99% surely this 8$/movie means, at best, 'just out on DVD' movies. As DRM-crippled, crap resolution, no extras...
Nope, won't fly.
Now if it's 8$/movie for full DVD image (2 images, if needed with all extras etc), burnable to completely normal DVD+R disc for later viewing. Maybe with slight compromise in quality to fit 4.7GB. Basically what bittorrent is offering right now, I think I might bite.
Will never happen tho. It would make them too much money. They want to offer you 320x200 crap with DRM out of the wazoo.
Only reason iTunes flies is because it's basically a legal option vs. torrents. You get the same thing in the end (good quality, no DRM if you recycle it via CD). No *way* sony would ever put out anything that would actually seem FAIR to the paying customer. So they are doomed to fail. Miserably. Nobody will pay money for a lesser version when the free version is better quality, no DRM crap.
I actually like nethack and other roguelikes (Zangband etc) very much.
And I wouldn't imagine playing them without 1600x1200 screen either. Have to fit all those windows in one display (gameworld, inventory, equipment, info). And yes, I've played nethack on 80x25 VT100 terminal. That's so 1990s and swapping between different information views is clumsy and takes extra time. Nowdays computers allow bigger displays, so why not use them?
What I want from games is simple - smooth compelling gameplay. Todays' games eat graphics cards for breakfast, so its POINTLESS to go and buy a cheap crappy card - it won't let you play latest games at reasonable resolution. The graphics tricks and pixel shader candy is secondary, but why watch blocky crap if the game allows higher resolution? Say, on online MMOs would you rather play in 800x600 and have your chat window eat up third of your screen with reasonably sized text font, or play at 1600x1200 and have it take a small bit off the bottom left corner?
I agree that spending 450$+ for top of the line card is silly for most people. But saving that last 50-100$ and choosing a budget card over a good price/performer is stupid. That budget card is obsolete on the date of purchase, while that double-the-budget-price high midrange card will serve you well for 2-3 years (with some compromises in display candy at the tail end of that lifespan).
Today's displays tend to have 1280x1024 native resolution. Some opt for 1600x1200. To game at those resolutions, playing games that are going to be on the market one year from now, you need something a BIT more powerful than craptastically bad FX5200:)
And if you want to play todays games, you ignore the article.
6600 (non-GT) is a piece of crap.
You just can't get a gaming videocard for 100-120$. If you want to buy something that doesn't go obsolete for gaming immediately again, you need to spend about 200-250$ (that would be something like X800GTO, X800XL or 6800/6800GT - depends a bit if your mobo is AGP or PCIE)
Yes, it's twice the price - and about three times the expected useful life as a gaming videocard. 6600 is already obsolete for gaming - its just a cheap piece of crap cashing in on good reputation of the 6600GT (which is nowdays too expensive compared to low end 6800s and X800s).
... because ATI made a big press release about it.
Since their product is still mostly vapor (you can't buy it yet), and nVidia is currently owning them in the high end market because ATI's product is so late, one has to grasp straws in order to try look l33t in the eyes of the potential purchasers.
Wish they'd spend less time yapping and more time actually putting product on the shelves.
Nice overclock in any case, but ATI putting out a press release about it is kinda silly
Warez jokes aside, most common non-corporate windows are OEM copies. OEM = no support from microsoft. You get your pile of bytes that might or might not work, and you get some patches at the whim of MS. You get no support unless you pay thru the nose per incident.
Sure, you can call your OEM supplier - however, they have no access to the source, and generally just tell you to reinstall the thing and immediately tell your system is unsupported if you actually install something other than the supplied bundled software on your system.
Okay, in the laptop side there are some reasons to pay a premium for Dell XPS - tho personally I'd never try to play modern games on a laptop, and for business use I'd personally buy IBM Thinkpad instead. But that's just my personal opinion, and I know plenty of people who are more than happy to game on expensive 'gaming laptops'.
But, in general, those who buy premium priced 'branded' computers are the target audience for Ultimate Edition. Extra 150$ for 'Best' Windows is easy to sink into the price tag of a 4000$ computer.
General people will buy the cheapest version that runs all applications. That version will be bundled with majority of the home computers. That will probably be the 'Basic' Home version. Don't expect it to be any cheaper than current Home Edition - MS has a monopoly, no reason to undercut in such situation. Premium crap will most likely be priced like today's Pro version, and will only sell to the crowd that today buys Media Center Edition.
