Yes, I'm aware of the mod amounts. When I said 2, I meant the ability to equip two weapon mods instead of just one. And more accuracy *is* useful, I simply meant that once you find a useful setup there is almost no need to change it ever.
I suppose variety is good in that it gives different players different load outs, but it would be much more useful if any given player had reason to occasionally change mods. But, in the end, there are just too many mods of dubious value which most players will almost never have need to equip. So they become generic "baubles" whose only purpose is to be collected and sold for cash.
One of my biggest complaints with the first game were the entirely generic weapons and mods. There were differences between types of weapons, but that was it. The routine eventually comes down to:
Kill and collect everything until inventory is full.
Equip best X for each party member.
Sell entire inventory except for best anti-personnel and anti-armor mods.
Repeat.
There was never any reason to break from this pattern and this essentially made the weapons generic "loot" to collect. If that was all they were intended to be, just automatically give the player credits instead.
Named and unique weapons would go a long way towards fixing this. I think only few times during the whole game did I actually scavenge a useful weapon. All of the others were bought in stores. The situation is almost identical for mods, except that I did acquire more useful mods via scavenging.
The weapon mods also had the addition problem of being almost entirely useless. All enemies fit into two categories: organic or mechanical. Simply equip the appropriate mod to boost your organic or mechanical damage bonus and fire away. I rarely had to stray from this model. When you get the ability to equip two weapon mods things open a little, but that happens rather late in the game.
Armor mods fared slightly better, but only a little. In general, I found the best way to operate was to equip most part members with the best shield boosting mods available. Makes everybody much harder to kill.
Yes, this is definitely the way to go for any throttling setup. In fact, this would make most of the network speed issues go away. Plus, I know that if I was a customer I wouldn't mind this sort of throttling.
Throttle when you need too, and turn it off as soon as it is no longer necessary. If you leave it on then you're most likely just going to annoy more customers. Plus, you'll know that after you've done reasonable throttling, if things are still slow then you're definitely going to need some additional capacity.
Sounds to me like an Administrator who enjoys his powers a little too much. Not everyone would take kindly to being in the receiving end of these words, even if these words don't apply to him.
I don't even play TF2, but a simple cursory glance at the blog in question will show in a matter of seconds that "The Administrator" is doing her writing "in character".
So... is she a grumpy and gruff war monger who, as the post states, was taken away from the latest issue of Punishment Monthly and a carton of cigarettes to deal with cheaters.... or an admin working for Valve who decided to add a bit of levity to the announcement that some cheaters were caught?
This is what makes the majority of modern Trek so unpleasant. Hollywood and the fanboys need to get it through their heads: Star Trek is not an action show! It's a space/sci-fi drama that occasionally has action.
DS9 was a good show - a decent space opera - but it was rarely what I would call Trek. For the most part, I enjoyed a lot of Voyager precisely because it went back to the "exploring the unknown" roots of the franchise, though I never cared for Seven or the Borg-heavy later seasons.
It's hard to say if Trek will ever find its way back. At least there are plenty of TOS and TNG episodes (and a few DS9/Voyager episodes) to enjoy...
Sigh... this is still a big disappointment. When this all exploded last week on the developer's forum, I made a post to ask one of the Google/Android employees to clarify the situation.
Timing wasn't a big issue for me, I just wanted an assurance that at some point in the future I could use the developer phone to both develop my FOSS program and use the phone as my primary device. That means that I might occasionally want to actually buy something from the store.
But all I got was a rather unclear response. And now the "fix" is released, but it only goes half way. A lot of developers are still going to enable the stupid copy protection flag whether they need to or not and whether it really provides any useful protection. In the end, as a hobbyist developer, this hurts me since the single phone I can afford is less useful.
I like to think it began with our deification of paramilitary groups like the police and firefighters after 9/11. Then with the rising body count in Iraq, people just became enamored with the military and military spending. Now, when new technology comes along, it isn't "wow, what can we do with this?", rather it is "wow, how can this help our troops?"
I hate to break it to you, but the military industrial complex predates 9/11 by a substantial amount of time.
