Re:One reason why I'm still using Window Maker....
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Basically the problem is that X, your WM, and your program run (and therefore redraw) during different timeslots. In case of GNOME and KDE, they may call other servers out of process before doing the drawing. This becomes really noticable when you move windows, or windows appear.
Is that why xchat has a wierd lag in the text rendering? It alt-tabs quickly enough, but (while my computer was still alive and runnning debian unstable) the text inside of it would visibly render down the window. Xchat doens't do that on Windows (my own personal hell), but who knows. Could be some wierd font server in X from Debian, could be that windows' priority system for the upper level window kicks in well enough. I've always wondered how to fix that; if it still occurs on the amd64 setup I'm building, I'll definately consider x.org.
What the statement means is that a company is mostly valued for the people working in it. Buying up a going concern and liquidating it will significantly reduce the value. In other words, companies have little value on the books, compared with the value of the work that is being done.
The liscences held are valuable, but most of them are one-offs that would be market failures if they suffered from a delay caused by mass developer exodus during acquisition. After that, Ubisoft would never get another movie liscence to mint money with during Christmas. So, the most valuable aspect of the equation is man-hours. Computer hardware depricates quickly, and certainly the executives who don't sit well with being owned by EA won't be there long.
So basically, they care about both, one because of the other.
Well, apparently (according to the article) 74 percent of "selective colleges" were in the top 1/4th of socioeconomic status, ie their parents make good money (see page 9 of the study linked in the article). Meaning, that they can attend on their parent's dime. The study also claims that graduation rates would be slightly higher if admittance was based on grades and test scores, with low income as a preference. I have no idea how the study comes to that conclusion, or how the study mentioned in the study works.
A while back, I had heard about Harvard considering giving every student a scholarship, and simply paying for the loss (not all that much, comparitively speaking) with alumni donations. Alumni donations usually exceed tuition payments, so it could have been workable, although I suspect they instead decided to spend the excess of donationed funds elsehwhere, perhaps a new alumni building, or a new car for the President of Harvard. It would have been an interesting experiment, and would certainly have perked the interest of many students who don't even bother trying to get into Harvard simply because of the reputation for costing so damn much. Certainly, they would have gotten my application fee that way.
Nintendo was probably the first to market with a rumble device, with the release of Star Fox 64 in 1997. The articles say the lawsuits are over force feedback, which could mean many things. The technical term would be some form of variable resistance applied to the joystick or something, but rumble features are often considered "force feedback." The PS2 has pressure sensative face buttons, which could cause one to contemplate. The Immersion website seems to promote the rumble aspect of force feedback, so clearly Nintendo could be liable.
Immersion's gone after the other big two (sucessfully), is Nintendo next? Perhaps, but Nintendo's no slouch when it comes to patents themselves, and perhaps Immersion doesn't wish to lose their own patent viability in a court battle with Nintendo. I wonder, if the Immersion and Nintendo patents are similar, if Nintendo can sue for damages and a share of the wealth...
On the other hand, "liberalized" evidence proceedings have easily ensured the conviction of Microsoft. The Burst.com case probably couldn't go forward without these proceedings, and could very well set a further precedent for not only discovery but lawyer-attorney privledges!
Ironically, Twin Snakes had the MGS3 zoom feature. I don't remember noticing that on MGS2, but its certainly possible. Its not a great invention, compared to say, not having cutscenes. If you want interactive dialog, take a cue from Deux Ex already. Something like 80 percent of the dialog was "heads up." Sure, its stealth action was hampered by the FPS POV, but there's plenty of redeeming factors that make Deus Ex a game worthy of study, and imitation.
Probably, we have hit a considerable wall in 3d game design. The amount of effort it takes to build characters, textures, and the like is incredible. Within 2d, game authors built up a substantial set of tools to automate and reduce the effort of building a game. As an example, Final Fantasy Legend 3 appears to use metatiles to store its towns and levels. This way, you can simply design one house, put a sign above the door that indiates "Items" or "Inn" and your work is mostly done. Certainly, its not perfect, especially for artists who fight against repetitive graphics.