If there are feature differences that matter to the applications (such as games or normal productivity apps) everyone will ignore crippled versions - bye bye starter ed. Dunno why MS can't figure this out.
Ultimate Edition will probably be sold to the Alienware/Dell XPS crowd that is too clueless. Rest will ignore the MS software clutter - especially since the ultimate edition has 'subscription' written all over it - the OS itself might work without one, but if it adds any downloadable extras, those will definitely want your personal information, and probably monthly fee sooner or later. I guess MS has gotten addicted to the mothly income it gathers from XBox Live subscribers. Someone has probably calculated how much they'd make if they could milk monthly fees from (some) Windows users as well.
As far as Warez goes - unless the 'Corporate Pro/Enterprise editions' are crippled in some way that matters to home user (lack of MCE features doesn't really qualify), that will be the version(s) that will make rounds - just like today. Additionally the 'Ultimate' version will be cracked to satisfy the 'Must have best version' crowd that previously cackled and downloaded warez versions of such gems as Win2003 Advanced Server for their home PCs so they could have the 'best' Windows. However, most won't want to bother with the extra bloat - or it will be ripped out of the Ultimate and plugged to a suitably modded Corporate version.
Problem is, the game content is serverside. The 'private' emulated servers have little to no content in them.
If you call 'running around in the same gameworld' as 'playing WoW', then your assesment is correct. To me, however, the items, quests and other things controlled serverside *is* the game - not just the backdrop that is local to your client.
Sorry, haven't tried US WoW so can't comment there - may be filled with idiots, don't know.
Euro WoW that I *have* tried is not *that* bad. It has it's share of cretins, but with careful server selection you can find bearable place to play in.
Generally I meant MMOs with bit more mature playerbase. Yes, every MMO has it's share of idiots, but they are in the minority. In Guild Wars they are in the majority...
I wonder if the telescope could see the smoldering ruins of the webserver from the surface of the moon - as the server just got slashdotted off the face of the earth...
It's cheaper in china - that is true - but that's just local pricing. It's not being dumped (near) free to 'foil pirates', because it can't be pirated.
Also of note - the chinese version is good for creating accounts only on the chinese servers. Same restriction is in place US vs European version.
Considering the amount of dev power MMO developers sink in for day-to-day improvements, and how much running a huge server farm plus customer support costs, 15$/month is peanuts. The valid question is - how many games can fit into the market. People pay that 15$, but once they are paying that, it's a huge additional step to pay for *another* game. So the 'best' game out there gets a disproportionate amount of the market as everyone flocks to it.
Also as there are huge swings in subscriber counts, one game might have to invest $megabucks for new server hardware, only to find it mostly unused after a bungled patch that caused 50k subscribers to quit almost overnight and move to another subscription game.
Blizzard is making huge wads of money, but beyond them (their game is currently 'best' as far as stability and polish goes), many MMO devs are in dire straits - see the long list of cancelled products that took a long look, decided that their offering sucked compared to WoW, and gave up. Games like Imperator (not even released) and Asheron's Call 2.
Also, there's an old saying - the moment you (MMO customer) actually contact their customer support either ingame or via phone, you already costed the company the month's fee you paid.
Some companies have tried to skimp on this - either with seriously undermanned CS, or by outsourcing it to india (go EA!), neither really works as customers bail out rather fast if they somehow get hosed in the game, and cannot get hold of a company rep to fix the issue with their character/possessions/whatever.
Considering the behind-the-scenes costs (servers, bandwidth) and development work and customer support, 15$/month/player is not unreasonable. Nobody is forcing you to pay.
And if you want 'no subs fee' games, there are those too - Guild Wars comes to mind. I tried it, it's so filled by idiotic kids with two second attenttion spans that can't have a credit card, that it made me vomit. Subscription fee is also a nice barrier of entry for the worst idiots, and I'd pay a monthly fee just to be able to play a game that has more mature playerbase.
Not really. You cannot 'black market' WoW. Each copy has an unique serial key used to create an unique account to access the game.
You cannot pirate WoW - well, you can, but the CDs are worthless without an account. At best you can use your 'pirate copy' to run an account you bought off ebay...
When major news organizations don't know what the fuck is going on, that means the place is totalled.
EXACTLY SAME THING happened during the asian tsunamis.
I knew immediately it was no small disaster when for *DAYS* there were absolutely no information from many of the areas. Locally news services reported 'govt has not heard of any deaths in *insert area of thailand*' - sure, they hadn't, because THE AREA WAS NOT THERE ANYMORE. Almost everyone had died to the tsunami.
