They're going to punish me for using some of their products but not all of their products. Since I'm not going to use all of their products, this is exactly the sort of move that makes me want to get rid of them entirely, and run a completely Linux/OSX office. Right on. I'm a writer by profession, and I like using Word. (I know, OpenOffice / Pages / WordPerfect are far superior, etc.. etc... etc..) Despite the fact that I'll never buy another MS Operating System, I am excited about - and will buy - Office 2008 for Mac, and if they made a Office version for Linux I'd probably buy that too.
While Microsoft as a whole may be evil(tm), some of their products are quite nice and often fill a need better than the competition. The "all or nothing" approach they often take gets my goat.
If there hoping for this thing to get widely adopted, it seems particularly foolish to not release a Linux Silverlight Client given the disproportionate amount of web-programmers who use non-MS operating systems.
I'm unable to decide if a vehicle is beautiful or hideous until it's been reviewed by Top Gear. Or at least until Jeremy Clarkston's written a column about it.
If we're nominating the most irritating driving habits we can think of, I'd have to go for the assholes that think it's their god-given right to go 20+mph faster than the rest the freeway even though this means weaving across all four lanes and cutting someone off approximately every 4.7 seconds. In my year commuting through southern California I've discovered that they seem to disproportionately drive Civic SIs, Volkswagen GTIs and jacked up pickups, though if you have enough asshole in you, any vehicle will do.
Because I spend about an hour of every day commuting with these fine people and watching them endanger the lives of everyone they share the road with, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how they could be caught and punished. So far, my ultimate solution has been that certain exemplary citizens - like, for example, moi - should have their vehicles fitted with government approved land-torpedoes.
Before I begin my first real anti-apple rant on Slashdot, I should note that I have and love an iBook, a 4th Gen iPod, a 2nd Gen iPod Shuffle, a Hackintosh, and an iPod Mini.
Now, to the rant. Perhaps I'm just paying more attention, but it feels to me that Apple is becoming more and more of an Evil Empire(tm). Suing a site that is completely devoted to Apple Fanboys out of existence seems pretty anti-customer. The "You installed bootcamp beta and now you must upgrade to Leopard if you ever want to boot your computer again" fiasco a few weeks ago reeked of the same.
My most recent bout of self-righteous indignation came when I went to Apple's online store to buy a new nano as a gift. I wanted to buy one of the 4gb nanos, and I wanted it in green. Sadly, this is impossible. The 4gb nano only comes in silver. To get a colored nano, you have to pay the extra $50 bucks for the 8gb model. It's a little thing, but it pushed me over the edge. Part of Apple's appeal has always been, "You pay a bit more to get something a bit cooler", but this is a bit too blatant for me. It's enough to kick me out of the fanboy camp. I'm sure Apple-product-lust will still rise in my greedy heart from time-to-time, but I'll do my self-righteous best to suppress those longings in favor of less restrictive fare.
In a related story, are there competitors to the nano that are as elegantly designed and easy to use?
Why do you want to neuter 1 rabbit ? Is there a local risk of rampant feral rabbits impregnating your pet ? While I doubt our rabbit will be impregnating any of the local feral rabbit population, (and doubt even more that he'll become impregnated, since, you know, he's a dude) neutered rabbits won't mark their territory (AKA pee all over everything), are less likely to chew destructively, are generally more pleasant, and are likely to live longer. See the rabbit faq.
BTW, rabbits don't generally like being "cuddled", so you had better get its front teeth and rear claws removed too. As for the cuddling, I can only speak from personal experience. If we ignore our rabbit for too long while he's hopping around the living room, he'll jump up on one of our laps and nuzzle a hand until we scratch him. Though I'd be the first to admit that our rabbit is totally nuts and not likely to be a good representation of the general population.
But compared to the cost of owning a real pet, a $350 one time fee isn't bad at all.
