private property, however, you can't legally do anything to prevent them from saying something you dislike (other than threatening to eject them from your property, trying to convince them not to say it, or binding them into a contractual agreement not to say it).
The government cannot bestow rights upon an individual or a corporation. Rights either exist or they don't. Governments can choose whether or not to enforce rights, however. But that is their primary (and in the end, only just) purpose, to ENFORCE and PROTECT rights. In this case the NCAA has a Copyright on broadcasting of their games. They can choose to license or not license that right as they see fit. It's theirs. There's nothing in the first amendment that says they have to let you sit in the stands and report on their games if they don't want you there. That has nothing to do with the government bestowing any monopoly power upon them. It's THEIR game. If you don't like it, go somewhere else.
That's not right. First, only governments can grant rights. Rights do not exist until they are recognized in law by a government. Until a right is recognized it's a principle, not a right.
Secondly, the NCAA does not have a copyright on the broadcasting of their games. They have a private property right to control access to their property. Therefore they can choose who they allow to stay and who they require to leave subject to the usual anti-discrimination laws. They sell the right to broadcast the game to a television network by enforcing their private property rights against anyone who hasn't paid for a broadcast licence. The licensors then own a copyright on the recording they make of the game.
As for the rest, the person you're responding to is a little overly distraught but functionally correct, the American media is owned by corporate interests. Sure journalists can write whatever they want, but they have editors who control what gets published and they do risk losing their jobs if they try to get the "wrong" writing published. He's not saying anyone with a press pass has sold out, he's saying the entire media is failing to fulfill it's responsibilities. The public relies on the fourth estate to be vigilant on it's behalf, to watch the government and the corporations, and to make their failures known. The mainstream American media is afraid to criticize corporations because they might loose advertising dollars and afraid to criticize government because it might be unpopular. It's part of the reason why there's so much celebretainment and crime coverage. Both topics are lurid and safe.
I just thought I would explain that since you seem to be failing to understand that a diatribe against the media in general is just that. It has little to do with this particular event.
As to the particular event at hand, while the NCAA has the right to eject anyone they wish from their game for violating their rules, the rule itself seems petty and ignorant. Petty because textual coverage of the game is insignificant in terms of revenue generation, and ignorant because it flies in the face of the new reality of pervasive computing. It's clearly not a free speech issue, but it is notable because the NCAA's actions make them look like money-grubbing thugs.
It wasn't so much that the stuff in BC was better, it was that the items you didn't have to work for were often better than ones you had invested a lot of time and effort into getting. It was kind of a slap in the face to dedicated players.
Also if they follow up on their promise to release a new expansion every year until you can hit level 100, well then in six months everyone is going to be facing the exact same need to regrind every reputation and regear up to raid/do heroic dungeons. It just feels empty and hollow knowing that you can't really make any progress by playing, the best thing to do is stop playing until they finish releasing the expansions that increase the level cap.
It is a lot like the rest of WoW and that, I suppose, was part of the problem. I have a number of reasons, but I helped form an build a casual raiding guild. I'd already been through the gearing up to raid phase once, and I couldn't shake the feeling that the expansion was just a big waste of time. I disliked the absolute reset on gear presented by it, the gap between level 70 gear and level 60 gear was so great that it rendered all previous time investments worthless (unless, of course, you just kept the gold). Even the BC level 58 green gear dropping in the very first area of BC was better than most of the level 60 blue gear.
Beyond that the introduction of so many new reputations that you had to grind, and the tedious collect the whatchamcallit quests where the beasties only drop them 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 just felt like tedious penalties. I don't play a game to work, I play to enjoy myself, and Blizzard introduced too many time sinks between me and my goals. The last straw was the pointless "mage do too much damage" nerf (In my case that increased the time for me to solo the average mob by more than 33%). It showed me that current developers didn't even understand the game their supposed to be running.
They claim they can make a game that doesn't have a tanking-healing-dps model by making every class a dps class. That's retarded, that doesn't change the model it just makes the classes that can only fill the dps slots the worst classes to play from "I-want-get-in-a-group" frame of reference. So combine the assine behaviour of their customer representatives with what appears to be a vendetta against the mage class in particular*, and a quantum increasing in reputation grinding and I completely lost interest in the game. There are just so many other things I could be wasting my time on, that I don't to participate in one I can no longer enjoy.
In the end it didn't seem to introduce anything new and just left me feeling like they had taken 6 months of progess in the game away so that they could suck an additional 6 months of subscription fees from everyone, so I quit.
* I know it's subjective, but I think it's also objectively true that mages had the most negative combination of nerfs and buffs. I also played a paladin, a druid, a warlock, and a hunter. I found the differences in the way the classes were treated to be huge. For all of those other classes, the developers were willing to make changes and give them new powers that were obviously great, and then reduce them down later if they were too good, mages on the other hand were always offered powers that were terrible and only after thousands of posts about how utterly useless the new abilities were (with a few suck-ups loudly declaring that anyone who dared criticize the work of the great Blizzard was a traitor to WoW), would the developers change them a little to make them suck slightly less. It was consistently infuriating and something I tired of watching happen over and over.
