all nice in theory, but workable only if your clients could all have 10ms latency. When you start designing games to be playable with 400+ms latency you need to make compromises, and it becomes REALLY difficult to get things working well (I know, in a previous life I've been a games network programmer for an fps, it was quite challenging).
In wow (and fps games in general) player movement is not predictable, at any point a player can stop and turn with no inertia (so it's not like, say, a space sim game where you can do dead reckoning at even fairly high latencies and make things look decent) and if you've seen any wow pvp you know it consists of a lot of jumping around and running through each other to try to get behind the other player. Also several abilities need to be used with very tight timings, there is the gcd to take care of etc. etc. etc.
You need to have some things running on the client side to make the game playable for as many people as possible (for example oceanic players on US servers), and the problem is what you do when the client and the server disagree on where you are and what you are doing: tilt the balance too much towards the client and you have easy exploits, tilt the balance too much towards the server and the game will start to feel 'sluggish' and sometimes outright broken (I was right on top of the other player, why did I get 'out of range').
It's not an easy problem to solve for a game as complex as wow, if it was do you think that with all the money they're raking in they wouldn't have fixed it yet?
120 film if properly scanned would qualify as way, way, way more than HD, especially if it was shot with decent glass (you can easily scan 120 film at 4800dpi, and it's 6 inches wide, you do the math...)
it should be on in about half an hour (5pm PST) on Discovery HD for 30 minutes, not sure how much of the footage they're going to show (or if it's only on the Canadian Discovery HD) but it's on my cable box's IPG so do check it out, I seem to recall also that it will be repeated at least twice in the next few days.
'#1 No, getting access to new skills every 2 levels, and new 'phat' loot is what push people to level up.'
that is another carrot added to the bouquet, of course the mount is not the ONLY thing, but it is a powerful incentive as the levelling curve starts to noticeably slow down in the late 20s/early 30s
'...it's a backwards way of game design and business. Give players what they want, and they will come.'
yes, they will come, but will they stay? In an mmporg every player wants the most overpowered equipment, do you think they would stick around once you give it to them? Like I was saying the point of an mmporg is to create an open-ended experience (as in, keep playing, keep paying), and to make it open-ended the carrot needs to be kept just slightly out of reach at all times.
In other games this feeling of carrot-ness is implicit in the player (basically wanting to get just a little bit better to improve your k/d ratio, or beat your high score, or beat your speedrun time, etc. etc.) while in mmporgs this is codified by means of gear/skill progression. In an interesting trend even non mmporg-games are starting to have some skinner box mechanisms of the same kind by having the 'achievement' system, which is definitely something created to keep people playing a game much longer than they would in the first time if they didn't exist.
> No it doesn't. Dead Time is BORING. The first rule of game design "The game should be fun"
#1 you completely missed my point, the boredom is what pushes you to level to get the mount #2 the first rule of (mmporg) game design is to hook people and keep them hooked, fun is not the primary objective, having them renew their subscription for years to come is. Single player and non-subscription-revenue games are a different kettle of fish, since the player has already given you all their money, you can indeed focus on making the game fun and satisfying to complete; there is no completing an mmporg.
exactly, you are not a game designer, it's obvious from your comments.
> * The designers don't have a clue stick about "dead time." Spending half of your time traveling back and forth across zones before you get your mount at 40 is B-O-R-I-N-G. Flying takes far too long.
dead time increases your wanting to level up to get the mount, it increases the value of mounts to players enormously: same thing for flying mounts, same thing for epic flying mounts. Think carrot (mount) and stick (time spent travelling)
> * The ONLY way to level up is to kill things. For those that only interested in creating/crafting things, you're screwed.
the amount of time the designers spend on creating mobs is way higher than the amount they spend in professions: if professions are your thing wow is probably not the game for you.
> * Quests are very limited. There 10 basic times, but only about 5 account for 95% of them: "Kill", "Random Drop", "Delivery", "Item", "Boss"
I challenge you to try to come up with a quest, any quest, that can not be boiled down to those simple constituents. (note that escort quests can be simplified as 'delivery' quests, and any sort of quest that can have you steal/manipulate things with can be simplified to 'item' for example).
