My habit is to wait at least six months after launch, the games are cheaper, the bugs will be well known and most importantly if a Publisher hasn't released a patch by then they never will.
Also excellent advice generally - living 6-12 months behind the latest and greatest will save you a ton of money on hardware.
The only time it's not great is for games that are primarily multiplayer in nature. Unless they're exceptional (and few are), the multiplayer is often much less viable after 6-12 months, simply because people have moved on to other games.
...about the games they're going to spend money on, and then find out too late that it has problems (ie, after they've paid for it).
Gamers need to get over that urgent, gripping need they have to rush out and buy a new game the second it is released. They've become too complacent and accustomed to game developers not releasing demos, and - sadly - this has become the status quo. Instead of a demo being something that absolutely has to happen before people even glance at your game, publishers have figured out that they can release some PRs, screenshots, and trailers, and slap anything in a box and it will/still/ sell enough to justify doing it that way.
Once they've gotten your money, it's basically too late (unless you have the energy to go and demand a refund).
BE A DISCRIMINATING GAMER. Read reviews. Try demos, and if they don't have one post on their forums asking where their demo is. Check out their forums and see what people are complaining about. It's all about knowledge.
Further, anyone that has touched an EA game in the last 10 years should know by now that they make games based on a deadline. Unless a game is catastrophically not ready, then it will be shipped and shelved, and any problems will get fixed later (maybe). They make a lot of great games, but a good rule of thumb is to only buy them after it's been out for a month and they've fixed all the critical bugs (a good rule for PC games in general).
Note: I'm not trying to justify shitty development practices. Far from it. I'm trying to make sure people understand the most effective way to vote on this stuff is with their feet - don't buy broken video games.
I can safely say I've never done this. I've made other errors - such as ending up in Estonia's (.ee) web space on occasion, since I work in an electrical engineering department. But I can't believe leaving out the "o" from ".com" is particularly easy or at all common.
I can't figure out how you think ending up at a domain ending in.ee because you're an electrical engineer is less weird than mistyping.com
I think copyright simply shouldn't apply after some period where the products are no longer commercially available. This would stop companies simply sitting on their copyrights trying to figure out ways to milk them for the next hundred years and keep fresh things rolling into the public domain.
Still worthless, you say? According to TFA, the last time the Terminator franchise rights were sold, they went for $25 million. The purchaser used the rights to make Terminator: Salvation, which grossed $380 million worldwide. Not so bad.
Well, depends on how much the movie cost to make on top of that as well, I guess:)
And how would an n-factor authentication scheme help when software on your computer is logging keystrokes, mouse gestures, and capturing images of your screen and then sending them near realtime to the bad guys?
The way it works here with some banks in Australia is they send you a code via SMS when you try to issue a transfer from Internet banking. You need to enter the code into the website to continue the transaction. So the extra factor here of having the phone offers a pretty useful extra layer.
Actually I disagree. I think it's crazy that I pay per KWh of electical power I use, I pay per minute of phone time I spent, I pay per BTU (or is it volume?) of natural gas I use, I pay per liter of petrol I use, etc, etc...
I guess it's partly because it's quite easy to use orders of magnitude more bandwidth than you intend in very short periods of time without being aware of it. A Windows update might suck down a couple hundred megs. A software glitch might cause something to get auto-downloaded a hundred times in an hour before it completes properly. A non-tech-savvy user might leave a torrent running for 3 days unaware that he's uploading gigabytes a day.
With all those other things though its quite a bit harder to use massively more than you think you're using.
Definitely agree though, metered pricing I think would be great to have, at least as an option for those of us that know how to deal with it.
Even if you're not but care about censorship and IP related issues, sign up. Dont let people whose policies are dictated by industries who only have how much profit they can squeeze out as their only lobbyists on such issues.
There's already a group that is lobbying for us effectively on those issues - the EFA!
...every few weeks. I have tried to contact the bank (Chase) to let them know that they're sending to the wrong account.
They make it fucking impossible to contact them - UNLESS I log on with the account to do so (or call them, which I don't feel like doing because I don't live in the USA).
Every couple weeks I reply to the email (even though it says "don't reply", it has a unique reply-to, so I hold out some hope that maybe someone keeps an eye on the occasional reply). This has been going on for months. Attempts to navigate the website to find a simple contact page appear to be futile - there/must/ be one (right?) but I can't find it at a glance, and how much time should I be investing in this, seriously?!
I haven't looked at the emails closely because I don't care what's in them, but I'm sure there's some personal/confidential information in them - and if not, as the owner of the email address, I'm sure I could request some more stuff to get sent to me.
I really want to fix this problem, rather than just hit 'spam' so gmail bins them all (which helps noone, I feel). But the bank has not taken this scenario into account adequately enough - and until they are forced to, they just won't bother.
