You don't seem to understand basic economics here. Gold farmers sell gold to other players who use this (for them) instantly created cash to buy high end items, thus driving the demand for high end items up while the supply stays essentially constant.
It's not farmers selling stuff that drives epic prices up, it's the gold buyers buying stuff. You can't have one side without the other.
There are different sects of Muslims, some believe in "live and let live". Others believe in "force people to live the way they should and kill those who don't because if they're going to hell any way, might as well cut out the cancer before they infect other people with their liberal ways".
The solution is not to look inward and say "what can we do to make them stop hating us?" It's to ask instead, "what can we do to make them understand that trying to kill us doesn't work as a strategy."
Have you ever tried to convice an angry man with a gun that shooting someone won't solve any problems?
The real question is, what's the easiest way for us to destroy terrorist networks? Hunt down the individuals involved and everyone who supports them and kill them (and all subsequently recruited people) until there are no terrorist networks? Or work to fix whatever conditions exist that encourage people to support terrorists so we starve off the supply of money, supplies and recruits?
"Every time that the prices on those skyrocketed, it was due to "regular players", and was always brought back down by farmers that continued to sell at the lower, older price or cheaper."
That's part of the problem, you see. By driving the price on materials low and then redistributing gold to other players based on out-of-game cash, farmers make material farming unprofitable for regular players while simultaneously driving the price up for high end items. So if you want to buy an epic item off the auction hall, farmers drive the price of the epic up and the price of all the stuff you can sell down. Thus forcing the average player to spend a lot more time farming their own gold to compete with the presence of bought gold.
That's the problem with gold farmers, they distort the economy and force players to do more work to progress in the game.
Notice that we are enemy #2 (sandwiched between Israel and the UK), but of these, we've had the fewest terrorist acts in our country since 9/11. That means we are stopping attacks.
Congratulations, Homer.
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm. Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, dear. Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away. Homer: Oh, how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: It's just a stupid rock. Homer: Uh-huh. Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you? [Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money] Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
Age of Mythology is an truly, truly aweful board game. If you play with people with any interest in winning the games becomes a downright nasty game of resource denial. Some of the sides have units that simply trump the other sides units and the combat system is just pseudo-randomness added to pseudo-randomness added to randomness and that's overkill.
Play Zombies instead, it's a much better game that won't make you regret playing it.
I have to agree. Throw in his Republican-style "We have to censor everyone for the sake of the children" rhetoric and you have some who appears to be genuinely clueless.
I think you're taking this a little too personally.
I bought a PS2 because it had games I wanted to play. If the PS3 doesn't have games I want to play at a price I want to pay I won't buy one. There's no sense in getting angry over this. Either it's something you want at a price you want to pay or it's not.
It's your choice. Raging against Sony is pointless.
It's simple. The fact that you plan to overreact and boycott a company for something they did months ago is now irrelevent. You shouldn't repeat it every single time the company is mentioned. It makes you a dull boor, and your friends start avoiding you because you act like an asshole. So save your diatribe until somebody asks you if you plan to buy, otherwise just shut up about it. We've heard it all before and we're tired of your loud mouth griping. So it's correctly modded as flamebait.
Except no one has ever demonstrated that this difference should matter. It's all theory: that maybe by playing a game where you do something you become more likely to actually do it. Of course, some people have decided that a theory that there might be link is reason enough to take action.
The only evidence provided so far to support this theory is that many players become excited while playing violent videogames. Of course, this couldn't have anything to do with the fact that we play them because they're exciting.
Maybe I like to pick at somewhat obscure flaws, but the problem that jumped out at me was that since the article complains about how the new consoles are not as cool looking as the old consoles, the author bears the responsibility to include pictures of the old "better" consoles. I mean I only saw 3 pictures, the PS3, the XBox 360 and the Wii. All of which the author decries as ungly trash. So, where are the pictures of these hallowed consoles of old that put the new consoles to shame?
The obvious refusal to present easily obtainable and credible evidence to support the case that the author is trying to make is an obvious sign that the author does not really believe his case will withstand any amount of scrutiny. So why should be bother reading this junk if the author doesn't even believe it?
You're like the guy who has his fingers in his eyes and his eyes jammed shut screaming "I can't hear you! Na-na-na!".
The evidence is here and is pretty damn conclusive. However, you prefer to believe that a book written by some people about 2000 years ago in another language, and translated several times, is "truthier" than the evidence right in front of you.
1) Huge save games 2) Not much replay value 3) Relatively short compared to other games 4) Somewhat disappointing ending 5) Not really a "mature" game as much as a "family-friendly" game.
It got buried because while good, it wasn't better than the competition.