> * Very limited world interaction. The world is static -- much like a ride through Disney Land. Your actions don't change the world.
how can you guarantee a consistent gaming experience to all your players if you let them change the world? Can you imagine how crappy the experience would be for a new subscriber if you let old high level subscribers destroy all the lower level areas permanently for example? (which is what would happen a second after you let people do it).
> * Crafting is not thought out. i.e. Smiths can make armor, but not repair their own??
crafting is thought out very well for what it is, a time/gold sink to give people something to do. If you allowed, say, blacksmiths to repair armor for free or at a big discount, every single raider would spec blacksmith in a second, you have to consider the balance of the game as a whole.
> Wow is NOT a great game -- but is "good enough", and certainly is "better" then anything else out there.
the incredible amounts of money it's been pulling in since release disagree with your view. WOW is a skinner box, intended to get people to be addicted to it, it parcels out rewards often enough to keep you hooked, but not so much as to overwhelm you and make you feel that you 'won', because if you did you'd cancel your subscription.
There always always always needs to be a further carrot for you to work towards, that's what people that complain that all the time bliz spends on 'high level dungeons that 1% of the population will ever see' is wasted don't understand: yes, only 1% of the players will see them, but at least 75% of the players will yearn to see them, and consequently will try to progress to that level while remaining hooked to the game (and paying their subscriptions).
Once a certain % of the players has reached a certain level, then Blizzard will release a new and shinier carrot, and the cycle continues: once they are out of carrots, out comes a new expansion, with apples, then one with bananas, and so on and on and on forever. Playing wow is like watching broadcast tv, a mindless time wasting activity, which is perfectly fine if done in moderation (everybody needs downtime) but not fine at all if you are sacrificing things you could do in real life just to spend more time in game under the mistaken assumption that what you do there 'matters'. Your GM gear, that you spent 6+ months of 50 hours a week of play, that you sacrificed 4 weeks of work vacation for the last push for, has been obsoleted by quest rewards anybody can get: was it really worth it?
I am positive blizzard employs quite a few psychologists to make sure their game is as addictive as possible (or has in
I don't really care about QOS, or about wireless (I actually want to make sure it's possible to turn it off explicitly), I just want something I can keep running NAT/DHCP/Firewalling on that sucks less electricity than a full featured box and won't cause issues with my 10mbit cable connection (whether limiting the d/load speed or, worse, introduce lag and/or other issues: I use this for telecommuting so having a very stable low-added-latency fw/nat is mandatory for me, since for some reason nx sometimes doesn't like to resume sessions dropped due to network issues).
no, I'm not new, and I am aware of the WRT54G (although I've never bought it b/c I don't care much about wireless), however as far as I know you can't run LEAF/Bering on it, that's why I was asking what the OP was running... OTOH I haven't really ever investigated the merits/demerits of DD-WRT et. al. compared against LEAF etc.
what router do you have? and can you run something full-featured like LEAF? I am looking into retiring my ancient (P133) linux router/fw for something more energy efficient and quiet and if there was something I could flash LEAF on it would be the perfect thing...
And I still contend that you are spending more than you would if you paid cash
I strongly disagree, I research whichever purchase I am going to make before making it, so however I pay for it it's immaterial.
I think the main issue with people and credit cards is impulse buying: if people had a rule that they will NOT buy anything non-essential (food, gas, etc.) unless it was decided at home at least the day before, for less than $50 purchases, or at least a week before, for less than $200, or at least a month before, for anything above $200, then there would be no issues with overspending regardless of things.
Credit cards have only one difference compared to cash/bank cards: they allow you to spend more than what you have, if you know how much you have and you don't spend more than that then there is no difference between c/cs and other types of cards.
there is really no way around store incompetence: if they mess up you'll always end up on the hook, an employee will always be believed before a customer.
Some years back I regularly rented movies from blockbusters, 3-4 at a time usually, one time I returned them all and after a few days I get a phone call saying to come to the store for some message: I go there and they tell me I didn't return title xyz, I am 'what do you mean, I had 4 movies out, 3 show up as returned, I always return all my movies at the same time and in the past 3-4 years if you look at my account you'll see I never ever returned something late', they're 'oh sorry' and I thought it was over.