We just bought a rabbit, and in the first year of ownership I'm sure we'll spend more than $350. We got out of the pet store for ~$100 with a cage and a starter kit, then spent about another ~$100 on a couple months worth of bedding, food and treats. When you add on the the ~$150 we'll have to spend to neuter the thing, we're already at the price of the Pleo for less than a year of about the easiest-to-care for cuddleable pet you can get.
Even the Pleo won't be quite the same as a rabbit, but the Pleo won't pee under the piano. At least, the Pleo 1.0 won't pee under the piano.
I have Leopard running on my iBook, a PC running Ubuntu at home (and Vista for when I need to run Photoshop), and XP at work. Frequently switching between four operating systems has helped me to sort between what's useful about each UI and what's just iCandy. The one thing this article (I know, I RTFA, I must be new) that appeared useful is MyExpose. I've always missed expose in Windows, it's a really wonderful productivity tool. Compiz does it well in Ubuntu, but until now I haven't found a Windows replacement for the 8 hours a day I spend sitting in front of my work PC. This functionality seems like the one tip from the article that, productivitywise, would be worth the additional memory being gobbled up.
Sadly, MyExpose keeps crashing on my XP box. I'm giving TopDesk a try, it's not free, and it's slower than either Compiz or Expose, but so far the best Windows alternative I've found.
The element that I have present in Windows and OSX but miss in Ubuntu is a keyboard based application launcher, ala Quicksilver for OSX and Launchy for Windows. I've tried Katapult in Ubuntu, but it's slow and inconsistent. Alt + F2 is ok for some things, but not nearly as convenient as the other dedicated apps. My search continues.
Being married to a medical student who's going through a year of trying different specialties has been very illuminating. Some specialties, like pathology, are almost entirely scientific. Others, like orthopedics are largely mechanical, as are most surgical specialties. Specialties like family practice and pediatrics involve a fair bit of science, but also depend heavily on personal interactions. And of course every physician, just like every person, is subject to their bias.
My wife and her fellow medical students frequently talk about how for your first two years of medical school you're taught science, and for your last two years of medical school you're taken through the hospital and told how everything you just learned is useless.
If medicine could be reduced to a set of scientific rules, it could be practiced by robots. Until that happens, we're stuck with our un-scientific doctors.
Angry gamer meet the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo Wii, meet the angry gamer.
I was just thinking about this weekend as I was playing the Wii. I just got a 1080p display, and some Wii games look fine on it, and others explise the Wii's technical limitations. Games like Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Strikers and Super Paper Mario (see a theme here?) look excellent. Other games, like Twilight Princess, have beautiful art in them that could really benefit from a higher resolution, the Wii's technical capabilities are definitely holding them back. The Wii shows that it is possible to make imminently playable and even beautiful games on hardware that isn't the latest and greatest.
I think, on the PC side, that the solution is to make games more versatile. Of course IANAGP (I Am Not A Game Programmer)so I may be recommending an impossibility, but it seems like it shouldn't be impossible to make games playable on a wide range of systems, just with more varying levels of detail and graphical effects than are currently available. There are plenty of "hacks" out there for the Half Life 2 engine that accomplish this, I don't understand why it's not build into more games.
You're missing the essential difference between Photo.net and Youtube. Photo.net is dedicated to ranking its content on artistic merit, while Youtube seems to be dedicated to ranking its content on merit of entertainment value.
Which is, of course, why I said that part of the equation is the development of "the tools to find that fantastic footage."
Certainly there's some truth there, but digital photography has shown us that more accessibility to "professional" tools generally means more beautiful art being produced by "amateurs". I'm sure if you look at the average flickr submission, there are plenty of awful photographs, but if you look at the photos that others have found most interesting, or head over to photo.net and look at their Top Photos [Warning: Occasional Boobies!], you can see that there is a vast pool of outstanding photographic talent that has been unlocked by digital photography.
Certainly cheap HD video equipment will lead to a lot of high resolution crap, but I'll bet that a lot of fantastic footage will come out of it as well, along with the tools (a la photo.net) to find that fantastic footage.