You do have something of a point concerning the near-deification of police and firefighters following 9/11. It has become more than a little excessive. Firemen do deserve a lot of praise. Job or not, it takes some courage to run into a building like that to help people, but the praise has become rather over the top.
But... paramilitary? Where did that come from? I know several firemen, all very nice people. If I were to pick words that describe them as a group in general, they would be something like risk-takers, and maybe reckless. But paramilitary is way off the mark.
Why were the horrors of WWII enough to convince Europeans not to fight each other, when the horrors of WWI weren't?
Maybe because of the scale? No doubt that WWI was devastating and dreadful, but WWII is in an entirely different league. In terms of deaths and sheer destruction to the continent it barely even compares with WWI. Artillery and air power alone made some amazing leaps forward in those 20 some years between wars.
It also helped that there were far fewer punitive actions taken against the losers and far more rebuilding efforts. After WWI, Germany's economy was a wreck and the "winners" were little interested in changing that.
Facts don't back this up at all. If somebody points a gun at you and mugs you, the odds you will survive are high if you just comply. The mugger's goal is to get your belongings/money, not to kill. Even stupid criminals are generally aware of how much more force will be used to find a murderer. It's not a given that they will be caught, but why take the chance when a gun left unfired is enough to attain your goal?
If you choose to fight back, however, the odds of the criminal using any weapon they may have (and which is probably at the ready) dramatically increase. It's just not wise no matter how you look at it.
The big exception is intention. If you have some way of knowing that said criminal plans on killing you regardless of whether you comply, then of course it makes sense to fight back. At least you have a chance then.
Personal responsibility is all well and good, but the purpose of SS is not to coddle old people. Just living off SS income is not very fun. It's not that much money.
We have SS for a number of reasons. It's a form of insurance. What if you become disabled through injury or illness before you've saved a significant amount? Also, having SS to fall back on prevents us from having an increasingly large amount of destitute old people. Yes, it *would* be better if they had saved for retirement, but since they didn't, our society is still better off with them having some sort of subsistence living than having nothing at all.
There's a reason why stores which do accept merchandise returns expect that you will return it in like-new condition, ready for resale. And, for me, this is perfectly fine. The odds are extremely in favor of me getting a never opened copy and in the off chance that I do get a return, as long as it is equivalent to a new copy, so be it.
Scuffed discs, missing pieces, used keys/serials all invalidate this, but a store which accepts returns should check for this and not blindly accept any return.
Hmmm... I guess I wouldn't say it's a hard and fast rule of pricing. But in my experience, the price of so called "triple A" titles varies little between PC and consoles. Still, I suppose it could just be that my sample is not indicative of the situation as a whole.
On a slightly different note, I am more certain about the parity of downloadable games versus boxed games. They really should be much cheaper, in my opinion. For example, I want to buy Mirror's Edge. The retail PC box is about US$50. The price on Steam is US$50. That's just wrong.
And these people, hell bent on scamming the system, do what now? Purchase their goods like honest people? No, they download their media in its entirety from the Internet. Not having set foot in a real store, there is zero chance that this dishonest customer may spend money on other goods besides media. Impulse buys, other games, whatever. Things they may not end up returning/scamming.
In the end, the decision to not accept returns (for functioning media) hurts only the honest customers. The people who intend to scam the system will, and have, found other ways to get what they want.
Piracy is not the root cause of all evil in the universe...
Consider these two situations: 1) I pirate a game by downloading it off the Internet. No money has exchanged hands and the chance that it will is almost zero. or 2) I purchase a game with the intent of copying it and returning it.
In the first example, the store/publisher is never going to get any money. In the second, there is at least a chance that the customer will change his mind, forget, run out of time, or something else. The store might actually make some money. Now consider that the vast majority of customers are *not* out to screw over the system.
Believe what you will, but the truth is that I seldom have so much time that I can devote it entirely to one game/product and finish it before the return period expires.