After about another week I receive a letter in the mail telling me that if I didn't return the movie I'd be charged full price for it, I go back to the store and we do once again the same song and dance, again telling me the matter was resolved. After about a month I started getting calls (I kid you not) from a collection agency, to cut a long story short this went on for another couple of months (with various visits to the store in between) until a point where I didn't get calls for several weeks.
Curious I stopped by at the store and they told me that they did a full inventory and they found 'my' movie on a different shelf: they didn't even say sorry or compensate me for anything. Three years pass and I stupidly decide to give them another chance and rent a playstation game, I take it back on time, on cue 4 days later I get the phone call saying I didn't return it: I go to the store and speak with the manager (who doesn't believe me, in the meantime they changed computer systems and the history of the previous incident is not there anymore), we walk to the PS games shelf and guess what, 'my' game is on the shelf next to the ps games.
After this I cut up my blockbuster card and I swore never ever ever ever to use their service again.
Call it names all you want. My guess is you are probably spending 12-18% more in your purchases than you would with cash. You don't feel the pain when you make that Credit Card purchase. You will feel it more if you use a debit card, and you will feel it completely when you use cash. Personal Finance is 80% mental.
The fact is most American families are drowning in Debt. Mortgages that they can't afford are a big part of the problem, the rest of the problem is credit card debt.
??? I've had a personal c/c since when I was 14 (I am now 37), always pay my balance in full at the end of the month (with very rare exceptions, paying 18% interest when I can get 3.5% max is quite stupid): I treat my c/c as a bank card with more protection. If somebody installs one of those pin stealing machines at a store (happened quite a few times around here lately) and gets your bank card info they can take a LOT of money out of your account; if they took my c/c info I'd be a lot more protected.
The fact that most families are drowning in debt is due to people always trying to 'keep up with the Joneses', if people budget it doesn't make a difference if they use a bank card, cash, a credit card, clams or whatever: if you figure out that your income is $x, that your fixed expenses are $y, that you want to save $z every month and consequently your discretionary income is $x - ($y + $z), well, you'll never go in debt or have financial issues (unless something bad happens, of course, if your house burns down and insurance doesn't pay, or you lose your job, or whatever).
There is no reason whatsoever for a dual-income family to be in an increasing-over-time level of debt: having a decreasing-over-time debt is pretty much a given (mortgage), but if you find that your debt is increasing it's because you either are not budgeting your expenses well, or you are living above your means (including being in a house that's way too expensive for your salary level).
I grew up with my parents in a 500sqf apartment without even having my own bedroom until I was 18 (I slept on the couch in the living room and did my homework on the kitchen table), did my parents envy their friends who could afford bigger apartments or even houses? you bet! did they extend themselves over their means just to satisfy this envy? you bet they didn't! If they had been like the 'typical' family we so often hear about nowadays they'd just have gotten a big place and ended up in foreclosure/bankruptcy some years later.
It's like the article I just read today about people with resetting mortgages maxing out their credit cards in order to be able to pay their mortgage: talk about throwing good money after bad! People should be taught the concept of sunk costs and why it's a bad idea to become emotionally attached to an investment (properties included). If you're underwater, unless it's obvious that it's a temporary thing, get out, take the (still) small financial penalty and start again, much better than really end up at the very bottom...
this was long and rambling, but I hope it will help people see that credit cards are not evil, they are just a different form of money, and like all forms of money they need to be understood, treated with respect and used accordingly.
Ouch, I hope both of those stores that accept Amex treat you well. Here in Canada only major chains accept it.
visa is not that bad either: about 10 years ago I bought a treadmill and paid 50% on order, with the remainder due on delivery (they kept my c/c on file for the delivery). Everything went fine until the month after the delivery I noticed that the store charged me 100% of the retail price (in two transactions) on delivery. Of course I called them right away and started this month-and-a-half-long back & forth with them using more and more implausible excuses about why this happened (the most interesting was this one: there was a power outage while they were processing my payment so there had been two transactions) and why it was taking so long for them to refund me (because the c/c machine mysteriously stopped working (for 3 weeks?) and they were waiting for it to be fixed).