Completely off topic, but I live about 3 miles from San Bernardino (not the nicest of towns, known for its gangs and welfare recipients) and every time I drive through its neighborhoods I'm amazed at the amounts of Benz's, Lexii (I'm assuming that's the plural of Lexus), Porsche's and the rest. It's astounding. I mean, selling drugs is the first thing that springs to mind, but I read Freakonomics, ("Why drug dealers live with their mothers"), and even so there can't be like 10 dealers on every block, can there? Does anyone else have an answer?
The students thought the assignments were more meaningful because they weren't just thrown away at the end of the assignment. This is an incredibly good point, and should become more of a focus in schools. In a sense, everything you do in school should have real world impact, but the more direct those connections can be made, the more students will be interested in learning. I took a journalism minor in college largely because I knew that many of my assignments would be published in the school's paper. One of the graphic design teachers assigned majors in his department to create logos for local non-profit organizations, and my designer friends gave far more dedication to those assignments than their average assignments.
Most of this discussion has been about the university level, but I think connecting assignments to the real world is even more important at the high school level. I don't really remember any of my high school classes having direct real-world connections, (except for perhaps sex ed, *hur* *hur*, oh, wait, this is Slashdot...), except for an environmental science class where we sampled the water quality of area streams and wrote up our findings for the local newspaper. Consequently that environmental science classes was one of my favorites.
Forget what Wikipedia would look like if more schools did these types of things, think about the impact it could have on the students.
After a while, the teams stop working together, and start working for themselves. Everyone wants to have the high ranking (which means lots of kills), and forgetting about your other duties, like healing and building support devices like dispensers and teleporters. One of the niftiest revamps in TF2 is that your points are no longer based exclusively on kills. Pretty much everything you do that helps your team will move you up the leader board. If you're a medic and you effectively heal your teammates, you move up the board. If you're an engineer and you build a useful dispenser or transporters, you move up the board. If you're a spy and you sap a sentry gun, you move up the board.
The upshot is that the game encourages cooperation far more than any other FPS I've played. For players like me who are simply awful at moving their mouse quickly and shooting people in the head, TF2's combination of unique classes and thoughtful point crediting makes the game incredibly appealing.
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If you really want recycling efforts, then you need to make it easy for people, convenient, and ideally provide some incentive to them doing so. Brilliant! I happen to be a flaming liberal who gets all choked up at the thought of saving the endangered meadow foam, but I don't expect the rest of the world to feel the same way. Mr. alexhmit01 is right on the money. We have to make environmentalism an economic and social no-brainier.
I live in a region that consistently sends republican representatives to congress, but since the city instituted no-sort curbside recycling, nearly every house in my neighborhood recycles. We can never expect Joe Public to pay $10,000 more for a Prius because it saves the Polar Bear, but there's no reason that we can't convince Joe Public to buy a car that gets good mileage because it saves him money at the pump. We can't expect our co-workers to give up their comfortable air-conditioned vehicles for a sweaty bicycle commute, but if public transportation were faster and more convenient, they might well switch over.
Yes, there will always be a subset of individuals who get weepy when they drive past a newly clearcut forest, but they - ok we - can't expect the rest of the world to feel the same way. If we really want to "save the planet" we have to think from the standpoint of Joe Public, not Julia Butterfly.
It turns out that even mid-range cards are going to be more than capable of playing UT3 at impressive image quality levels. Yeah, sure, midrange cards with a $1,000 CPU.
Seriously. How about some benchmarks with a mid/low range CPU?
I think I can safely assume that if bits of the demo dropped to 20FPS with a Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800, 4 Gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 8800GTS, there's really no point in even trying on a midrange machine.
Why can't I find the button to digg this article down?
I think this is a good idea for the church... Get the kids used to being at the church, and interacting with their friends there, possibly even friends that they never get to see otherwise. It establishes it as a friendly place that they want to be, the kids have some supervision while they play, and everyone involved is happy. The ethics of playing an FPS at church aside, you're absolutely right. I grew up in a conservative Christian denomination and while my personal beliefs have swayed considerably from their doctrines, I'm still culturally very much an Adventist. Even though I don't ascribe much religious importance to the activities I still go to church, "keep the Sabbath day holy", tithe, etc... All because I had a youth group that I was heavily involved in during high school.