More important, though, is the financial cost. Under which situation does the game company make more money? (a) I purchase a game I may or may not like and there is a 2/3 chance I will keep it and they will keep my money. (b) I download a pirated copy of the full game and play it with a 1/10 chance that I like it so much I decide to go to the store to buy a copy of something I already (but not legally) possess.
Your numbers may vary, of course. I am merely pointing out my own personal experience. The number of available games has greatly increased while the percentage of games I like has, if anything, decreased slightly. My argument is that under the returns-are-okay model, the stores/publishers/devs received more of my money than they do now.
For consoles, yes, this is certainly an option. But my comment comes mostly from the PC gamer side of the equation. I have a PS2 and a Wii, but I buy and play many more games on my PC than I do on consoles.
If I had a 360, obviously I'd have a few games for it, but for the types of games I like to play, I'm fortunate that most of them are released on PC at the same time or as an eventual port. For example, the new Prince of Persia (which I don't enjoy as much as I expected I would), Mass Effect (even better on the PC), and others.
This is an excellent point and one which I think too many people overlook.
It's certainly true that many games cost a whole hell of a lot of money to produce, but the fee that the console makers charge is astronomical for exactly the reason you give.
The only exception is Nintendo since they do not take a loss. So why are their games not substantially cheaper? Simple: they don't have to be. As long as they charge developers less and Wii games cost less than 360/PS3 games, customers will recognize the less expensive choice.
Personally, I'd be extremely happy if PC game prices were uncoupled from the console prices. There are no licensing fees since there is no central authority. I'm not sure if the "Games for Windows" logo/certification costs anything. Some publishers might want it because it makes their game look more official, but on the other hand Microsoft needs that logo on more boxes to make Windows seem more attractive. At any rate, it's not a significant portion of the cost.
Also, the ability to return a game that I do not like.
It used to be that this was a given, since before the media companies forced their will upon the rest of us, games were treated like any other merchandise. When I could return a game I didn't like, or that didn't work, to the store in the mall (at the time it was Software Etc.) I bought many more games than I do now. I could take a chance because the risk to me personally was extremely low.
I would frequently browse the shelves holding PC games (which were far more numerous back then). Hmm, that looks like it *might* be fun/interesting. I'll buy it and find out. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I'll soon know first hand.
Publishers constantly whine about the risks of developing new IP because it is very hard to know how it will do in the market. If I, as a customer, have the ability to make low risk purchases, I'm far more likely to try new games.
As it stands now with the draconian return policies, I almost always wait for a stack of reviews to be published before I make any decisions. This hurts the developers and publishers in a number of ways. First, I have to take the initiative to find these reviews which all but eliminates the chance of an impulse buy (or even a semi-researched buy). And second, I am relying on the reviewers subjective opinion. I know that I am getting filtered information and that my views on what is good/bad are likely different from that of the reviewer, but what choice do I have?
Demos can mitigate this problem, but only a little. They still eliminate the chance of an impulse buy. Plus, I find I give a demo much less time to "win me over" than I do something I have paid for. And, of course, depending on what genres you like, the availability of demos varies greatly. Adventure games, strategy, RPG/JRPG? Good luck finding demos.
In my mind, the main offender is internationalization and localization support. It's a non-trivial problem that the standard library just isn't very well-suited to--I usually end up using a library like ICU for this.
I can see that, looking at the problem today. Given the age of those functions, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. When the whole locale and i18n system was added, there was nothing else to do the job and something low level like the C library probably seemed the natural place.
Today, now that the problem has been redefined, it is woefully inadequate. As a whole, the community has decided, "why do it half-assed?" and has moved towards representing all locales with Unicode and specific libraries like ICU.
As a stepping stone in i18n development, having these functions in the C library was a very good thing. I think what should happen now is that they should be marked as obsolete to discourage people from using them for new projects. Hopefully that will move more people towards newer solutions like ICU.
I would suggest hint tokens. Completing a level quickly or in a certain way will earn a user hint tokens. Later, if they get stuck, they can spend a token to get a hint.
You don't need to make the tokens very scarce. The simple fact that they are not unlimited will likely cause most players to conserve them for when they really need them. If they know the system exists and they know they might need it on level 99, they'll be more inclined to save tokens.