In the end I called up td visa, faxed them the receipts and they immediately refunded the extra 50% and dealt with recouping the extra $$$ from the store without me having to do anything else. I was going to return the treadmill altogether to punish the store but unfortunately it was one of those 30-day-return-limit ones so I couldn't. Drove by the store about 6 months later and saw it was boarded up and out of business, big surprise!
you must have not been using computers for very long, I clearly remember paying about $600 for a 30MB drive (that's megabytes, and I remember partitioning in 4 partitions because 30mb was so much, lol) for my atari st way back...
adjustment layers, which are one of the most important editing tools IMHO and have been missing from the gimp despite years and years of people begging for them (together with cymk and a more 'standard' gui) but as usual in the OSS world features developers care about are done first, not features important for users: I will be sticking with my CS2, thanks, and given Adobe's earnings I think others are as well (I don't think CS3 is worth $200 to upgrade btw, but that's just me).
But, alas, I'm almost 100% positive (I didn't RTFA) that this particular technology could not be adapted to a floating bridge.
why not? from the video I've seen it looks as all of the tech is on the peg side of things (which are motorized and do the tuning), the bridge is not touched at all (unlike the other older tech where it seemed that the adjustments by the servos were done there)
it's the first fps since, hmmm, the original counter strike way back (around 1.5) that has me hooked and doesn't feel like yet another quake/doom/ut rehash. The polish level is amazing, and the art is just mind-blowing, amazing how they were able to create something so unique and yet make it run so well even on non super cutting edge hardware.
actually that is not true, look it up in a dictionary and you'll see that dike and dyke are synonims.
dyke
n 1: offensive terms for a lesbian who is noticeably masculine
[syn: butch, dike]
2: a barrier constructed to contain the flow or water or to
keep out the sea [syn: dam, dike, levee]
v : enclose with a dike; "dike the land to protect it from
water" [syn: dike]
they are? are you sure? yeah, old school quake is/was, however newer games for sure are not. Also a lot of modern games do perform continuous disk i/o (MMPORGS, GTA,...). Also users might not want to have to shut down all their apps when they want to game, a 'dumber' scheduler that focuses on the current app would be a much better choice than a 'fair' scheduler here.
Slashdot Mirror
all nice in theory, but workable only if your clients could all have 10ms latency. When you start designing games to be playable with 400+ms latency you need to make compromises, and it becomes REALLY difficult to get things working well (I know, in a previous life I've been a games network programmer for an fps, it was quite challenging).
In wow (and fps games in general) player movement is not predictable, at any point a player can stop and turn with no inertia (so it's not like, say, a space sim game where you can do dead reckoning at even fairly high latencies and make things look decent) and if you've seen any wow pvp you know it consists of a lot of jumping around and running through each other to try to get behind the other player. Also several abilities need to be used with very tight timings, there is the gcd to take care of etc. etc. etc.
You need to have some things running on the client side to make the game playable for as many people as possible (for example oceanic players on US servers), and the problem is what you do when the client and the server disagree on where you are and what you are doing: tilt the balance too much towards the client and you have easy exploits, tilt the balance too much towards the server and the game will start to feel 'sluggish' and sometimes outright broken (I was right on top of the other player, why did I get 'out of range').
It's not an easy problem to solve for a game as complex as wow, if it was do you think that with all the money they're raking in they wouldn't have fixed it yet?
when I was playing wow I used prepaid game cards exactly for this reason... or aren't prepaid cards available anymore?
I taped it on my PVR and wow, it sure was worth it! The earthrise and earthset sequences were just gorgeous...
120 film if properly scanned would qualify as way, way, way more than HD, especially if it was shot with decent glass (you can easily scan 120 film at 4800dpi, and it's 6 inches wide, you do the math...)
it should be on in about half an hour (5pm PST) on Discovery HD for 30 minutes, not sure how much of the footage they're going to show (or if it's only on the Canadian Discovery HD) but it's on my cable box's IPG so do check it out, I seem to recall also that it will be repeated at least twice in the next few days.