Convictions aside I'm sure that most denomiations would prefer members who are active to members who are not, and making the church a social hub is a great way to do that.
Is having Halo 3 parties necessary to creating that atmosphere? Not necessarily. My church never had any video gaming nights, and I managed to get my nerd on elsewhere and still stay active in the youth group. Halo 3 nights seem more like a cop-out for leaders who don't have the energy or ability to host more creative activities.
As someone who discovered the Anarchists cookbook on a local BBS at the age of 12, I learned that people never really get used to your lack of eyebrows.
While the Slashdot summary focuses on the article's brief discussion of Mac gaming, the bread and butter of the article is about other things. I found this to be the most illuminating quote:
So [Team Fortress 2] tends to accommodate a wider variety of play styles than say Counter-Strike. I mean Counter-Strike is very clear; there's not a lot of variety in that, whereas there's a huge difference between the tactical thinking that an engineer does managing resources versus say the approach that the sniper has playing in that game. So really it's much more accommodating to a wider range of play styles than any game out there.
This is exactly why I haven't played CS for 2 or 3 years, but I've been playing TF2 every night this week. In CS, or Halo, or just about any other multiplayer first person shooter, if you're not good at shooting people in the head, you're not good at the game. But in TF2, there are so many ways to play the game that everyone's bound to be good at something once they find their niche. While I still suck at playing a soldier or sniper in TF2, I'll often find myself at the top of the list when I'm playing as a Medic or Engineer.
The other unique thing about TF2 is the variety of cooperation that it requires. In Halo and CS, sticking together is just about the only required teamwork. In TF2 the level of class specialization demands an incredibly diverse range of cooperation. Switching the balance of power is often as easy (or hard) as finding a combination of classes that can defeat whatever strategy happens to be working for the enemy.
In some ways, the cooperation in TF2 reminds me more of World of Warcraft than any other First Person Shooter.
While there are some problems with Steam (I'm bothered by the fact that it's impossible to call and talk to a person about either technical support issues or sales support issues) their release pattern for the Orange Box has been great.
As soon as I purchased it I was able to download the TF2 beta and begin playing. Every day or two there have been little updates that increase performance and decrease crashing. What's not to love? It'd be a pain if my statistics didn't transfer over from the beta to the final game, but since they're just accomplishments that don't really unlock anything, nothing will be hurt other than my pride.
My only dissatisfaction comes from the fact that while my machine runs HL2 and CS:Source well, I haven't been able to figure out settings that run TF2 smoothly. I might have to break down and buy some new hardware.
I agree in some cases I agree: I feel like if I'm paying $18/mo to subscribe to WOW, than my addons should be free.
But, in the case of the Half Life 2 episodes, I didn't feel at all like Half Life 2 was shorter than it should have been. And I just got Episode 2 nearly free bundled with "The Orange Box".
Which brings me to my next point: That Team Fortress 2 is awesome. Completely awesome.
I've found that the artistic quality of a game's graphics really does affect gameplay. It's why I have a Wii instead of a 360. It's part of why WOW has a larger user base than Everquest.
Sure, new graphical technologies will always help to make games more fun, but without being used artistically they're little more than a gimmick.
Slashdot Mirror
While Microsoft as a whole may be evil(tm), some of their products are quite nice and often fill a need better than the competition. The "all or nothing" approach they often take gets my goat.
If there hoping for this thing to get widely adopted, it seems particularly foolish to not release a Linux Silverlight Client given the disproportionate amount of web-programmers who use non-MS operating systems.
I'm unable to decide if a vehicle is beautiful or hideous until it's been reviewed by Top Gear. Or at least until Jeremy Clarkston's written a column about it.