This has to be repeated. Pay the people who have access to your companies confidential information as if they had access to your companies confidential information. Treat them well and they will treat the company well. Employees who are happy don't sell company secrets to the highest bidder. The president/CEO of the company is not the only one who's important.
Voting more than once is pretty much small scale fraud, that requires coordination and conspiracy to perform. Most people don't care because it seems unfeasible to have thousands of people vote multiple times to actually influence an election. It's much easier to stuff a ballot box with extra votes after the election is closed, than it is to organize a legion of multiple votes and much more importantly keep the fraud quiet after the fact.
Well here's where we make the political parties do the work, and they'll gladly do it too. You don't hire your own contractors to verify the software, you make it legal for anyone running in the election to hire scrutineers to examine the machines. You require the specifications of the machines to be available and require that all interested parties be present at specified time after the election to examine the machines that were used.
This, of course, requires the voting machines to be built to obvious and rigorous security standards. The cases must not be interchangeable, there must be a record maintained of any changes to the software running on the machine with a time stamp, and everything else the Nevada gaming commission has to say. They're the guys who should be in charge of the specs, really. They're the ones with experience in setting the standards for verifyability in a hostile environment because:
1) The owner of slot machines wants it to pay out less. 2) The player wants it to pay out more. 3) The commision wants to be able to verify that it is paying out at the specified rate.
So you can't trust either of the groups who heave regular access to the machine, this is amazingly similar to the voting situation where:
1) The people operating the polling stations want a particular candidate to win. 2) Every voter wants a particular candidate to win. 3) Observers want the election to return an accurate count of the votes.
It is not similar to ATMs. ATM security is all in the outer shell construction and audit logs. Furthermore, the bank has no interest in defrauding you, they use service charges instead of simply "disappearing" your money. So if you were to penetrate the exterior covering of an ATM, you might find a PC running Windows 2000 or OS/2, depending on the manufacturer. I would not be surprised at all if Diebold ATMs rely entirely on the restriction of physical access to the system for their security.
Hollywood isn't out of ideas, it's afraid of new ideas. Movies are expensive, making a bad movie is really expensive. No one wants to be the scapegoat who suggested something different when a movie fails.
Frankly I don't care whether or not you go off "the deep end". You're evidence that Windows doesn't preload IE is that "the documentation doesn't say it does". Microsoft's documentation is far from complete.
Doing a quick goodle search what I found was the explorer preloads a significant portion of the code used by IE without explicitly preloading IE. What it doesn't preload is the rendering engine and some of the extensible "features" like activeX. In practice that means that half of the DLLs that IE needs are probably already in memory, and what remains to be loaded are the specific IE chrome libraries and the rendering engine.
So, like the answer to so many questions, it's not a case of black and white. Parts of the code needed by IE are preloaded by explorer, and they're preloaded because explorer uses them.
The "different process" stuff is wrong according to the developers who actually developed IE7, and if you disagree with me, then you can go google their discussion on MSN, because I don't feel like beeing any more helpful to a fanatic like you than you were to me. DLLs are shared between processes, that's why they're DLLs.
Yes, put the X-Files down and step away from the TV.
Seriously, while X-Files had some interesting episodes it also had terribly bad episodes like the one where Mulder is somehow absorbed by a VR system when the hologram projector "un-draws" him, and then Scully has to go all "Ridley" on the computer to save him. The worst thing is the episode was written by William Gibson (of "Neuromancer" fame), and that's exactly the episode he wanted to make, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of what is wrong with that episode, but I hope you see the problem.
I'm sure there are other terrible episodes that people could list, but the huge problem here is that they blantantly and repeatedly break the laws of physics without any justification. That's where they lost me, you can break the rules as long as you justify breaking the rules. When you break the rules and no one notices or cares that the impossible has just happened, well then you've jumped the shark and I can't take your series seriously any more.
As I understand it "cable service" does in fact pay for the "just the service" with a large, tasty profit margin for the cable company. Shows are produced by production houses who are generally funded by the networks who provide content to the cable services. The cable companies don't, generally, pay the stations for content, stations get their money by selling advertising time. So any time you're charged a fee for additional channels (barring payTV channels that have no commericals), you're being charged to change a filter. The monthly fee for those additional channels is 100% profit for the cable company.
3 million sold is presumably the number that are in the hands of consumers, the 5 million from your link is the number that MS has shipped to stores. They're different metrics, take care not to mix them carelessly.
Actually, I doubt it. It's not splashy enough to be a PR tactic. If it was PR, there would be a press release about how Sony was doing this for the customer, yada, yada, yada. Instead what you have is an article in a trade publication being summarized on a web site, which is then linked by Slashdot.
It's just people with nothing better to read/write about overanalyzing every move Sony makes.