Its not quite outsourcing. What I believe he's referring to is referral programs. Amazon.com and others do use referral programs to boost their advertising; its certainly outside advertising, but they still manage to do a lot of advertising themselves. These programs are usually designed to include as many people as possible, so its certainly no surprise that you find people pushing their referral program over gator. While I'd appreciate a more proactive stance against the practice, I certainly wouldn't want to destroy the program; perhaps some day I'd like to participate in a revenue sharing program. I hope that doesn't make me an evil person.
Even slashdot participates in this advertising process, so if you feel badly, perhaps you should stop visiting here?
Well, in case you didn't notice, there was a lawsuit going on. Lawyers aren't free, although they can often counter-sue for court fees and the like. Still, if you want a settlement, you usually end up paying your own lawyers fees.
The bottom line is yes, there's something about political climate in the US you don't know, but you either should have (read the article) or you're feigning ignorance to make some sort of point about how evil and corrupt American politics is. Bravo.
But the income would be foreign, and earned abroad. This income is generally not taxed as income in the US. Instead, he'll wind up paying Japanese taxes. Strange world we live in.
Also I've heard much about forming a company, and paying yourself a salary. Apparently, corporate income taxes are smaller than the upper bracket of income. With a decent accountant, presumably one could reinvest that money however he sees fit, and take it as a write off against the lump sum income.
Really, for the most part, your computer is at idle. If you look at top, you'll typically see two or three processes in the running state at all times. Some are sleeping, others are waiting on I/O. Faster processors and dual core chips might cut that down to 1 active process per cpu, but for the most part, it will simply improve latency immesurably.
That's why they're pushing things like PCIexpress and sata. Unfortunately, disk speed isn't keeping pace. SATA is rated to 150 MB/s, and SATA is on the horizon, but the hard drives connected to them rarely hit that limit, if I'm interpreting the tom's hardware charts correctly. Sure, your disk cache can might that fast, but it turns out for a lot of desktop I/O, its useless. Running md5sum on the disk only goes through the data once, as does writing a DVD.
The standard solutions to this problem don't really work; RAID gets expensive (and bulky) fast, and Dell isn't about to choose a fast small disk drive over the larger, slower one. Improving density, making the disks faster and adding platters certainly help, but for some reason disk media doesn't have the same Moore's law performance pressure that CPUs fall into.
Well, the guy at microcenter indicated that he was considering an radeon but it wont fit into the shuttle case he wants to use. I was considering the shittle cases, but they're so damn expensive its hard to justify.
The pictures of the sapphire look much shorter than the ATi Radeon; perhaps you've got a smaller radeon? (lucky!)
Basically, because they can charge that much. Its ludicrous, and aluminum is a cheaper substance overall. People think they need the added cooling that aluminum provides and the manufacturers are quick to trump that claim up (this 'thermal conductivity' theory is even promoted by ESR's guide on buying PC parts). The markup on these things is huge, because everyone's excited about smaller computers that fit nicely in your home theater. What they fail to mention, is that you certainly can't fit an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro inside that thing.
Ironically, this thing is tiny. But if they made a plastic one, they wouldn't be able to sell it for more than 100 dollars. Where's competition when you need it? Or at least, a newegg category?
All its really doing is playing streamed video over the internet via its wifi link. The DS could theoretically do the same, but that's beside the point, really. What matters is whether playback will be Better, or Worse, than Realmedia. My money's on Worse, simply because they have a tendency to overstate themselves (how many polygons/sec was the ps2 supposed to push?). Certainly, if you own a PSP, this sounds exciting, but the options are either you record stuff elsewhere (like tivo or mythTV) or you get it from an official source from a content server hosted by Sony or whoever is actually doing this. The bad thing here is, its up to them, not you.
Because Libertarian is the political party of the Internet, and because during the late 90s stock and options as compensation were regular. Are the two related? Possibly. But as long as "the free market is so awesome, and I'm so smart I can rise above current cruft of inept wankers" lives on, and project managers rise from the rank and file, unions won't be taking off any time soon. And certainly, those blue collar workers aren't likely to sympathise about the health costs of sitting in a cubicle for 50 hours a week minimum.