If you have a multi-level hint tree, the token system can work even better. A player might only pay for the simple hint knowing that if they become really stuck, the answer is there, but they better have kept enough tokens around to buy the more descriptive hint.
Among other games, the Professor Layton DS game used a similar system. I think they erred too far on the side of giving many hint tokens, though. I didn't need to use them for any but the hardest (or, sometimes, poorly defined/written) puzzles and by the end of the game I had a mighty stash of them. Of course, you could also figure out some method to reward the player for having many unspent tokens: more points, extra levels, bonuses, etc.
That's a bit harsh now, no? It's not a great API, but I've seen worse.
I've been a Palm OS developer for some nine years now, primarily working on Weasel Reader (http://weaselreader.org), so I've watched as it grew, changed, and finally died over the years.
Early on, the OS was really great. It knew what its target hardware was and who its target audience was and it served them both quite well. Very useful and very low powered devices. The battery on my devices would last for weeks. I could even read on my Clie SJ-20 with the backlight on for a surprisingly large number of hours.
But, Palm's failure can only be blamed on itself. They owned the market and they let it slip away. Along with stupid business decisions, one of the biggest problems was that Palm OS failed to grow and mature like it should have. Palm OS 5.0 was the biggest update after 3.x and it was already way behind the times. They also managed to slap all of their FOSS developers in the face at the same time. OS 5 made it much harder to develop under anything but Windows.
And now the grand new thing is WebOS. There's still an enormous number of Palm apps out there in the wild. Useful apps that require very little from the host platform, yet WebOS has no manner of emulation for them.
I'm still subscribed to the palm-dev mailing list, the traffic of which has, not surprisingly, dropped off dramatically. One of the most recent threads was just a lot of old hands saying goodbye. Considering the longevity of this community, you'd think Palm might pay some attention, but no. As best as anybody can tell, nobody on the list was ever contacted by Palm for the WebOS beta, nor has anybody from Palm even dropped by just to promote the thing. This is the complete opposite of the Android dev mailing list which is crawling with people from Google who are more than happy to give useful answers and feedback.
Palm lost me as a developer a long time ago and if it hadn't been for maintenance of Weasel Reader I would have stopped already. Why would I follow them now? Certainly, devs writing commercial and shareware apps will need to evaluate the situation as it pertains to their business, but what about FOSS authors? One of the best things about the Palm platform was the large number of quality FOSS apps developed by a community that Palm never helped and sometimes even hindered. For the time being, it looks like a lot of the FOSS people will be moving over to Android.
I'm pretty sure you missed his point entirely. They aren't running "another business" but instead finding some temporary storage place for the excess electricity. That's why the GP said "over supply utilization system".
Melting salt sucks up power and then generates it when you use that trapped heat to make steam later. Running pumps lets you store power with gravity. Pump water up higher, it releases the potential energy when it comes back down. And there are many other methods.
Despite the GP's warning, I've just recently purchased a Dell 2408WFP (a couple generations/revisions newer than the 2405WFP) and I couldn't be happier. It's a 24" P-VA panel with 1920x1200 resolution.
The color quality is fantastic, especially compared to my previous (good quality) 19" LG TN panel. The response time is perfectly good and I haven't noticed anything resembling lag regardless of what types of games I've tried.
The viewing angle isn't as good as an IPS panel, but it is far superior to a TN. Also, even when the colors change as your angle changes, the difference isn't as dramatic as with a TN panel.
As far as extras, it's got a handy 4-port USB hub built in, along with memory card reader slots (one for SD/MMC/MStick and one for CF). It also has many connectors on the back: VGA, 2 DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, composite, component, and S-video.
The nice thing about all the connectors is that you can use it as a TV display if so inclined. There's no tuner, but it would be great for a DVR output. It also has two built in speakers, however I've not used them and I've read that they sound awful (which isn't at all surprising).