'#1 No, getting access to new skills every 2 levels, and new 'phat' loot is what push people to level up.'
that is another carrot added to the bouquet, of course the mount is not the ONLY thing, but it is a powerful incentive as the levelling curve starts to noticeably slow down in the late 20s/early 30s
'...it's a backwards way of game design and business. Give players what they want, and they will come.'
yes, they will come, but will they stay? In an mmporg every player wants the most overpowered equipment, do you think they would stick around once you give it to them? Like I was saying the point of an mmporg is to create an open-ended experience (as in, keep playing, keep paying), and to make it open-ended the carrot needs to be kept just slightly out of reach at all times.
In other games this feeling of carrot-ness is implicit in the player (basically wanting to get just a little bit better to improve your k/d ratio, or beat your high score, or beat your speedrun time, etc. etc.) while in mmporgs this is codified by means of gear/skill progression. In an interesting trend even non mmporg-games are starting to have some skinner box mechanisms of the same kind by having the 'achievement' system, which is definitely something created to keep people playing a game much longer than they would in the first time if they didn't exist.
> No it doesn't. Dead Time is BORING. The first rule of game design "The game should be fun"
#1 you completely missed my point, the boredom is what pushes you to level to get the mount
#2 the first rule of (mmporg) game design is to hook people and keep them hooked, fun is not the primary objective, having them renew their subscription for years to come is. Single player and non-subscription-revenue games are a different kettle of fish, since the player has already given you all their money, you can indeed focus on making the game fun and satisfying to complete; there is no completing an mmporg.
> Oh please. I am a game programmer.
exactly, you are not a game designer, it's obvious from your comments.
> * The designers don't have a clue stick about "dead time." Spending half of your time traveling back and forth across zones before you get your mount at 40 is B-O-R-I-N-G. Flying takes far too long.
dead time increases your wanting to level up to get the mount, it increases the value of mounts to players enormously: same thing for flying mounts, same thing for epic flying mounts. Think carrot (mount) and stick (time spent travelling)
> * The ONLY way to level up is to kill things. For those that only interested in creating/crafting things, you're screwed.
the amount of time the designers spend on creating mobs is way higher than the amount they spend in professions: if professions are your thing wow is probably not the game for you.
> * Quests are very limited. There 10 basic times, but only about 5 account for 95% of them: "Kill", "Random Drop", "Delivery", "Item", "Boss"
I challenge you to try to come up with a quest, any quest, that can not be boiled down to those simple constituents. (note that escort quests can be simplified as 'delivery' quests, and any sort of quest that can have you steal/manipulate things with can be simplified to 'item' for example).
> * Very limited world interaction. The world is static -- much like a ride through Disney Land. Your actions don't change the world.
how can you guarantee a consistent gaming experience to all your players if you let them change the world? Can you imagine how crappy the experience would be for a new subscriber if you let old high level subscribers destroy all the lower level areas permanently for example? (which is what would happen a second after you let people do it).
> * Crafting is not thought out. i.e. Smiths can make armor, but not repair their own??
crafting is thought out very well for what it is, a time/gold sink to give people something to do. If you allowed, say, blacksmiths to repair armor for free or at a big discount, every single raider would spec blacksmith in a second, you have to consider the balance of the game as a whole.
> Wow is NOT a great game -- but is "good enough", and certainly is "better" then anything else out there.
the incredible amounts of money it's been pulling in since release disagree with your view. WOW is a skinner box, intended to get people to be addicted to it, it parcels out rewards often enough to keep you hooked, but not so much as to overwhelm you and make you feel that you 'won', because if you did you'd cancel your subscription.
There always always always needs to be a further carrot for you to work towards, that's what people that complain that all the time bliz spends on 'high level dungeons that 1% of the population will ever see' is wasted don't understand: yes, only 1% of the players will see them, but at least 75% of the players will yearn to see them, and consequently will try to progress to that level while remaining hooked to the game (and paying their subscriptions).