Also the "IT industry" isn't keen on its workers going on strike. Imagine if a CPU processing plant went on strike for a week. Moore's law (that hypothetical boundary that we redefine as the situation changes) generally implies that our hardware is going to be 1 percent faster every week. If that strike has any real purpose, it very well could go on for a month or longer. That's looking at a five percent loss over competitors, which means your product is now painfully difficult to sell, AND you've lost any possible premium pricing potential, not to mention the hit on production you'll take. So the companies that comprise the industry aren't about to sing praise of unions onto US Congressional inqueries.
I hope I've answered your question without implying that I don't exactly like the situation either.
Yea, but they were also seriously expensive. A corp has to rely on the threat of using ICE just as much as actually using ICE. If they're paying for ice, that's cash that can't be used to advance agendas.
I think you're missing a fundamental difference: linus was a single guy with relatively little. He had just a super duper terminal emulator and access to the internet. Valve already has a state of the art system that relatively few could improve upon, and a reasonably solid business model. Linus could not have expected that his kernel would go to demolish the minix user base, become the foundation for several distribution/'opreating systems', and result in millions in his bank account. There's plenty of GPL'd software out there that doesn't even make a dime, despite active development on software that requires a lot of expertise and is generally considered intereting to the programmer community (for example, real time 3d rendering engines!).
Its a personal opinion of mine, that one releases software under the GPL not because they're altruistic, but because they're greedy. Not for money, but for source code. A true gift to the world would be unencumbered, such as the BSD TCP/IP stack. I don't intend this as any sort of slam or insult to the GNU foudation, but rather a reasonable rationale for those who refuse to believe in the moral imperatives of Free Software.
>>So how exactly is that different of when I take Firefox, name its "Grumbels Personal Browser" add some stuff to it and release? Why should I be allowed to do that with Firefox, or any kind of free software, but not with movies, videogames or whatever?
>You're not allowed to do that with Firefox, or any Free Software; doing so would be misappropriation.
Are you for real? Firefox was a stunning example of how someone did exactly what was decribed above. Someone (I don't think it was grumbel) decided that mozilla was too damn huge, and getting huger. So he decided to remove all the thunderbird extensions, the irc extensions, the huge preferences menus, etc and just bring the size down in any way possible. Eventually it was called phoenix, and given to people, without the explicit support of the Mozilla foundation. It was only after it was clear that phoenix was not only not going away, but was pulling developers away from the Mozilla effort that the foundation decided on the firefox directives. You can find similar examples, even within the GNU foundation; gcc 3.0 comes to mind as a fork that became official.
At its very heart, nethack is about identification and risk management. Identifying something by using it on yourself is the most dangerous way there is.
There is a challenge that you've touched on, which is that a deep game like nethack is very unfriendly to new players. The challenge for nethack is to make it more friendly without making the depth irrelevant. The easier the game is, the less important and interesting depth will be. The sheer combinatorial possibilities of nethack is interesting because you need to exploit it, not just hit everything with arrows, swords and magic and move down a level.
Its not that the rares are useless, they're just not vital in light of the heavy deck searching mechanisms available, especially for runners. Most of the rares have interesting or unusual (like a wall that does damage) side effects that are difficult to plan for and occasionally unreliable (Quest for Catakin). That doesn't make them unplayable, but you might want to keep in mind that sealed deck play is considered an equally challenging and worthwhile tourney format. There's still plenty of "shit rares," but no more than MtG (certainly less than a certain Legends expansion!)
Also, the mere utterance of RTS disturbs me. At its very core, warcraft and its spawn are essentially clickfests, click faster and you win. Micromanagement and deadlines is a difficult combination to mix bluffing and hidden information with. Certainly feel free to experiment with your own ideas, hell maybe even turn them into reality. Thats how we got Uplink!
I never was an accountant, but I do file taxes for myself. Tax return expenses are deductable, not free. That means you don't have to pay taxes on the money you spend. You still have to pay the accountant, and the government won't reimburse you for that cost. That's my problem with them.