(Why do banks send emails at all? They should/only/ ever send emails to people that have opted in with a public key so they can be securely signed. Yes, that cuts out a lot of people, but seriously, the people that it cuts out will be better off for it.)
MMS just helps cell/mobile telcos perpetuate the myth that they're now anything other than mere purveyors of wireless data connectivity. The iPhone has done so much to help break this pattern, it'd be a shame to go backwards.
Obligatory reference to MUTE, an anonymous p2p system for file sharing which is apparently based on the process by which ants find food: http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml
The article is about AFACT - the copyright mob in Australia - trying to stop the caps. Not the ISPs (they have their own issues with bandwidth that are not at all related to copyright). In Australia, I think we're actually better off than, say, people in the USA - because our limits are clearly defined and well published. Unlike in the US where you have these 'unlimited' plans getting advertised and then you get randomly cut off when you use too much data.
AFACT trying to limit our downloads is, imo, worse than the ISPs trying to cut it off. What business does AFACT have to tell anyone about how much they should be downloading? I routinely leave large downloads and uploads going overnight so it doesn't tie up my connection during the day, and it's sure as shit not anything AFACT need to worry about - backing up my data, photos, my legitimately purchased digital content, downloading Linux ISOs (actual, real ones, not the airquote ones that people use to ever-so-subtly refer to pirating shit).
AFACT and ISPs have butted heads regularly in the past. They're a bunch of complete dicks that are pushing the same retarded line the RIAA/MPAA do, just in a different way. There was a great roundtable on an Australian TV show about it last year which you can watch online (possibly only if you are in.au, depending on how fucked their licensing is, I guess).
It's an interesting branding issue - a significant proportion of the non-technical people I know that use Firefox call it Mozilla (though my dad keeps mispronouncing it "Mot-zilla", and he's not the only one I've met that does that).
I thought this was interesting so just went to wikipedia's hemp page, which tells me hemp nut is around 30% protein by mass.
This information is cited in Wikipedia as sourced from http://www.wcranchohemp.com/info.php, which states the information is sourced from http://www.thehempnut.com/, which is a site that sells hemp foods. The data no longer appears to be there though, so I am not sure exactly how it was gathered. A quick Google indicates that data has been spread all over the Internet as seems to form the basis of most nutritional assumptions, so YMMV with the data. This and this have slightly different numbers that seem to agree.
Not sure if there's some sort of official authority for this sort of data that is reliable though !
Seems like it would be great to have a private network of twitter-enabled devices where only you or friends would be able to monitor their status. There's way too many privacy concerns with an open network like Twitter.
RSS with optional VPN sounds easier, more flexible, and more useful to me:>
Can't everyone just, like, move away from that place?
I don't know if I'm reading wiki wrong but that doesn't look like an end-of-all-life-on-earth sort of event, like an asteroid slamming into it would be:)
(Disclaimer: I just finished re-reading Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle. Well worth a read!!)
That's an interesting article. I'll respond to this first though:
Also, the better e-mail clients automatically italicise text between slashes, bolden text between asterisks, and underline text between underscores.
This isn't a standard though. I would totally be happy doing this if it was a standard. HTML is a good, simple, clean standard for text formatting and its now so widely accepted that not supporting it seems like a bit of a waste. It's better, IMO, to focus on "down-rendering" HTML into plain text!
To your article though:
- several points are about bad HTML handling. This is a problem, but it's a client problem and one that I think is largely resolved in most clients. Except text-based ones. Oh, and that piece of shit Outlook (now that's a big problem).
- sending HTML is inefficient due to overhead I would say is a triviality. This is really only a big deal if you're sending emails to hundreds of thousands of people. There is a size penalty, but its orders of magnitudes less than almost any other activity one might do on the Internet. And adding basic HTML formatting (especially if your client creates nice, clean HTML or you write the HTML yourself like I generally do!) really isn't that big a deal.
- Background image, flashy graphics, etc - subjective and not very interesting.
- People limited to text only terminals - definitely a problem, but again, creating a simple plain text version to send is fairly trivial.
- Security issues of inline graphics - definitely an excellent point. Most clients deal with this gracefully already, giving you the option to load or not load, and its trivial to add trusted senders or block losers.
- Proprietary attachments and mail systems are, of course, stupid. No argument there.
That is actually now exactly what I do:) I've found it is the best compromise.
Exec summary at the top in point form, details below. I use HTML formatting in both the summary and the lengthy text though to highlight key issues in both.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you truly think that the Greens could do better?
I see it as the following options:
a) Jack Johnson
b) John Jackson
c) The Greens
I'm a bit over the first two options. Pretty keen to see what someone else can do when given the chance.
Yep, I remember being in Japan and seeing phones that did all that and being amazed at how far behind the rest of the world was.
This was when I was there at the start of 2006.
Sad face.