If we're nominating the most irritating driving habits we can think of, I'd have to go for the assholes that think it's their god-given right to go 20+mph faster than the rest the freeway even though this means weaving across all four lanes and cutting someone off approximately every 4.7 seconds. In my year commuting through southern California I've discovered that they seem to disproportionately drive Civic SIs, Volkswagen GTIs and jacked up pickups, though if you have enough asshole in you, any vehicle will do.
Because I spend about an hour of every day commuting with these fine people and watching them endanger the lives of everyone they share the road with, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how they could be caught and punished. So far, my ultimate solution has been that certain exemplary citizens - like, for example, moi - should have their vehicles fitted with government approved land-torpedoes.
Before I begin my first real anti-apple rant on Slashdot, I should note that I have and love an iBook, a 4th Gen iPod, a 2nd Gen iPod Shuffle, a Hackintosh, and an iPod Mini.
Now, to the rant. Perhaps I'm just paying more attention, but it feels to me that Apple is becoming more and more of an Evil Empire(tm). Suing a site that is completely devoted to Apple Fanboys out of existence seems pretty anti-customer. The "You installed bootcamp beta and now you must upgrade to Leopard if you ever want to boot your computer again" fiasco a few weeks ago reeked of the same.
My most recent bout of self-righteous indignation came when I went to Apple's online store to buy a new nano as a gift. I wanted to buy one of the 4gb nanos, and I wanted it in green. Sadly, this is impossible. The 4gb nano only comes in silver. To get a colored nano, you have to pay the extra $50 bucks for the 8gb model. It's a little thing, but it pushed me over the edge. Part of Apple's appeal has always been, "You pay a bit more to get something a bit cooler", but this is a bit too blatant for me. It's enough to kick me out of the fanboy camp. I'm sure Apple-product-lust will still rise in my greedy heart from time-to-time, but I'll do my self-righteous best to suppress those longings in favor of less restrictive fare.
In a related story, are there competitors to the nano that are as elegantly designed and easy to use?
But compared to the cost of owning a real pet, a $350 one time fee isn't bad at all.
We just bought a rabbit, and in the first year of ownership I'm sure we'll spend more than $350. We got out of the pet store for ~$100 with a cage and a starter kit, then spent about another ~$100 on a couple months worth of bedding, food and treats. When you add on the the ~$150 we'll have to spend to neuter the thing, we're already at the price of the Pleo for less than a year of about the easiest-to-care for cuddleable pet you can get.
Even the Pleo won't be quite the same as a rabbit, but the Pleo won't pee under the piano. At least, the Pleo 1.0 won't pee under the piano.
I have Leopard running on my iBook, a PC running Ubuntu at home (and Vista for when I need to run Photoshop), and XP at work. Frequently switching between four operating systems has helped me to sort between what's useful about each UI and what's just iCandy. The one thing this article (I know, I RTFA, I must be new) that appeared useful is MyExpose. I've always missed expose in Windows, it's a really wonderful productivity tool. Compiz does it well in Ubuntu, but until now I haven't found a Windows replacement for the 8 hours a day I spend sitting in front of my work PC. This functionality seems like the one tip from the article that, productivitywise, would be worth the additional memory being gobbled up.
Sadly, MyExpose keeps crashing on my XP box. I'm giving TopDesk a try, it's not free, and it's slower than either Compiz or Expose, but so far the best Windows alternative I've found.
The element that I have present in Windows and OSX but miss in Ubuntu is a keyboard based application launcher, ala Quicksilver for OSX and Launchy for Windows. I've tried Katapult in Ubuntu, but it's slow and inconsistent. Alt + F2 is ok for some things, but not nearly as convenient as the other dedicated apps. My search continues.
Is medicine science? Sometimes.
Being married to a medical student who's going through a year of trying different specialties has been very illuminating. Some specialties, like pathology, are almost entirely scientific. Others, like orthopedics are largely mechanical, as are most surgical specialties. Specialties like family practice and pediatrics involve a fair bit of science, but also depend heavily on personal interactions. And of course every physician, just like every person, is subject to their bias.