Additonally, people who see software as some sort of Right to Freedom moral problem in today's society, take issue with having to pay for tax software that isn't Free. I'll be arsed as to how they expect software developers to lighten themselves of responsibility in the case of widespread software failure, or even a single significant one.
Netrunner did have an established competitive scene, and the most popular decks were largely rare void. "The Digger" sought to make a run on R&D so deep that it found 7 points worth of agenda in a single run. The deck is based on uncommon and commons, mostly R&D chips and moles. The corp decks are usually take one of two tactics: tag n bag, and turbo agendas. Neither of these need rares to survive. The only killer rare that I can recall is Loan from Chiba, and that got banned pretty quickly (there's no 4 card limit, which helps reduce the intense deck scrying in MtG).
For the most part, Rare cards were reserved for those interesting cards that weren't practical to have a ton of. Since they're no more durable in play than a common, there's no huge push for "card economy" that dominates the valuation of mtg playworthiness.
Going back to dropping the ccg format, its pretty simple to come up with a system where the corp simply has to plan out things ahead of time. Maybe keep the card concept and simply let them write a single number on it that indicates both the cost of the card and its strength. The trouble is a victory condition for the runner. There's a rule in netrunner that regulates agenda point density in the corp's r&d, but thats thrown out the window. The runner needs some way to take initiative when the corp is stalling. You can also argue that making everything deterministic will lead to a dominate strategy.
Netrunner was pretty cool. It had a great style and theme, and the game was well balanced (mostly), despite the fact that the two players had vastly different goals, and means of achieving them. No side is ever out of the runnnig and at a huge disadvantage. What Netrunner boiled down to is taking risks and bluffing, whereas Magic comes down to rules lawyering, buying expensive cards, and painstaking attention to deck contruction principles.
The true barriers to mass market appeal is that it had to compete with Magic, and there weren't many obvious multiplayer rules. I'd be interested to see the Netrunner concepts turned into a game somehow, but I can never get my head around how to drop the card concept.
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Basically the problem is that X, your WM, and your program run (and therefore redraw) during different timeslots. In case of GNOME and KDE, they may call other servers out of process before doing the drawing. This becomes really noticable when you move windows, or windows appear.
Is that why xchat has a wierd lag in the text rendering? It alt-tabs quickly enough, but (while my computer was still alive and runnning debian unstable) the text inside of it would visibly render down the window. Xchat doens't do that on Windows (my own personal hell), but who knows. Could be some wierd font server in X from Debian, could be that windows' priority system for the upper level window kicks in well enough. I've always wondered how to fix that; if it still occurs on the amd64 setup I'm building, I'll definately consider x.org.
What the statement means is that a company is mostly valued for the people working in it. Buying up a going concern and liquidating it will significantly reduce the value. In other words, companies have little value on the books, compared with the value of the work that is being done.
The liscences held are valuable, but most of them are one-offs that would be market failures if they suffered from a delay caused by mass developer exodus during acquisition. After that, Ubisoft would never get another movie liscence to mint money with during Christmas. So, the most valuable aspect of the equation is man-hours. Computer hardware depricates quickly, and certainly the executives who don't sit well with being owned by EA won't be there long.
So basically, they care about both, one because of the other.
Well, apparently (according to the article) 74 percent of "selective colleges" were in the top 1/4th of socioeconomic status, ie their parents make good money (see page 9 of the study linked in the article). Meaning, that they can attend on their parent's dime. The study also claims that graduation rates would be slightly higher if admittance was based on grades and test scores, with low income as a preference. I have no idea how the study comes to that conclusion, or how the study mentioned in the study works.
A while back, I had heard about Harvard considering giving every student a scholarship, and simply paying for the loss (not all that much, comparitively speaking) with alumni donations. Alumni donations usually exceed tuition payments, so it could have been workable, although I suspect they instead decided to spend the excess of donationed funds elsehwhere, perhaps a new alumni building, or a new car for the President of Harvard. It would have been an interesting experiment, and would certainly have perked the interest of many students who don't even bother trying to get into Harvard simply because of the reputation for costing so damn much. Certainly, they would have gotten my application fee that way.