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Yes, I'm aware of the mod amounts. When I said 2, I meant the ability to equip two weapon mods instead of just one. And more accuracy *is* useful, I simply meant that once you find a useful setup there is almost no need to change it ever.
I suppose variety is good in that it gives different players different load outs, but it would be much more useful if any given player had reason to occasionally change mods. But, in the end, there are just too many mods of dubious value which most players will almost never have need to equip. So they become generic "baubles" whose only purpose is to be collected and sold for cash.
One of my biggest complaints with the first game were the entirely generic weapons and mods. There were differences between types of weapons, but that was it. The routine eventually comes down to:
There was never any reason to break from this pattern and this essentially made the weapons generic "loot" to collect. If that was all they were intended to be, just automatically give the player credits instead.
Named and unique weapons would go a long way towards fixing this. I think only few times during the whole game did I actually scavenge a useful weapon. All of the others were bought in stores. The situation is almost identical for mods, except that I did acquire more useful mods via scavenging.
The weapon mods also had the addition problem of being almost entirely useless. All enemies fit into two categories: organic or mechanical. Simply equip the appropriate mod to boost your organic or mechanical damage bonus and fire away. I rarely had to stray from this model. When you get the ability to equip two weapon mods things open a little, but that happens rather late in the game.
Armor mods fared slightly better, but only a little. In general, I found the best way to operate was to equip most part members with the best shield boosting mods available. Makes everybody much harder to kill.
Yes, this is definitely the way to go for any throttling setup. In fact, this would make most of the network speed issues go away. Plus, I know that if I was a customer I wouldn't mind this sort of throttling.
Throttle when you need too, and turn it off as soon as it is no longer necessary. If you leave it on then you're most likely just going to annoy more customers. Plus, you'll know that after you've done reasonable throttling, if things are still slow then you're definitely going to need some additional capacity.
Sounds to me like an Administrator who enjoys his powers a little too much. Not everyone would take kindly to being in the receiving end of these words, even if these words don't apply to him.
I don't even play TF2, but a simple cursory glance at the blog in question will show in a matter of seconds that "The Administrator" is doing her writing "in character".
So... is she a grumpy and gruff war monger who, as the post states, was taken away from the latest issue of Punishment Monthly and a carton of cigarettes to deal with cheaters.... or an admin working for Valve who decided to add a bit of levity to the announcement that some cheaters were caught?
This is what makes the majority of modern Trek so unpleasant. Hollywood and the fanboys need to get it through their heads: Star Trek is not an action show! It's a space/sci-fi drama that occasionally has action.
DS9 was a good show - a decent space opera - but it was rarely what I would call Trek. For the most part, I enjoyed a lot of Voyager precisely because it went back to the "exploring the unknown" roots of the franchise, though I never cared for Seven or the Borg-heavy later seasons.
It's hard to say if Trek will ever find its way back. At least there are plenty of TOS and TNG episodes (and a few DS9/Voyager episodes) to enjoy...
And then there will be the inevitable Star Trek in the park productions...
Somebody: Make this happen
Please.
Sigh... this is still a big disappointment. When this all exploded last week on the developer's forum, I made a post to ask one of the Google/Android employees to clarify the situation.
Timing wasn't a big issue for me, I just wanted an assurance that at some point in the future I could use the developer phone to both develop my FOSS program and use the phone as my primary device. That means that I might occasionally want to actually buy something from the store.
But all I got was a rather unclear response. And now the "fix" is released, but it only goes half way. A lot of developers are still going to enable the stupid copy protection flag whether they need to or not and whether it really provides any useful protection. In the end, as a hobbyist developer, this hurts me since the single phone I can afford is less useful.
I like to think it began with our deification of paramilitary groups like the police and firefighters after 9/11. Then with the rising body count in Iraq, people just became enamored with the military and military spending. Now, when new technology comes along, it isn't "wow, what can we do with this?", rather it is "wow, how can this help our troops?"
I hate to break it to you, but the military industrial complex predates 9/11 by a substantial amount of time.