Once a certain % of the players has reached a certain level, then Blizzard will release a new and shinier carrot, and the cycle continues: once they are out of carrots, out comes a new expansion, with apples, then one with bananas, and so on and on and on forever. Playing wow is like watching broadcast tv, a mindless time wasting activity, which is perfectly fine if done in moderation (everybody needs downtime) but not fine at all if you are sacrificing things you could do in real life just to spend more time in game under the mistaken assumption that what you do there 'matters'. Your GM gear, that you spent 6+ months of 50 hours a week of play, that you sacrificed 4 weeks of work vacation for the last push for, has been obsoleted by quest rewards anybody can get: was it really worth it?
I am positive blizzard employs quite a few psychologists to make sure their game is as addictive as possible (or has in
they are not active, I know somebody who hasn't played since mid-August and his characters are still viewable in the armory.
how long do you think their server would survive if they put the original 1080p footage on?
I don't really care about QOS, or about wireless (I actually want to make sure it's possible to turn it off explicitly), I just want something I can keep running NAT/DHCP/Firewalling on that sucks less electricity than a full featured box and won't cause issues with my 10mbit cable connection (whether limiting the d/load speed or, worse, introduce lag and/or other issues: I use this for telecommuting so having a very stable low-added-latency fw/nat is mandatory for me, since for some reason nx sometimes doesn't like to resume sessions dropped due to network issues).
no, I'm not new, and I am aware of the WRT54G (although I've never bought it b/c I don't care much about wireless), however as far as I know you can't run LEAF/Bering on it, that's why I was asking what the OP was running... OTOH I haven't really ever investigated the merits/demerits of DD-WRT et. al. compared against LEAF etc.
what router do you have? and can you run something full-featured like LEAF? I am looking into retiring my ancient (P133) linux router/fw for something more energy efficient and quiet and if there was something I could flash LEAF on it would be the perfect thing...
I strongly disagree, I research whichever purchase I am going to make before making it, so however I pay for it it's immaterial.
I think the main issue with people and credit cards is impulse buying: if people had a rule that they will NOT buy anything non-essential (food, gas, etc.) unless it was decided at home at least the day before, for less than $50 purchases, or at least a week before, for less than $200, or at least a month before, for anything above $200, then there would be no issues with overspending regardless of things.
Credit cards have only one difference compared to cash/bank cards: they allow you to spend more than what you have, if you know how much you have and you don't spend more than that then there is no difference between c/cs and other types of cards.
there is really no way around store incompetence: if they mess up you'll always end up on the hook, an employee will always be believed before a customer.
Some years back I regularly rented movies from blockbusters, 3-4 at a time usually, one time I returned them all and after a few days I get a phone call saying to come to the store for some message: I go there and they tell me I didn't return title xyz, I am 'what do you mean, I had 4 movies out, 3 show up as returned, I always return all my movies at the same time and in the past 3-4 years if you look at my account you'll see I never ever returned something late', they're 'oh sorry' and I thought it was over.
After about another week I receive a letter in the mail telling me that if I didn't return the movie I'd be charged full price for it, I go back to the store and we do once again the same song and dance, again telling me the matter was resolved. After about a month I started getting calls (I kid you not) from a collection agency, to cut a long story short this went on for another couple of months (with various visits to the store in between) until a point where I didn't get calls for several weeks.
Curious I stopped by at the store and they told me that they did a full inventory and they found 'my' movie on a different shelf: they didn't even say sorry or compensate me for anything. Three years pass and I stupidly decide to give them another chance and rent a playstation game, I take it back on time, on cue 4 days later I get the phone call saying I didn't return it: I go to the store and speak with the manager (who doesn't believe me, in the meantime they changed computer systems and the history of the previous incident is not there anymore), we walk to the PS games shelf and guess what, 'my' game is on the shelf next to the ps games.
After this I cut up my blockbuster card and I swore never ever ever ever to use their service again.
??? I've had a personal c/c since when I was 14 (I am now 37), always pay my balance in full at the end of the month (with very rare exceptions, paying 18% interest when I can get 3.5% max is quite stupid): I treat my c/c as a bank card with more protection. If somebody installs one of those pin stealing machines at a store (happened quite a few times around here lately) and gets your bank card info they can take a LOT of money out of your account; if they took my c/c info I'd be a lot more protected.