Nintendo was probably the first to market with a rumble device, with the release of Star Fox 64 in 1997. The articles say the lawsuits are over force feedback, which could mean many things. The technical term would be some form of variable resistance applied to the joystick or something, but rumble features are often considered "force feedback." The PS2 has pressure sensative face buttons, which could cause one to contemplate. The Immersion website seems to promote the rumble aspect of force feedback, so clearly Nintendo could be liable.
Immersion's gone after the other big two (sucessfully), is Nintendo next? Perhaps, but Nintendo's no slouch when it comes to patents themselves, and perhaps Immersion doesn't wish to lose their own patent viability in a court battle with Nintendo. I wonder, if the Immersion and Nintendo patents are similar, if Nintendo can sue for damages and a share of the wealth...
On the other hand, "liberalized" evidence proceedings have easily ensured the conviction of Microsoft. The Burst.com case probably couldn't go forward without these proceedings, and could very well set a further precedent for not only discovery but lawyer-attorney privledges!
Ironically, Twin Snakes had the MGS3 zoom feature. I don't remember noticing that on MGS2, but its certainly possible. Its not a great invention, compared to say, not having cutscenes. If you want interactive dialog, take a cue from Deux Ex already. Something like 80 percent of the dialog was "heads up." Sure, its stealth action was hampered by the FPS POV, but there's plenty of redeeming factors that make Deus Ex a game worthy of study, and imitation.
Probably, we have hit a considerable wall in 3d game design. The amount of effort it takes to build characters, textures, and the like is incredible. Within 2d, game authors built up a substantial set of tools to automate and reduce the effort of building a game. As an example, Final Fantasy Legend 3 appears to use metatiles to store its towns and levels. This way, you can simply design one house, put a sign above the door that indiates "Items" or "Inn" and your work is mostly done. Certainly, its not perfect, especially for artists who fight against repetitive graphics.
Its not quite outsourcing. What I believe he's referring to is referral programs. Amazon.com and others do use referral programs to boost their advertising; its certainly outside advertising, but they still manage to do a lot of advertising themselves. These programs are usually designed to include as many people as possible, so its certainly no surprise that you find people pushing their referral program over gator. While I'd appreciate a more proactive stance against the practice, I certainly wouldn't want to destroy the program; perhaps some day I'd like to participate in a revenue sharing program. I hope that doesn't make me an evil person.
Even slashdot participates in this advertising process, so if you feel badly, perhaps you should stop visiting here?
Well, in case you didn't notice, there was a lawsuit going on. Lawyers aren't free, although they can often counter-sue for court fees and the like. Still, if you want a settlement, you usually end up paying your own lawyers fees.
The bottom line is yes, there's something about political climate in the US you don't know, but you either should have (read the article) or you're feigning ignorance to make some sort of point about how evil and corrupt American politics is. Bravo.
But the income would be foreign, and earned abroad. This income is generally not taxed as income in the US. Instead, he'll wind up paying Japanese taxes. Strange world we live in.
Also I've heard much about forming a company, and paying yourself a salary. Apparently, corporate income taxes are smaller than the upper bracket of income. With a decent accountant, presumably one could reinvest that money however he sees fit, and take it as a write off against the lump sum income.
Really, for the most part, your computer is at idle. If you look at top, you'll typically see two or three processes in the running state at all times. Some are sleeping, others are waiting on I/O. Faster processors and dual core chips might cut that down to 1 active process per cpu, but for the most part, it will simply improve latency immesurably.
That's why they're pushing things like PCIexpress and sata. Unfortunately, disk speed isn't keeping pace. SATA is rated to 150 MB/s, and SATA is on the horizon, but the hard drives connected to them rarely hit that limit, if I'm interpreting the tom's hardware charts correctly. Sure, your disk cache can might that fast, but it turns out for a lot of desktop I/O, its useless. Running md5sum on the disk only goes through the data once, as does writing a DVD.