Personally, I think it's telling that he doesn't want people who work for him to find out exactly what he been doing. And overall, this isn't really that bad, it helps build a case against him. The attempt to cover up what's he's doing prevents him from pleading ignorance later.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the Xbox 360 and a year of online play?
You don't seem to understand basic economics here. Gold farmers sell gold to other players who use this (for them) instantly created cash to buy high end items, thus driving the demand for high end items up while the supply stays essentially constant.
It's not farmers selling stuff that drives epic prices up, it's the gold buyers buying stuff. You can't have one side without the other.
There are different sects of Muslims, some believe in "live and let live". Others believe in "force people to live the way they should and kill those who don't because if they're going to hell any way, might as well cut out the cancer before they infect other people with their liberal ways".
Have you ever tried to convice an angry man with a gun that shooting someone won't solve any problems?
The real question is, what's the easiest way for us to destroy terrorist networks? Hunt down the individuals involved and everyone who supports them and kill them (and all subsequently recruited people) until there are no terrorist networks? Or work to fix whatever conditions exist that encourage people to support terrorists so we starve off the supply of money, supplies and recruits?
Or should we being doing both simultaneously?
"Every time that the prices on those skyrocketed, it was due to "regular players", and was always brought back down by farmers that continued to sell at the lower, older price or cheaper."
That's part of the problem, you see. By driving the price on materials low and then redistributing gold to other players based on out-of-game cash, farmers make material farming unprofitable for regular players while simultaneously driving the price up for high end items. So if you want to buy an epic item off the auction hall, farmers drive the price of the epic up and the price of all the stuff you can sell down. Thus forcing the average player to spend a lot more time farming their own gold to compete with the presence of bought gold.
That's the problem with gold farmers, they distort the economy and force players to do more work to progress in the game.
Congratulations, Homer.
Age of Mythology is an truly, truly aweful board game. If you play with people with any interest in winning the games becomes a downright nasty game of resource denial. Some of the sides have units that simply trump the other sides units and the combat system is just pseudo-randomness added to pseudo-randomness added to randomness and that's overkill.
Play Zombies instead, it's a much better game that won't make you regret playing it.
I have to agree. Throw in his Republican-style "We have to censor everyone for the sake of the children" rhetoric and you have some who appears to be genuinely clueless.
I think you're taking this a little too personally.
I bought a PS2 because it had games I wanted to play. If the PS3 doesn't have games I want to play at a price I want to pay I won't buy one. There's no sense in getting angry over this. Either it's something you want at a price you want to pay or it's not.
It's your choice. Raging against Sony is pointless.
It's simple. The fact that you plan to overreact and boycott a company for something they did months ago is now irrelevent. You shouldn't repeat it every single time the company is mentioned. It makes you a dull boor, and your friends start avoiding you because you act like an asshole. So save your diatribe until somebody asks you if you plan to buy, otherwise just shut up about it. We've heard it all before and we're tired of your loud mouth griping. So it's correctly modded as flamebait.
Except no one has ever demonstrated that this difference should matter. It's all theory: that maybe by playing a game where you do something you become more likely to actually do it. Of course, some people have decided that a theory that there might be link is reason enough to take action.
The only evidence provided so far to support this theory is that many players become excited while playing violent videogames. Of course, this couldn't have anything to do with the fact that we play them because they're exciting.
Maybe I like to pick at somewhat obscure flaws, but the problem that jumped out at me was that since the article complains about how the new consoles are not as cool looking as the old consoles, the author bears the responsibility to include pictures of the old "better" consoles. I mean I only saw 3 pictures, the PS3, the XBox 360 and the Wii. All of which the author decries as ungly trash. So, where are the pictures of these hallowed consoles of old that put the new consoles to shame?
The obvious refusal to present easily obtainable and credible evidence to support the case that the author is trying to make is an obvious sign that the author does not really believe his case will withstand any amount of scrutiny. So why should be bother reading this junk if the author doesn't even believe it?
You're like the guy who has his fingers in his eyes and his eyes jammed shut screaming "I can't hear you! Na-na-na!".
The evidence is here and is pretty damn conclusive. However, you prefer to believe that a book written by some people about 2000 years ago in another language, and translated several times, is "truthier" than the evidence right in front of you.
1) Huge save games
2) Not much replay value
3) Relatively short compared to other games
4) Somewhat disappointing ending
5) Not really a "mature" game as much as a "family-friendly" game.
It got buried because while good, it wasn't better than the competition.
This has to be repeated. Pay the people who have access to your companies confidential information as if they had access to your companies confidential information. Treat them well and they will treat the company well. Employees who are happy don't sell company secrets to the highest bidder. The president/CEO of the company is not the only one who's important.