My wife and her fellow medical students frequently talk about how for your first two years of medical school you're taught science, and for your last two years of medical school you're taken through the hospital and told how everything you just learned is useless.
If medicine could be reduced to a set of scientific rules, it could be practiced by robots. Until that happens, we're stuck with our un-scientific doctors.
Angry gamer meet the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo Wii, meet the angry gamer.
I was just thinking about this weekend as I was playing the Wii. I just got a 1080p display, and some Wii games look fine on it, and others explise the Wii's technical limitations. Games like Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Strikers and Super Paper Mario (see a theme here?) look excellent. Other games, like Twilight Princess, have beautiful art in them that could really benefit from a higher resolution, the Wii's technical capabilities are definitely holding them back. The Wii shows that it is possible to make imminently playable and even beautiful games on hardware that isn't the latest and greatest.
I think, on the PC side, that the solution is to make games more versatile. Of course IANAGP (I Am Not A Game Programmer)so I may be recommending an impossibility, but it seems like it shouldn't be impossible to make games playable on a wide range of systems, just with more varying levels of detail and graphical effects than are currently available. There are plenty of "hacks" out there for the Half Life 2 engine that accomplish this, I don't understand why it's not build into more games.
You're missing the essential difference between Photo.net and Youtube. Photo.net is dedicated to ranking its content on artistic merit, while Youtube seems to be dedicated to ranking its content on merit of entertainment value.
Which is, of course, why I said that part of the equation is the development of "the tools to find that fantastic footage."
Certainly there's some truth there, but digital photography has shown us that more accessibility to "professional" tools generally means more beautiful art being produced by "amateurs". I'm sure if you look at the average flickr submission, there are plenty of awful photographs, but if you look at the photos that others have found most interesting, or head over to photo.net and look at their Top Photos [Warning: Occasional Boobies!], you can see that there is a vast pool of outstanding photographic talent that has been unlocked by digital photography.
Certainly cheap HD video equipment will lead to a lot of high resolution crap, but I'll bet that a lot of fantastic footage will come out of it as well, along with the tools (a la photo.net) to find that fantastic footage.
Completely off topic, but I live about 3 miles from San Bernardino (not the nicest of towns, known for its gangs and welfare recipients) and every time I drive through its neighborhoods I'm amazed at the amounts of Benz's, Lexii (I'm assuming that's the plural of Lexus), Porsche's and the rest. It's astounding. I mean, selling drugs is the first thing that springs to mind, but I read Freakonomics, ("Why drug dealers live with their mothers"), and even so there can't be like 10 dealers on every block, can there? Does anyone else have an answer?
Most of this discussion has been about the university level, but I think connecting assignments to the real world is even more important at the high school level. I don't really remember any of my high school classes having direct real-world connections, (except for perhaps sex ed, *hur* *hur*, oh, wait, this is Slashdot...), except for an environmental science class where we sampled the water quality of area streams and wrote up our findings for the local newspaper. Consequently that environmental science classes was one of my favorites.
Forget what Wikipedia would look like if more schools did these types of things, think about the impact it could have on the students.
The upshot is that the game encourages cooperation far more than any other FPS I've played. For players like me who are simply awful at moving their mouse quickly and shooting people in the head, TF2's combination of unique classes and thoughtful point crediting makes the game incredibly appealing.
I live in a region that consistently sends republican representatives to congress, but since the city instituted no-sort curbside recycling, nearly every house in my neighborhood recycles. We can never expect Joe Public to pay $10,000 more for a Prius because it saves the Polar Bear, but there's no reason that we can't convince Joe Public to buy a car that gets good mileage because it saves him money at the pump. We can't expect our co-workers to give up their comfortable air-conditioned vehicles for a sweaty bicycle commute, but if public transportation were faster and more convenient, they might well switch over.