Actually, you're absolutely wrong.
Filesharing has little to no effect on sales. In fact, very popular songs actually have a proportional increase in sales when they are shared frequently online.
In fact there are a host of other issues which the RIAA major labels completely ignore in favor of going after the one factor that irks them. You see to greedy assholes who routinely bite the hand that feeds them, the fact that anyone is listening to "their music" for free is galling. The ignore factors like entertainment diversification, the consistent growth of independent labels (yes, independent labels have increasing CD sales not decreasing sales), the negative publicity associated with lying, cheating, stealing, bribing, price-fixing being exposed to the public, the end of an upgrade cycle (sales declines are compared to the top ever sales level of the music industry ignoring the cyclical and temporary nature of upgrade cycles), and the narrowing of industry channels through the disappearance of retail music stores and do we even need to go into the general agreement that the major labels have been producing inferior albums for years?
There are plenty of reasons for falling revenues, the problem is the only reason that doesn't put the blame on the executives in charge of the music industry is the only one that given any credence by the music industry. That's in their own selfish best interest (not that of the music companies or the music industry), if they admit to making huge mistakes and covering them up years, then they could lose their cushy jobs. I understand why they do it, I just am not willing to tolerate it.
Hell, considering how little artists get paid for music the coming changes in the efficiency of music distribution are long overdue. The CD system of the music distribution is insane in a digital world. Completely insane and since the wholesale price of CD sales is the determining factor for the "size" of the music industry it's no wonder they're falling. At best the artists get to split $1 of a CD sale between them. Often it's less, I've heard of the musicians earning less than one cent per copy sold. So the rest of the $15-$20 of the CD price is overhead. That means 75%-95% of the "industry" revenues are waste.
We should expect the revenues to fall dramatically as they shift from traditional distribution to digital. However, these are professional money grubbers here, you can also expect profits to rise once they've finally admitted they have to do this and have begun to figure out how to work the system. Right now, the major labels all still appear to be in denial.
Your opening position should be "The average pay for my job is double what I'm currently earning". Make sure you bring some documentation with you. Seriously, according to that site, on average system admins with no experience earn about 41,000 USD / year.
Not really, it's more like they lean less right.
On of my friends has a wii, the only game we play when he brings it out is Bomberman. We're all gamers, we've tried his other games and every other game just seems to suck.
I, personally, have no interest in the Wii, there just are too few games that I want to play for it, and I don't expect to see most of the games that I want to play on it.
They *used* to be able to pull it off. I'm skeptical now. Blizzard's top people are gone.
The people who made starcraft? Gone.
Warcraft III? Gone.
World of Warcraft? Gone.
Even the people who ran Battle.net? Gone.
I'm expecting an inferior sequel that will sell really well. I just can't get excited about it after the huge let down of Burning Crusade.
Frankly, from my experience working in both the private and the public sector, you're just as likely to run into incompetence in either one. In theory, the private sector should be more efficient than the public sector, but that only works as long as no people are involved. Both government and industry are made up of people and both reflect the strengths of weaknesses of people.
Climate change and the environment is turning out to be one of the largest driving factors in Canadian politics. The Conservatives Party is being forced to actually enact some positive changes. I'm not actually sure that the claims of high unemployment from fighting climate change are true. Sure if we shut down every industry that emitted pollution there would be rampant unemployment, but there's also plenty of opportunities (especially for early adopters). There's research to be done. New cleaner power plants have to be built. A carbon trading marketplace to be set up. Regulations to be enforced, and environmentally friendly products to be invented, engineered, marketed, and sold.
The key here is that early action may make reduce or even eliminate the need for later, more dramatic and more costly action. Right now, we have a few groups who are protecting their profits by trying to ensure that the pollution remains "free", but the longer we tolerate their misbehaviour, the more costly the solution becomes.
Actually, we are already feeling the costs of tolerating their bad behaviour. Rising cost of gas? The cost wouldn't be so high and filling your car up wouldn't so expensive if the U.S. Government hadn't kowtowed to car companies that claimed "making our cars more fuel-efficient will cost people their jobs". Now U.S. automakers are in dire straits anyway and they can't sell their cars overseas because they don't meet emissions standards. If something has to be done, "it costs too much" is never a good answer.
I'm glad Lanza agrees that exploting the Virginia Tech shootings for profit is sick and wrong. Now if only he'd quit being a hypocrite.
It is so very, very sad when satire comes true.
Isn't "Super Paper Mario" a "franchise" Mario entry and a sequel to "Paper Mario"? Doesn't that mean it's a franchise of franchise? Does that make it bad, or maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't judge a game to be bad simply because it's a sequel?