When news organizations fail to deliver a picture of what's going on in the disaster area after the disaster, that means the place is fucked beyond recognition. Otherwise the news orgs have their cameras and reporters on the scene 30 minutes after the fact. Reason why they were not in this case was because all the roads were busted and all the comms were gone. All we had was some soundbites via satellite videophone from reporters who were holed in some highrise with no idea what's happening outside.
Mainframes Just Work. Mainframes are used when Downtime is NOT an option.
Your random winblows/linux x86 server farm - even a redundant one - crashing couple of times every year is completely out of the question for applications where mainframes are used. Mainframe parts are also made with completely different reliability goals in mind.
had thousands of potential wlan users in the area.
Tho I think most still used normal LAN, simply because the wlan access points they had there were all still 11Mbps for historic reasons (several year old APs)
Umm... I modified mine last week. By running a windows application (WinFlash).
Sure, I think it requires admin rights, but it sure modified the BIOS.
It's not a longshot to make a piece of malware that knows how to flash, say, the 20-30 most common motherboards and 0wn them via BIOS. I think the only reason it hasn't been done so far is because today's OSes hardly use BIOS for anything. Tho I guess you could make BIOS to load haxx0red version of, say, NTLDR and via that compromise everything silently.
MS and their cronies have a solution already lined up. It's called 'trusted computing'. As an additional bonus, it will make sure that the user won't be able to do anything MS and their cronies don't want you to do on your computer.
Slashdot Mirror
People at the middle of nowhere without internet connections are surprisingly not their target market.
And no, dialup doesn't count.
Bit like movie studios don't exactly market their movies to blind people, because they have trouble seeing the product in question.
iTunes has latest releases pretty much instantly.
99% surely this 8$/movie means, at best, 'just out on DVD' movies. As DRM-crippled, crap resolution, no extras...
Nope, won't fly.
Now if it's 8$/movie for full DVD image (2 images, if needed with all extras etc), burnable to completely normal DVD+R disc for later viewing. Maybe with slight compromise in quality to fit 4.7GB. Basically what bittorrent is offering right now, I think I might bite.
Will never happen tho. It would make them too much money. They want to offer you 320x200 crap with DRM out of the wazoo.
Only reason iTunes flies is because it's basically a legal option vs. torrents. You get the same thing in the end (good quality, no DRM if you recycle it via CD). No *way* sony would ever put out anything that would actually seem FAIR to the paying customer. So they are doomed to fail. Miserably. Nobody will pay money for a lesser version when the free version is better quality, no DRM crap.
I actually like nethack and other roguelikes (Zangband etc) very much.
And I wouldn't imagine playing them without 1600x1200 screen either. Have to fit all those windows in one display (gameworld, inventory, equipment, info). And yes, I've played nethack on 80x25 VT100 terminal. That's so 1990s and swapping between different information views is clumsy and takes extra time. Nowdays computers allow bigger displays, so why not use them?
What I want from games is simple - smooth compelling gameplay. Todays' games eat graphics cards for breakfast, so its POINTLESS to go and buy a cheap crappy card - it won't let you play latest games at reasonable resolution. The graphics tricks and pixel shader candy is secondary, but why watch blocky crap if the game allows higher resolution? Say, on online MMOs would you rather play in 800x600 and have your chat window eat up third of your screen with reasonably sized text font, or play at 1600x1200 and have it take a small bit off the bottom left corner?
I agree that spending 450$+ for top of the line card is silly for most people. But saving that last 50-100$ and choosing a budget card over a good price/performer is stupid. That budget card is obsolete on the date of purchase, while that double-the-budget-price high midrange card will serve you well for 2-3 years (with some compromises in display candy at the tail end of that lifespan).
Yes, if you play at 640x480.
:)
Today's displays tend to have 1280x1024 native resolution. Some opt for 1600x1200. To game at those resolutions, playing games that are going to be on the market one year from now, you need something a BIT more powerful than craptastically bad FX5200
And if you want to play todays games, you ignore the article.
6600 (non-GT) is a piece of crap.