You do have something of a point concerning the near-deification of police and firefighters following 9/11. It has become more than a little excessive. Firemen do deserve a lot of praise. Job or not, it takes some courage to run into a building like that to help people, but the praise has become rather over the top.
But... paramilitary? Where did that come from? I know several firemen, all very nice people. If I were to pick words that describe them as a group in general, they would be something like risk-takers, and maybe reckless. But paramilitary is way off the mark.
Why were the horrors of WWII enough to convince Europeans not to fight each other, when the horrors of WWI weren't?
Maybe because of the scale? No doubt that WWI was devastating and dreadful, but WWII is in an entirely different league. In terms of deaths and sheer destruction to the continent it barely even compares with WWI. Artillery and air power alone made some amazing leaps forward in those 20 some years between wars.
It also helped that there were far fewer punitive actions taken against the losers and far more rebuilding efforts. After WWI, Germany's economy was a wreck and the "winners" were little interested in changing that.
Facts don't back this up at all. If somebody points a gun at you and mugs you, the odds you will survive are high if you just comply. The mugger's goal is to get your belongings/money, not to kill. Even stupid criminals are generally aware of how much more force will be used to find a murderer. It's not a given that they will be caught, but why take the chance when a gun left unfired is enough to attain your goal?
If you choose to fight back, however, the odds of the criminal using any weapon they may have (and which is probably at the ready) dramatically increase. It's just not wise no matter how you look at it.
The big exception is intention. If you have some way of knowing that said criminal plans on killing you regardless of whether you comply, then of course it makes sense to fight back. At least you have a chance then.
Personal responsibility is all well and good, but the purpose of SS is not to coddle old people. Just living off SS income is not very fun. It's not that much money.
We have SS for a number of reasons. It's a form of insurance. What if you become disabled through injury or illness before you've saved a significant amount? Also, having SS to fall back on prevents us from having an increasingly large amount of destitute old people. Yes, it *would* be better if they had saved for retirement, but since they didn't, our society is still better off with them having some sort of subsistence living than having nothing at all.
There's more to a game than the bits on a disc.
Such as?
There's a reason why stores which do accept merchandise returns expect that you will return it in like-new condition, ready for resale. And, for me, this is perfectly fine. The odds are extremely in favor of me getting a never opened copy and in the off chance that I do get a return, as long as it is equivalent to a new copy, so be it.
Scuffed discs, missing pieces, used keys/serials all invalidate this, but a store which accepts returns should check for this and not blindly accept any return.
Hmmm... I guess I wouldn't say it's a hard and fast rule of pricing. But in my experience, the price of so called "triple A" titles varies little between PC and consoles. Still, I suppose it could just be that my sample is not indicative of the situation as a whole.
On a slightly different note, I am more certain about the parity of downloadable games versus boxed games. They really should be much cheaper, in my opinion. For example, I want to buy Mirror's Edge. The retail PC box is about US$50. The price on Steam is US$50. That's just wrong.
And these people, hell bent on scamming the system, do what now? Purchase their goods like honest people? No, they download their media in its entirety from the Internet. Not having set foot in a real store, there is zero chance that this dishonest customer may spend money on other goods besides media. Impulse buys, other games, whatever. Things they may not end up returning/scamming.
In the end, the decision to not accept returns (for functioning media) hurts only the honest customers. The people who intend to scam the system will, and have, found other ways to get what they want.
Piracy is not the root cause of all evil in the universe...
Consider these two situations: 1) I pirate a game by downloading it off the Internet. No money has exchanged hands and the chance that it will is almost zero. or 2) I purchase a game with the intent of copying it and returning it.
In the first example, the store/publisher is never going to get any money. In the second, there is at least a chance that the customer will change his mind, forget, run out of time, or something else. The store might actually make some money. Now consider that the vast majority of customers are *not* out to screw over the system.
Believe what you will, but the truth is that I seldom have so much time that I can devote it entirely to one game/product and finish it before the return period expires.
More important, though, is the financial cost. Under which situation does the game company make more money? (a) I purchase a game I may or may not like and there is a 2/3 chance I will keep it and they will keep my money. (b) I download a pirated copy of the full game and play it with a 1/10 chance that I like it so much I decide to go to the store to buy a copy of something I already (but not legally) possess.