The standard solutions to this problem don't really work; RAID gets expensive (and bulky) fast, and Dell isn't about to choose a fast small disk drive over the larger, slower one. Improving density, making the disks faster and adding platters certainly help, but for some reason disk media doesn't have the same Moore's law performance pressure that CPUs fall into.
Copyright infringment already is a criminal act in the US. Duh.
Well, the guy at microcenter indicated that he was considering an radeon but it wont fit into the shuttle case he wants to use. I was considering the shittle cases, but they're so damn expensive its hard to justify.
The pictures of the sapphire look much shorter than the ATi Radeon; perhaps you've got a smaller radeon? (lucky!)
Basically, because they can charge that much. Its ludicrous, and aluminum is a cheaper substance overall. People think they need the added cooling that aluminum provides and the manufacturers are quick to trump that claim up (this 'thermal conductivity' theory is even promoted by ESR's guide on buying PC parts). The markup on these things is huge, because everyone's excited about smaller computers that fit nicely in your home theater. What they fail to mention, is that you certainly can't fit an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro inside that thing.
Ironically, this thing is tiny. But if they made a plastic one, they wouldn't be able to sell it for more than 100 dollars. Where's competition when you need it? Or at least, a newegg category?
All its really doing is playing streamed video over the internet via its wifi link. The DS could theoretically do the same, but that's beside the point, really. What matters is whether playback will be Better, or Worse, than Realmedia. My money's on Worse, simply because they have a tendency to overstate themselves (how many polygons/sec was the ps2 supposed to push?). Certainly, if you own a PSP, this sounds exciting, but the options are either you record stuff elsewhere (like tivo or mythTV) or you get it from an official source from a content server hosted by Sony or whoever is actually doing this. The bad thing here is, its up to them, not you.
Because Libertarian is the political party of the Internet, and because during the late 90s stock and options as compensation were regular. Are the two related? Possibly. But as long as "the free market is so awesome, and I'm so smart I can rise above current cruft of inept wankers" lives on, and project managers rise from the rank and file, unions won't be taking off any time soon. And certainly, those blue collar workers aren't likely to sympathise about the health costs of sitting in a cubicle for 50 hours a week minimum.
Also the "IT industry" isn't keen on its workers going on strike. Imagine if a CPU processing plant went on strike for a week. Moore's law (that hypothetical boundary that we redefine as the situation changes) generally implies that our hardware is going to be 1 percent faster every week. If that strike has any real purpose, it very well could go on for a month or longer. That's looking at a five percent loss over competitors, which means your product is now painfully difficult to sell, AND you've lost any possible premium pricing potential, not to mention the hit on production you'll take. So the companies that comprise the industry aren't about to sing praise of unions onto US Congressional inqueries.
I hope I've answered your question without implying that I don't exactly like the situation either.
Yea, but they were also seriously expensive. A corp has to rely on the threat of using ICE just as much as actually using ICE. If they're paying for ice, that's cash that can't be used to advance agendas.
I think you're missing a fundamental difference: linus was a single guy with relatively little. He had just a super duper terminal emulator and access to the internet. Valve already has a state of the art system that relatively few could improve upon, and a reasonably solid business model. Linus could not have expected that his kernel would go to demolish the minix user base, become the foundation for several distribution/'opreating systems', and result in millions in his bank account. There's plenty of GPL'd software out there that doesn't even make a dime, despite active development on software that requires a lot of expertise and is generally considered intereting to the programmer community (for example, real time 3d rendering engines!).
Its a personal opinion of mine, that one releases software under the GPL not because they're altruistic, but because they're greedy. Not for money, but for source code. A true gift to the world would be unencumbered, such as the BSD TCP/IP stack. I don't intend this as any sort of slam or insult to the GNU foudation, but rather a reasonable rationale for those who refuse to believe in the moral imperatives of Free Software.
>>So how exactly is that different of when I take Firefox, name its "Grumbels Personal Browser" add some stuff to it and release? Why should I be allowed to do that with Firefox, or any kind of free software, but not with movies, videogames or whatever?
>You're not allowed to do that with Firefox, or any Free Software; doing so would be misappropriation.