The fact that most families are drowning in debt is due to people always trying to 'keep up with the Joneses', if people budget it doesn't make a difference if they use a bank card, cash, a credit card, clams or whatever: if you figure out that your income is $x, that your fixed expenses are $y, that you want to save $z every month and consequently your discretionary income is $x - ($y + $z), well, you'll never go in debt or have financial issues (unless something bad happens, of course, if your house burns down and insurance doesn't pay, or you lose your job, or whatever).
There is no reason whatsoever for a dual-income family to be in an increasing-over-time level of debt: having a decreasing-over-time debt is pretty much a given (mortgage), but if you find that your debt is increasing it's because you either are not budgeting your expenses well, or you are living above your means (including being in a house that's way too expensive for your salary level).
I grew up with my parents in a 500sqf apartment without even having my own bedroom until I was 18 (I slept on the couch in the living room and did my homework on the kitchen table), did my parents envy their friends who could afford bigger apartments or even houses? you bet! did they extend themselves over their means just to satisfy this envy? you bet they didn't! If they had been like the 'typical' family we so often hear about nowadays they'd just have gotten a big place and ended up in foreclosure/bankruptcy some years later.
It's like the article I just read today about people with resetting mortgages maxing out their credit cards in order to be able to pay their mortgage: talk about throwing good money after bad! People should be taught the concept of sunk costs and why it's a bad idea to become emotionally attached to an investment (properties included). If you're underwater, unless it's obvious that it's a temporary thing, get out, take the (still) small financial penalty and start again, much better than really end up at the very bottom...
this was long and rambling, but I hope it will help people see that credit cards are not evil, they are just a different form of money, and like all forms of money they need to be understood, treated with respect and used accordingly.
visa is not that bad either: about 10 years ago I bought a treadmill and paid 50% on order, with the remainder due on delivery (they kept my c/c on file for the delivery). Everything went fine until the month after the delivery I noticed that the store charged me 100% of the retail price (in two transactions) on delivery. Of course I called them right away and started this month-and-a-half-long back & forth with them using more and more implausible excuses about why this happened (the most interesting was this one: there was a power outage while they were processing my payment so there had been two transactions) and why it was taking so long for them to refund me (because the c/c machine mysteriously stopped working (for 3 weeks?) and they were waiting for it to be fixed).
In the end I called up td visa, faxed them the receipts and they immediately refunded the extra 50% and dealt with recouping the extra $$$ from the store without me having to do anything else. I was going to return the treadmill altogether to punish the store but unfortunately it was one of those 30-day-return-limit ones so I couldn't. Drove by the store about 6 months later and saw it was boarded up and out of business, big surprise!
you must have not been using computers for very long, I clearly remember paying about $600 for a 30MB drive (that's megabytes, and I remember partitioning in 4 partitions because 30mb was so much, lol) for my atari st way back...
do you really think that the 8800gtx will still be nvidia's top-of-the-line card come Christmas?
adjustment layers, which are one of the most important editing tools IMHO and have been missing from the gimp despite years and years of people begging for them (together with cymk and a more 'standard' gui) but as usual in the OSS world features developers care about are done first, not features important for users: I will be sticking with my CS2, thanks, and given Adobe's earnings I think others are as well (I don't think CS3 is worth $200 to upgrade btw, but that's just me).
arrr, you're right, forgot about that :(
why not? from the video I've seen it looks as all of the tech is on the peg side of things (which are motorized and do the tuning), the bridge is not touched at all (unlike the other older tech where it seemed that the adjustments by the servos were done there)
it's the first fps since, hmmm, the original counter strike way back (around 1.5) that has me hooked and doesn't feel like yet another quake/doom/ut rehash. The polish level is amazing, and the art is just mind-blowing, amazing how they were able to create something so unique and yet make it run so well even on non super cutting edge hardware.
major kudos to valve!
actually that is not true, look it up in a dictionary and you'll see that dike and dyke are synonims.
and from another
they are? are you sure? yeah, old school quake is/was, however newer games for sure are not. Also a lot of modern games do perform continuous disk i/o (MMPORGS, GTA,