Your numbers may vary, of course. I am merely pointing out my own personal experience. The number of available games has greatly increased while the percentage of games I like has, if anything, decreased slightly. My argument is that under the returns-are-okay model, the stores/publishers/devs received more of my money than they do now.
For consoles, yes, this is certainly an option. But my comment comes mostly from the PC gamer side of the equation. I have a PS2 and a Wii, but I buy and play many more games on my PC than I do on consoles.
If I had a 360, obviously I'd have a few games for it, but for the types of games I like to play, I'm fortunate that most of them are released on PC at the same time or as an eventual port. For example, the new Prince of Persia (which I don't enjoy as much as I expected I would), Mass Effect (even better on the PC), and others.
This is an excellent point and one which I think too many people overlook.
It's certainly true that many games cost a whole hell of a lot of money to produce, but the fee that the console makers charge is astronomical for exactly the reason you give.
The only exception is Nintendo since they do not take a loss. So why are their games not substantially cheaper? Simple: they don't have to be. As long as they charge developers less and Wii games cost less than 360/PS3 games, customers will recognize the less expensive choice.
Personally, I'd be extremely happy if PC game prices were uncoupled from the console prices. There are no licensing fees since there is no central authority. I'm not sure if the "Games for Windows" logo/certification costs anything. Some publishers might want it because it makes their game look more official, but on the other hand Microsoft needs that logo on more boxes to make Windows seem more attractive. At any rate, it's not a significant portion of the cost.
Also, the ability to return a game that I do not like.
It used to be that this was a given, since before the media companies forced their will upon the rest of us, games were treated like any other merchandise. When I could return a game I didn't like, or that didn't work, to the store in the mall (at the time it was Software Etc.) I bought many more games than I do now. I could take a chance because the risk to me personally was extremely low.
I would frequently browse the shelves holding PC games (which were far more numerous back then). Hmm, that looks like it *might* be fun/interesting. I'll buy it and find out. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I'll soon know first hand.
Publishers constantly whine about the risks of developing new IP because it is very hard to know how it will do in the market. If I, as a customer, have the ability to make low risk purchases, I'm far more likely to try new games.
As it stands now with the draconian return policies, I almost always wait for a stack of reviews to be published before I make any decisions. This hurts the developers and publishers in a number of ways. First, I have to take the initiative to find these reviews which all but eliminates the chance of an impulse buy (or even a semi-researched buy). And second, I am relying on the reviewers subjective opinion. I know that I am getting filtered information and that my views on what is good/bad are likely different from that of the reviewer, but what choice do I have?
Demos can mitigate this problem, but only a little. They still eliminate the chance of an impulse buy. Plus, I find I give a demo much less time to "win me over" than I do something I have paid for. And, of course, depending on what genres you like, the availability of demos varies greatly. Adventure games, strategy, RPG/JRPG? Good luck finding demos.
In my mind, the main offender is internationalization and localization support. It's a non-trivial problem that the standard library just isn't very well-suited to--I usually end up using a library like ICU for this.
I can see that, looking at the problem today. Given the age of those functions, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. When the whole locale and i18n system was added, there was nothing else to do the job and something low level like the C library probably seemed the natural place.
Today, now that the problem has been redefined, it is woefully inadequate. As a whole, the community has decided, "why do it half-assed?" and has moved towards representing all locales with Unicode and specific libraries like ICU.
As a stepping stone in i18n development, having these functions in the C library was a very good thing. I think what should happen now is that they should be marked as obsolete to discourage people from using them for new projects. Hopefully that will move more people towards newer solutions like ICU.
I would suggest hint tokens. Completing a level quickly or in a certain way will earn a user hint tokens. Later, if they get stuck, they can spend a token to get a hint.
You don't need to make the tokens very scarce. The simple fact that they are not unlimited will likely cause most players to conserve them for when they really need them. If they know the system exists and they know they might need it on level 99, they'll be more inclined to save tokens.