Are you for real? Firefox was a stunning example of how someone did exactly what was decribed above. Someone (I don't think it was grumbel) decided that mozilla was too damn huge, and getting huger. So he decided to remove all the thunderbird extensions, the irc extensions, the huge preferences menus, etc and just bring the size down in any way possible. Eventually it was called phoenix, and given to people, without the explicit support of the Mozilla foundation. It was only after it was clear that phoenix was not only not going away, but was pulling developers away from the Mozilla effort that the foundation decided on the firefox directives. You can find similar examples, even within the GNU foundation; gcc 3.0 comes to mind as a fork that became official.
At its very heart, nethack is about identification and risk management. Identifying something by using it on yourself is the most dangerous way there is.
There is a challenge that you've touched on, which is that a deep game like nethack is very unfriendly to new players. The challenge for nethack is to make it more friendly without making the depth irrelevant. The easier the game is, the less important and interesting depth will be. The sheer combinatorial possibilities of nethack is interesting because you need to exploit it, not just hit everything with arrows, swords and magic and move down a level.
Its not that the rares are useless, they're just not vital in light of the heavy deck searching mechanisms available, especially for runners. Most of the rares have interesting or unusual (like a wall that does damage) side effects that are difficult to plan for and occasionally unreliable (Quest for Catakin). That doesn't make them unplayable, but you might want to keep in mind that sealed deck play is considered an equally challenging and worthwhile tourney format. There's still plenty of "shit rares," but no more than MtG (certainly less than a certain Legends expansion!)
Also, the mere utterance of RTS disturbs me. At its very core, warcraft and its spawn are essentially clickfests, click faster and you win. Micromanagement and deadlines is a difficult combination to mix bluffing and hidden information with. Certainly feel free to experiment with your own ideas, hell maybe even turn them into reality. Thats how we got Uplink!
I never was an accountant, but I do file taxes for myself. Tax return expenses are deductable, not free. That means you don't have to pay taxes on the money you spend. You still have to pay the accountant, and the government won't reimburse you for that cost. That's my problem with them.
Additonally, people who see software as some sort of Right to Freedom moral problem in today's society, take issue with having to pay for tax software that isn't Free. I'll be arsed as to how they expect software developers to lighten themselves of responsibility in the case of widespread software failure, or even a single significant one.
Netrunner did have an established competitive scene, and the most popular decks were largely rare void. "The Digger" sought to make a run on R&D so deep that it found 7 points worth of agenda in a single run. The deck is based on uncommon and commons, mostly R&D chips and moles. The corp decks are usually take one of two tactics: tag n bag, and turbo agendas. Neither of these need rares to survive. The only killer rare that I can recall is Loan from Chiba, and that got banned pretty quickly (there's no 4 card limit, which helps reduce the intense deck scrying in MtG).
For the most part, Rare cards were reserved for those interesting cards that weren't practical to have a ton of. Since they're no more durable in play than a common, there's no huge push for "card economy" that dominates the valuation of mtg playworthiness.
Going back to dropping the ccg format, its pretty simple to come up with a system where the corp simply has to plan out things ahead of time. Maybe keep the card concept and simply let them write a single number on it that indicates both the cost of the card and its strength. The trouble is a victory condition for the runner. There's a rule in netrunner that regulates agenda point density in the corp's r&d, but thats thrown out the window. The runner needs some way to take initiative when the corp is stalling. You can also argue that making everything deterministic will lead to a dominate strategy.
Netrunner was pretty cool. It had a great style and theme, and the game was well balanced (mostly), despite the fact that the two players had vastly different goals, and means of achieving them. No side is ever out of the runnnig and at a huge disadvantage. What Netrunner boiled down to is taking risks and bluffing, whereas Magic comes down to rules lawyering, buying expensive cards, and painstaking attention to deck contruction principles.
The true barriers to mass market appeal is that it had to compete with Magic, and there weren't many obvious multiplayer rules. I'd be interested to see the Netrunner concepts turned into a game somehow, but I can never get my head around how to drop the card concept.