Voting more than once is pretty much small scale fraud, that requires coordination and conspiracy to perform. Most people don't care because it seems unfeasible to have thousands of people vote multiple times to actually influence an election. It's much easier to stuff a ballot box with extra votes after the election is closed, than it is to organize a legion of multiple votes and much more importantly keep the fraud quiet after the fact.
Well here's where we make the political parties do the work, and they'll gladly do it too. You don't hire your own contractors to verify the software, you make it legal for anyone running in the election to hire scrutineers to examine the machines. You require the specifications of the machines to be available and require that all interested parties be present at specified time after the election to examine the machines that were used.
This, of course, requires the voting machines to be built to obvious and rigorous security standards. The cases must not be interchangeable, there must be a record maintained of any changes to the software running on the machine with a time stamp, and everything else the Nevada gaming commission has to say. They're the guys who should be in charge of the specs, really. They're the ones with experience in setting the standards for verifyability in a hostile environment because:
1) The owner of slot machines wants it to pay out less.
2) The player wants it to pay out more.
3) The commision wants to be able to verify that it is paying out at the specified rate.
So you can't trust either of the groups who heave regular access to the machine, this is amazingly similar to the voting situation where:
1) The people operating the polling stations want a particular candidate to win.
2) Every voter wants a particular candidate to win.
3) Observers want the election to return an accurate count of the votes.
It is not similar to ATMs. ATM security is all in the outer shell construction and audit logs. Furthermore, the bank has no interest in defrauding you, they use service charges instead of simply "disappearing" your money. So if you were to penetrate the exterior covering of an ATM, you might find a PC running Windows 2000 or OS/2, depending on the manufacturer. I would not be surprised at all if Diebold ATMs rely entirely on the restriction of physical access to the system for their security.
Hollywood isn't out of ideas, it's afraid of new ideas. Movies are expensive, making a bad movie is really expensive. No one wants to be the scapegoat who suggested something different when a movie fails.
In a science fiction setting, everyone has a blaster. Wizards =/= Stormtroopers.
Frankly I don't care whether or not you go off "the deep end". You're evidence that Windows doesn't preload IE is that "the documentation doesn't say it does". Microsoft's documentation is far from complete.
Doing a quick goodle search what I found was the explorer preloads a significant portion of the code used by IE without explicitly preloading IE. What it doesn't preload is the rendering engine and some of the extensible "features" like activeX. In practice that means that half of the DLLs that IE needs are probably already in memory, and what remains to be loaded are the specific IE chrome libraries and the rendering engine.
So, like the answer to so many questions, it's not a case of black and white. Parts of the code needed by IE are preloaded by explorer, and they're preloaded because explorer uses them.
The "different process" stuff is wrong according to the developers who actually developed IE7, and if you disagree with me, then you can go google their discussion on MSN, because I don't feel like beeing any more helpful to a fanatic like you than you were to me. DLLs are shared between processes, that's why they're DLLs.
Yes, put the X-Files down and step away from the TV.
Seriously, while X-Files had some interesting episodes it also had terribly bad episodes like the one where Mulder is somehow absorbed by a VR system when the hologram projector "un-draws" him, and then Scully has to go all "Ridley" on the computer to save him. The worst thing is the episode was written by William Gibson (of "Neuromancer" fame), and that's exactly the episode he wanted to make, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of what is wrong with that episode, but I hope you see the problem.
I'm sure there are other terrible episodes that people could list, but the huge problem here is that they blantantly and repeatedly break the laws of physics without any justification. That's where they lost me, you can break the rules as long as you justify breaking the rules. When you break the rules and no one notices or cares that the impossible has just happened, well then you've jumped the shark and I can't take your series seriously any more.
As I understand it "cable service" does in fact pay for the "just the service" with a large, tasty profit margin for the cable company. Shows are produced by production houses who are generally funded by the networks who provide content to the cable services. The cable companies don't, generally, pay the stations for content, stations get their money by selling advertising time. So any time you're charged a fee for additional channels (barring payTV channels that have no commericals), you're being charged to change a filter. The monthly fee for those additional channels is 100% profit for the cable company.
3 million sold is presumably the number that are in the hands of consumers, the 5 million from your link is the number that MS has shipped to stores. They're different metrics, take care not to mix them carelessly.
Actually, I doubt it. It's not splashy enough to be a PR tactic. If it was PR, there would be a press release about how Sony was doing this for the customer, yada, yada, yada. Instead what you have is an article in a trade publication being summarized on a web site, which is then linked by Slashdot.
It's just people with nothing better to read/write about overanalyzing every move Sony makes.
Personally, I think it's telling that he doesn't want people who work for him to find out exactly what he been doing. And overall, this isn't really that bad, it helps build a case against him. The attempt to cover up what's he's doing prevents him from pleading ignorance later.