My habit is to wait at least six months after launch, the games are cheaper, the bugs will be well known and most importantly if a Publisher hasn't released a patch by then they never will.
Also excellent advice generally - living 6-12 months behind the latest and greatest will save you a ton of money on hardware.
The only time it's not great is for games that are primarily multiplayer in nature. Unless they're exceptional (and few are), the multiplayer is often much less viable after 6-12 months, simply because people have moved on to other games.
...about the games they're going to spend money on, and then find out too late that it has problems (ie, after they've paid for it).
Gamers need to get over that urgent, gripping need they have to rush out and buy a new game the second it is released. They've become too complacent and accustomed to game developers not releasing demos, and - sadly - this has become the status quo. Instead of a demo being something that absolutely has to happen before people even glance at your game, publishers have figured out that they can release some PRs, screenshots, and trailers, and slap anything in a box and it will /still/ sell enough to justify doing it that way.
Once they've gotten your money, it's basically too late (unless you have the energy to go and demand a refund).
BE A DISCRIMINATING GAMER. Read reviews. Try demos, and if they don't have one post on their forums asking where their demo is. Check out their forums and see what people are complaining about. It's all about knowledge.
Further, anyone that has touched an EA game in the last 10 years should know by now that they make games based on a deadline. Unless a game is catastrophically not ready, then it will be shipped and shelved, and any problems will get fixed later (maybe). They make a lot of great games, but a good rule of thumb is to only buy them after it's been out for a month and they've fixed all the critical bugs (a good rule for PC games in general).
Note: I'm not trying to justify shitty development practices. Far from it. I'm trying to make sure people understand the most effective way to vote on this stuff is with their feet - don't buy broken video games.
..if they'd just given that $9.5 million to the EFF.
I can safely say I've never done this. I've made other errors - such as ending up in Estonia's (.ee) web space on occasion, since I work in an electrical engineering department. But I can't believe leaving out the "o" from ".com" is particularly easy or at all common.
I can't figure out how you think ending up at a domain ending in .ee because you're an electrical engineer is less weird than mistyping .com
I think copyright simply shouldn't apply after some period where the products are no longer commercially available. This would stop companies simply sitting on their copyrights trying to figure out ways to milk them for the next hundred years and keep fresh things rolling into the public domain.
Still worthless, you say? According to TFA, the last time the Terminator franchise rights were sold, they went for $25 million. The purchaser used the rights to make Terminator: Salvation, which grossed $380 million worldwide. Not so bad.
Well, depends on how much the movie cost to make on top of that as well, I guess :)
And how would an n-factor authentication scheme help when software on your computer is logging keystrokes, mouse gestures, and capturing images of your screen and then sending them near realtime to the bad guys?
The way it works here with some banks in Australia is they send you a code via SMS when you try to issue a transfer from Internet banking. You need to enter the code into the website to continue the transaction. So the extra factor here of having the phone offers a pretty useful extra layer.
My bank doesn't offer it; I wish it did.
"General principles should not be based on exceptional cases."
Robert J. Sawyer, "Calculating God"
Actually I disagree. I think it's crazy that I pay per KWh of electical power I use, I pay per minute of phone time I spent, I pay per BTU (or is it volume?) of natural gas I use, I pay per liter of petrol I use, etc, etc...
I guess it's partly because it's quite easy to use orders of magnitude more bandwidth than you intend in very short periods of time without being aware of it. A Windows update might suck down a couple hundred megs. A software glitch might cause something to get auto-downloaded a hundred times in an hour before it completes properly. A non-tech-savvy user might leave a torrent running for 3 days unaware that he's uploading gigabytes a day.
With all those other things though its quite a bit harder to use massively more than you think you're using.
Definitely agree though, metered pricing I think would be great to have, at least as an option for those of us that know how to deal with it.
Even if you're not but care about censorship and IP related issues, sign up. Dont let people whose policies are dictated by industries who only have how much profit they can squeeze out as their only lobbyists on such issues.
There's already a group that is lobbying for us effectively on those issues - the EFA!
They just bought the On2 VP6 codec, which will no doubt feature heavily in their future video plans.
...every few weeks. I have tried to contact the bank (Chase) to let them know that they're sending to the wrong account.
They make it fucking impossible to contact them - UNLESS I log on with the account to do so (or call them, which I don't feel like doing because I don't live in the USA).
Every couple weeks I reply to the email (even though it says "don't reply", it has a unique reply-to, so I hold out some hope that maybe someone keeps an eye on the occasional reply). This has been going on for months. Attempts to navigate the website to find a simple contact page appear to be futile - there /must/ be one (right?) but I can't find it at a glance, and how much time should I be investing in this, seriously?!
I haven't looked at the emails closely because I don't care what's in them, but I'm sure there's some personal/confidential information in them - and if not, as the owner of the email address, I'm sure I could request some more stuff to get sent to me.