If you have a multi-level hint tree, the token system can work even better. A player might only pay for the simple hint knowing that if they become really stuck, the answer is there, but they better have kept enough tokens around to buy the more descriptive hint.
Among other games, the Professor Layton DS game used a similar system. I think they erred too far on the side of giving many hint tokens, though. I didn't need to use them for any but the hardest (or, sometimes, poorly defined/written) puzzles and by the end of the game I had a mighty stash of them. Of course, you could also figure out some method to reward the player for having many unspent tokens: more points, extra levels, bonuses, etc.
Serious question: What is glibc doing that you don't think it should be doing?
That's a bit harsh now, no? It's not a great API, but I've seen worse.
I've been a Palm OS developer for some nine years now, primarily working on Weasel Reader (http://weaselreader.org), so I've watched as it grew, changed, and finally died over the years.
Early on, the OS was really great. It knew what its target hardware was and who its target audience was and it served them both quite well. Very useful and very low powered devices. The battery on my devices would last for weeks. I could even read on my Clie SJ-20 with the backlight on for a surprisingly large number of hours.
But, Palm's failure can only be blamed on itself. They owned the market and they let it slip away. Along with stupid business decisions, one of the biggest problems was that Palm OS failed to grow and mature like it should have. Palm OS 5.0 was the biggest update after 3.x and it was already way behind the times. They also managed to slap all of their FOSS developers in the face at the same time. OS 5 made it much harder to develop under anything but Windows.
And now the grand new thing is WebOS. There's still an enormous number of Palm apps out there in the wild. Useful apps that require very little from the host platform, yet WebOS has no manner of emulation for them.
I'm still subscribed to the palm-dev mailing list, the traffic of which has, not surprisingly, dropped off dramatically. One of the most recent threads was just a lot of old hands saying goodbye. Considering the longevity of this community, you'd think Palm might pay some attention, but no. As best as anybody can tell, nobody on the list was ever contacted by Palm for the WebOS beta, nor has anybody from Palm even dropped by just to promote the thing. This is the complete opposite of the Android dev mailing list which is crawling with people from Google who are more than happy to give useful answers and feedback.
Palm lost me as a developer a long time ago and if it hadn't been for maintenance of Weasel Reader I would have stopped already. Why would I follow them now? Certainly, devs writing commercial and shareware apps will need to evaluate the situation as it pertains to their business, but what about FOSS authors? One of the best things about the Palm platform was the large number of quality FOSS apps developed by a community that Palm never helped and sometimes even hindered. For the time being, it looks like a lot of the FOSS people will be moving over to Android.
I'm pretty sure you missed his point entirely. They aren't running "another business" but instead finding some temporary storage place for the excess electricity. That's why the GP said "over supply utilization system".
Melting salt sucks up power and then generates it when you use that trapped heat to make steam later. Running pumps lets you store power with gravity. Pump water up higher, it releases the potential energy when it comes back down. And there are many other methods.
Despite the GP's warning, I've just recently purchased a Dell 2408WFP (a couple generations/revisions newer than the 2405WFP) and I couldn't be happier. It's a 24" P-VA panel with 1920x1200 resolution.
The color quality is fantastic, especially compared to my previous (good quality) 19" LG TN panel. The response time is perfectly good and I haven't noticed anything resembling lag regardless of what types of games I've tried.
The viewing angle isn't as good as an IPS panel, but it is far superior to a TN. Also, even when the colors change as your angle changes, the difference isn't as dramatic as with a TN panel.
As far as extras, it's got a handy 4-port USB hub built in, along with memory card reader slots (one for SD/MMC/MStick and one for CF). It also has many connectors on the back: VGA, 2 DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, composite, component, and S-video.
The nice thing about all the connectors is that you can use it as a TV display if so inclined. There's no tuner, but it would be great for a DVR output. It also has two built in speakers, however I've not used them and I've read that they sound awful (which isn't at all surprising).
These two reviews gave me a lot of information before I bought the panel:
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_2408wfp.htm
http://monitortest.blogspot.com/