You just can't get a gaming videocard for 100-120$. If you want to buy something that doesn't go obsolete for gaming immediately again, you need to spend about 200-250$ (that would be something like X800GTO, X800XL or 6800/6800GT - depends a bit if your mobo is AGP or PCIE)
Yes, it's twice the price - and about three times the expected useful life as a gaming videocard. 6600 is already obsolete for gaming - its just a cheap piece of crap cashing in on good reputation of the 6600GT (which is nowdays too expensive compared to low end 6800s and X800s).
These guys were overclocking an X1800XT they got directly from ATI.
X1800XL is out (tho even it is not buyable yet in most part of europe), but XT is nowhere to be seen - and it's been three weeks since the 'launch'.
... because ATI made a big press release about it.
Since their product is still mostly vapor (you can't buy it yet), and nVidia is currently owning them in the high end market because ATI's product is so late, one has to grasp straws in order to try look l33t in the eyes of the potential purchasers.
Wish they'd spend less time yapping and more time actually putting product on the shelves.
Nice overclock in any case, but ATI putting out a press release about it is kinda silly
... at which point they dig up the mile-log EULA of Windows. And say 'tough luck'.
BO3 was unplayable on PS2 without hard drive. We used to call it Burnout 3: Loading...
Now once ya plug in the HDD and use HDLoader, crash mode retry takes just a couple of seconds, and the game becomes muuuuch more fun to play.
Purchased...?
Warez jokes aside, most common non-corporate windows are OEM copies. OEM = no support from microsoft. You get your pile of bytes that might or might not work, and you get some patches at the whim of MS. You get no support unless you pay thru the nose per incident.
Sure, you can call your OEM supplier - however, they have no access to the source, and generally just tell you to reinstall the thing and immediately tell your system is unsupported if you actually install something other than the supplied bundled software on your system.
Okay, in the laptop side there are some reasons to pay a premium for Dell XPS - tho personally I'd never try to play modern games on a laptop, and for business use I'd personally buy IBM Thinkpad instead. But that's just my personal opinion, and I know plenty of people who are more than happy to game on expensive 'gaming laptops'.
But, in general, those who buy premium priced 'branded' computers are the target audience for Ultimate Edition. Extra 150$ for 'Best' Windows is easy to sink into the price tag of a 4000$ computer.
Ooo lets see... Educated Guess Time;
I predict that...
General people will buy the cheapest version that runs all applications. That version will be bundled with majority of the home computers. That will probably be the 'Basic' Home version. Don't expect it to be any cheaper than current Home Edition - MS has a monopoly, no reason to undercut in such situation. Premium crap will most likely be priced like today's Pro version, and will only sell to the crowd that today buys Media Center Edition.
If there are feature differences that matter to the applications (such as games or normal productivity apps) everyone will ignore crippled versions - bye bye starter ed. Dunno why MS can't figure this out.
Ultimate Edition will probably be sold to the Alienware/Dell XPS crowd that is too clueless. Rest will ignore the MS software clutter - especially since the ultimate edition has 'subscription' written all over it - the OS itself might work without one, but if it adds any downloadable extras, those will definitely want your personal information, and probably monthly fee sooner or later. I guess MS has gotten addicted to the mothly income it gathers from XBox Live subscribers. Someone has probably calculated how much they'd make if they could milk monthly fees from (some) Windows users as well.
As far as Warez goes - unless the 'Corporate Pro/Enterprise editions' are crippled in some way that matters to home user (lack of MCE features doesn't really qualify), that will be the version(s) that will make rounds - just like today. Additionally the 'Ultimate' version will be cracked to satisfy the 'Must have best version' crowd that previously cackled and downloaded warez versions of such gems as Win2003 Advanced Server for their home PCs so they could have the 'best' Windows. However, most won't want to bother with the extra bloat - or it will be ripped out of the Ultimate and plugged to a suitably modded Corporate version.
Just my 2 cents...
Problem is, the game content is serverside. The 'private' emulated servers have little to no content in them.
If you call 'running around in the same gameworld' as 'playing WoW', then your assesment is correct. To me, however, the items, quests and other things controlled serverside *is* the game - not just the backdrop that is local to your client.
Sorry, haven't tried US WoW so can't comment there - may be filled with idiots, don't know.
Euro WoW that I *have* tried is not *that* bad. It has it's share of cretins, but with careful server selection you can find bearable place to play in.
Generally I meant MMOs with bit more mature playerbase. Yes, every MMO has it's share of idiots, but they are in the minority. In Guild Wars they are in the majority...
I wonder if the telescope could see the smoldering ruins of the webserver from the surface of the moon - as the server just got slashdotted off the face of the earth...