I really want to fix this problem, rather than just hit 'spam' so gmail bins them all (which helps noone, I feel). But the bank has not taken this scenario into account adequately enough - and until they are forced to, they just won't bother.
(Why do banks send emails at all? They should /only/ ever send emails to people that have opted in with a public key so they can be securely signed. Yes, that cuts out a lot of people, but seriously, the people that it cuts out will be better off for it.)
MMS just helps cell/mobile telcos perpetuate the myth that they're now anything other than mere purveyors of wireless data connectivity. The iPhone has done so much to help break this pattern, it'd be a shame to go backwards.
Obligatory reference to MUTE, an anonymous p2p system for file sharing which is apparently based on the process by which ants find food: http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml
The article is about AFACT - the copyright mob in Australia - trying to stop the caps. Not the ISPs (they have their own issues with bandwidth that are not at all related to copyright). In Australia, I think we're actually better off than, say, people in the USA - because our limits are clearly defined and well published. Unlike in the US where you have these 'unlimited' plans getting advertised and then you get randomly cut off when you use too much data.
AFACT trying to limit our downloads is, imo, worse than the ISPs trying to cut it off. What business does AFACT have to tell anyone about how much they should be downloading? I routinely leave large downloads and uploads going overnight so it doesn't tie up my connection during the day, and it's sure as shit not anything AFACT need to worry about - backing up my data, photos, my legitimately purchased digital content, downloading Linux ISOs (actual, real ones, not the airquote ones that people use to ever-so-subtly refer to pirating shit).
AFACT and ISPs have butted heads regularly in the past. They're a bunch of complete dicks that are pushing the same retarded line the RIAA/MPAA do, just in a different way. There was a great roundtable on an Australian TV show about it last year which you can watch online (possibly only if you are in .au, depending on how fucked their licensing is, I guess).
It's an interesting branding issue - a significant proportion of the non-technical people I know that use Firefox call it Mozilla (though my dad keeps mispronouncing it "Mot-zilla", and he's not the only one I've met that does that).
Does the Kindle have an EULA or something that defines what "unlimited" means?
I thought this was interesting so just went to wikipedia's hemp page, which tells me hemp nut is around 30% protein by mass.
This information is cited in Wikipedia as sourced from http://www.wcranchohemp.com/info.php, which states the information is sourced from http://www.thehempnut.com/, which is a site that sells hemp foods. The data no longer appears to be there though, so I am not sure exactly how it was gathered. A quick Google indicates that data has been spread all over the Internet as seems to form the basis of most nutritional assumptions, so YMMV with the data. This and this have slightly different numbers that seem to agree.
Not sure if there's some sort of official authority for this sort of data that is reliable though !
Seems like it would be great to have a private network of twitter-enabled devices where only you or friends would be able to monitor their status. There's way too many privacy concerns with an open network like Twitter.
RSS with optional VPN sounds easier, more flexible, and more useful to me :>
Can't everyone just, like, move away from that place?
I don't know if I'm reading wiki wrong but that doesn't look like an end-of-all-life-on-earth sort of event, like an asteroid slamming into it would be :)
(Disclaimer: I just finished re-reading Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle. Well worth a read!!)
That's an interesting article. I'll respond to this first though:
Also, the better e-mail clients automatically italicise text between slashes, bolden text between asterisks, and underline text between underscores.
This isn't a standard though. I would totally be happy doing this if it was a standard. HTML is a good, simple, clean standard for text formatting and its now so widely accepted that not supporting it seems like a bit of a waste. It's better, IMO, to focus on "down-rendering" HTML into plain text!
To your article though:
- several points are about bad HTML handling. This is a problem, but it's a client problem and one that I think is largely resolved in most clients. Except text-based ones. Oh, and that piece of shit Outlook (now that's a big problem).
- sending HTML is inefficient due to overhead I would say is a triviality. This is really only a big deal if you're sending emails to hundreds of thousands of people. There is a size penalty, but its orders of magnitudes less than almost any other activity one might do on the Internet. And adding basic HTML formatting (especially if your client creates nice, clean HTML or you write the HTML yourself like I generally do!) really isn't that big a deal.
- Background image, flashy graphics, etc - subjective and not very interesting.
- People limited to text only terminals - definitely a problem, but again, creating a simple plain text version to send is fairly trivial.
- Security issues of inline graphics - definitely an excellent point. Most clients deal with this gracefully already, giving you the option to load or not load, and its trivial to add trusted senders or block losers.
- Proprietary attachments and mail systems are, of course, stupid. No argument there.
That is actually now exactly what I do :) I've found it is the best compromise.
Exec summary at the top in point form, details below. I use HTML formatting in both the summary and the lengthy text though to highlight key issues in both.
hehe!