Yes, there will always be a subset of individuals who get weepy when they drive past a newly clearcut forest, but they - ok we - can't expect the rest of the world to feel the same way. If we really want to "save the planet" we have to think from the standpoint of Joe Public, not Julia Butterfly.
Where's the "+1 Soul Crushingly Sad But True" mod option?
Seriously. How about some benchmarks with a mid/low range CPU?
I think I can safely assume that if bits of the demo dropped to 20FPS with a Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800, 4 Gigs of RAM and an Nvidia 8800GTS, there's really no point in even trying on a midrange machine.
Why can't I find the button to digg this article down?
Convictions aside I'm sure that most denomiations would prefer members who are active to members who are not, and making the church a social hub is a great way to do that.
Is having Halo 3 parties necessary to creating that atmosphere? Not necessarily. My church never had any video gaming nights, and I managed to get my nerd on elsewhere and still stay active in the youth group. Halo 3 nights seem more like a cop-out for leaders who don't have the energy or ability to host more creative activities.
As someone who discovered the Anarchists cookbook on a local BBS at the age of 12, I learned that people never really get used to your lack of eyebrows.
While the Slashdot summary focuses on the article's brief discussion of Mac gaming, the bread and butter of the article is about other things. I found this to be the most illuminating quote:
So [Team Fortress 2] tends to accommodate a wider variety of play styles than say Counter-Strike. I mean Counter-Strike is very clear; there's not a lot of variety in that, whereas there's a huge difference between the tactical thinking that an engineer does managing resources versus say the approach that the sniper has playing in that game. So really it's much more accommodating to a wider range of play styles than any game out there.
This is exactly why I haven't played CS for 2 or 3 years, but I've been playing TF2 every night this week. In CS, or Halo, or just about any other multiplayer first person shooter, if you're not good at shooting people in the head, you're not good at the game. But in TF2, there are so many ways to play the game that everyone's bound to be good at something once they find their niche. While I still suck at playing a soldier or sniper in TF2, I'll often find myself at the top of the list when I'm playing as a Medic or Engineer.
The other unique thing about TF2 is the variety of cooperation that it requires. In Halo and CS, sticking together is just about the only required teamwork. In TF2 the level of class specialization demands an incredibly diverse range of cooperation. Switching the balance of power is often as easy (or hard) as finding a combination of classes that can defeat whatever strategy happens to be working for the enemy.
In some ways, the cooperation in TF2 reminds me more of World of Warcraft than any other First Person Shooter.
While there are some problems with Steam (I'm bothered by the fact that it's impossible to call and talk to a person about either technical support issues or sales support issues) their release pattern for the Orange Box has been great.
As soon as I purchased it I was able to download the TF2 beta and begin playing. Every day or two there have been little updates that increase performance and decrease crashing. What's not to love? It'd be a pain if my statistics didn't transfer over from the beta to the final game, but since they're just accomplishments that don't really unlock anything, nothing will be hurt other than my pride.
My only dissatisfaction comes from the fact that while my machine runs HL2 and CS:Source well, I haven't been able to figure out settings that run TF2 smoothly. I might have to break down and buy some new hardware.
I agree in some cases I agree: I feel like if I'm paying $18/mo to subscribe to WOW, than my addons should be free.
But, in the case of the Half Life 2 episodes, I didn't feel at all like Half Life 2 was shorter than it should have been. And I just got Episode 2 nearly free bundled with "The Orange Box".
Which brings me to my next point: That Team Fortress 2 is awesome. Completely awesome.
Wait, did I just go completely off topic? Bugger.
If you could say Hi to my cousin on the way that would be awesome. He also lives in Canada.
I certainly agree to a point.
I've found that the artistic quality of a game's graphics really does affect gameplay. It's why I have a Wii instead of a 360. It's part of why WOW has a larger user base than Everquest.
Sure, new graphical technologies will always help to make games more fun, but without being used artistically they're little more than a gimmick.
It'll be beautiful. If I could subsidize my OTA HD reception with ESPN HD, Discovery HD and Comedy Central, I'd be one happy sonofabitch.