It's cheaper in china - that is true - but that's just local pricing. It's not being dumped (near) free to 'foil pirates', because it can't be pirated.
Also of note - the chinese version is good for creating accounts only on the chinese servers. Same restriction is in place US vs European version.
Considering the amount of dev power MMO developers sink in for day-to-day improvements, and how much running a huge server farm plus customer support costs, 15$/month is peanuts. The valid question is - how many games can fit into the market. People pay that 15$, but once they are paying that, it's a huge additional step to pay for *another* game. So the 'best' game out there gets a disproportionate amount of the market as everyone flocks to it.
Also as there are huge swings in subscriber counts, one game might have to invest $megabucks for new server hardware, only to find it mostly unused after a bungled patch that caused 50k subscribers to quit almost overnight and move to another subscription game.
Blizzard is making huge wads of money, but beyond them (their game is currently 'best' as far as stability and polish goes), many MMO devs are in dire straits - see the long list of cancelled products that took a long look, decided that their offering sucked compared to WoW, and gave up. Games like Imperator (not even released) and Asheron's Call 2.
Also, there's an old saying - the moment you (MMO customer) actually contact their customer support either ingame or via phone, you already costed the company the month's fee you paid.
Some companies have tried to skimp on this - either with seriously undermanned CS, or by outsourcing it to india (go EA!), neither really works as customers bail out rather fast if they somehow get hosed in the game, and cannot get hold of a company rep to fix the issue with their character/possessions/whatever.
Considering the behind-the-scenes costs (servers, bandwidth) and development work and customer support, 15$/month/player is not unreasonable. Nobody is forcing you to pay.
And if you want 'no subs fee' games, there are those too - Guild Wars comes to mind. I tried it, it's so filled by idiotic kids with two second attenttion spans that can't have a credit card, that it made me vomit. Subscription fee is also a nice barrier of entry for the worst idiots, and I'd pay a monthly fee just to be able to play a game that has more mature playerbase.
Not really. You cannot 'black market' WoW. Each copy has an unique serial key used to create an unique account to access the game.
You cannot pirate WoW - well, you can, but the CDs are worthless without an account. At best you can use your 'pirate copy' to run an account you bought off ebay...
When major news organizations don't know what the fuck is going on, that means the place is totalled.
EXACTLY SAME THING happened during the asian tsunamis.
I knew immediately it was no small disaster when for *DAYS* there were absolutely no information from many of the areas. Locally news services reported 'govt has not heard of any deaths in *insert area of thailand*' - sure, they hadn't, because THE AREA WAS NOT THERE ANYMORE. Almost everyone had died to the tsunami.
When news organizations fail to deliver a picture of what's going on in the disaster area after the disaster, that means the place is fucked beyond recognition. Otherwise the news orgs have their cameras and reporters on the scene 30 minutes after the fact. Reason why they were not in this case was because all the roads were busted and all the comms were gone. All we had was some soundbites via satellite videophone from reporters who were holed in some highrise with no idea what's happening outside.
It's not rocket science...
Problem is reliability.
Mainframes Just Work. Mainframes are used when Downtime is NOT an option.
Your random winblows/linux x86 server farm - even a redundant one - crashing couple of times every year is completely out of the question for applications where mainframes are used. Mainframe parts are also made with completely different reliability goals in mind.
128 hours of *HDTV* p0rn. A lot more in normal def :)
www.assembly.org
had thousands of potential wlan users in the area.
Tho I think most still used normal LAN, simply because the wlan access points they had there were all still 11Mbps for historic reasons (several year old APs)
BIOS?
Unmodifiable?
Umm... I modified mine last week. By running a windows application (WinFlash).
Sure, I think it requires admin rights, but it sure modified the BIOS.
It's not a longshot to make a piece of malware that knows how to flash, say, the 20-30 most common motherboards and 0wn them via BIOS. I think the only reason it hasn't been done so far is because today's OSes hardly use BIOS for anything. Tho I guess you could make BIOS to load haxx0red version of, say, NTLDR and via that compromise everything silently.
And even THAT got 0wned. Witness modchips...
:)
MS and their cronies have a solution already lined up. It's called 'trusted computing'. As an additional bonus, it will make sure that the user won't be able to do anything MS and their cronies don't want you to do on your computer.
All in the name of security, of course.
Freedom or security, which one you want?
Nope, but I do play MMOs a lot - and that term is actually originally from EQ... :)