As the Technical Director of a group doing telecom related multimedia application development back in 1995 and a long time Mac User, I was sad when I had to make the decision to develop for Windows '95 instead of Mac OS. The reason was simply that Apple had abandoned the home and educational markets and there were far more development options in Windows by that time. I remember writing a letter about the problem to Mac Weekly (Now defunct I believe).
Getting back into the educational system is Apple's best hope of retaining the desktop market they once dominated.
It's good to see any run of the mill village idiot can still start a game company. I was beginning to think it was only for smart people.
I see why he is concerned, however. When your game is utter crap, who wants people finding out before they fork over large sums of cash? A free demo is just a way for people to discover the game is junk and let their friends know.
I can't tell you how many games I sat on the fence for and only decided to purchase AFTER the free demo proved the game might be worth it.
But maybe he's right, maybe Chik Fil'A will stop handing out free samples. Maybe movie theatres will stop showing trailers of upcoming movies. Maybe MMO companies will stop giving out 5-10 day free trials.
Maybe the Sun will stop coming up in the East.
Until then, I suspect Crytek is in trouble with their current management.
If the law is unfair, unjust, or just plain disproportionate, then yes, I'd prefer to see the enforcers refuse to do the law's bidding.
That is far too broad a brush for the police to decide. Life isn't fair, I suspect most people who are mature enough to get through a Police Academy are mature enough to understand that. If the law is clearly immoral or unethical then I'd agree with you. However I don't see this law as being either of those.
Is it unfair? Yes.
Should the police not enforce it because of that? No
That is for the courts to decide. If a jury of this man's peers cannot be convinced the law is wrong, then he's going to jail. I have no doubt that any worthy sheis...lawyer will be able to argue this well enough to keep the man out of jail. He may end up paying fines.
Same argument goes for "just plain disproportionate." I don't think the Police should be in the habit of deciding what laws have disproportionate penalties. That is also what the courts are for.
This reminds me of the 60's when there were actually people who believed that all of those little Japanese cars were programmed to fall apart when a signal came from Tokyo. We'd be stuck with no transportation and Japan would finally win the war.
I'm not saying this couldn't be done with computer software today. But obviously paranoia isn't limited by technology.
I have to agree on the UI front. The decision to move so many OS options and settings all over the place was simply baffling. It was like someone at MS said "If we move this stuff to new places, it will feel like a new OS."
At the very least I think they should have left hooks to allow users to go where they are used to when looking for something. Along with a note that tells people the new way to go about something. Instead they came up with some sort of "anti file link" mechanism. I wonder how many people double clicked on "Documents and Settings" and got frustrated and confused by the "You aren't allowed to go there" dialog box. The right thing to do would have been to make it a usable link. The next best thing would have been to pop up a kinder and gentler dialog that said "Please use the new 'Users' folder, we can take you there now if you like..." Simple and oh so un-Microsoft like. Instead they call the user an idiot for using a folder name they have been taught to use for years.
I'm a hardcore gamer, and when I got a machine with a Vista upgrade disk I decided to run Vista and XP side by side for awhile until I was convinced that Vista didn't cause me any performance degradation while playing games. After a few weeks and a couple of video driver updates, Vista was getting the same performance as XP in every game that mattered to me. At that point I uninstalled the XP partition and haven't looked back.
That isn't to say I like Vista. It has many features that I am disgusted with. UAC is one obvious one. However, while I saw it as necessary, the real problem with UAC was the way it was implemented. MS simply got it wrong. The biggest problem is that Vista has no features that make it a "must have" upgrade. Except for DirectX 10, there is nothing that Vista does that XP cannot do in one fashion or another.
I don't recommend Vista to anyone. My wife just got a new machine with XP and a Vista upgrade disk. She'll stay on XP. I upgraded because I have to support the platform in my network security job, and I wanted to be familiar with it.
But Vista can be made to perform at least as well as XP in almost every case.
I may wait until the weekend to find out. I work from home. I can avoid all news outlets for that long. The better to get drunk when I find out. Celebrating or commiserating, isn't it great that alcohol goes with both?
There was a LONG LONG LONG thread on the Google discussion groups about this new interface when they forced many users into the Beta version. Of the hundreds of people who took the time to post, I don't think I read a single person who was happy with the change.
Many of us found a way to opt out of the experiment, much to our delight.
So apparently Google took all of those complaints (about 99% against the change, maybe 99.99%) and decided it was a good change because nobody threatened violence. Well, a couple did but the Google reps discounted them as fringe users.
So where is everyone moving too now that Google has decided that UI means User Interference.
You think anyone here was asked their opinion? Seriously?
"You're an idiot, here's your sign." - Jeff Foxworthy, but it applies.
A good game isn't determined by whether or not a computer can play it. Nor whether or not a specific person likes to play it.
A good game is determined by the value people find in playing it when they do. Do people keep coming back to it because they enjoy the experience? By that standard WoW is clearly a very good game.
Tic-tac-toe is a bad game, whether or not a computer can play it.
Apparently you don't understand the Engineering/Management process. In most companies firing is the path of least pain. If you really want to punish an engineer for making a mistake, you make them fix it.
Believe me with some software I've worked on that was the worst punishment.
What Apple DOES want Joe Average to know is that by purchasing Apple Hardware Apple will guarantee that their OS works properly. They may not make hardware that much different from a generic PC, but they build it and configure it so that they know the OS will run without problems.
That's the reason people BUY a Mac. They know it all "just works". That difference is not lost on the several million Apple customers who have been so loyal despite Windows market share.
I'm actually re-reading the book at this time. Partly in preparation to see the movie and have the book sort of fresh in my mind, and partly because I haven't read it in awhile and it is a fine Graphics Novel.
I for one hope they get the situation sorted, and that the movie is as close to the book as all of the interviews and teasers have indicated.
plus getting in and out of sleep, especially for the laptops, appears to go smoother.
Sadly, after months of upgrades from Intel for my motherboard I finally got sleep to work as well as it has been on XP. Service Pack 1 has broken sleep once again and I have to decide if I want to uninstall it and have my stable system back or hope that Intel releases upgrades that fix sleep again in Vista.
Sigh
No the problem is entirely with raising a generation of people who have seen countless friends call theft something else to quell their quilt. I couldn't afford it so I wouldn't have bought it anyway so I was justified in stealing it. You made money to purchase blank floppies, and your neighbor made money to buy the lock picks so he could come into your house and steal your computer.
Argue all you want, but any rationalization of theft is NOT a defense.
I'm not here to help you feel better or worse about your past actions. I hope to educate other kids, like I have educated my own.
It is the government's responsibility to educate the people absolutely and they are failing in that responsibility absolutely.
That is perhaps the single most frightening statement I have ever read. Government education has been responsible for some of the biggest crimes in the past couple of centuries. See Germany in the 1930's or the Soviet Union for the first half of the 20th century for examples of this.
However, reading the rest of your post proves that government education is alive and working here in the U.S.
STOP listening to what the big government is trying to teach you, get out of the house and talk to real people. NOT just your close friends.
Don't rely on the Government for absolute education. People need to understand humans act like humans, and the same goes for institutions run by humans. If the Government is failing to educate, then take it as a fundamental truth that the Government is not the place to turn to for education.
No one lost anything from my "piracy" because there was absolutely ZERO chance that I ever would have been able to buy any of the software or half of the magazines that I had available to me back then.
Nice rationalization, so if a thief can't afford a CD it would be fine to steal the CD?
OTOH, I realize the Hardware companies have profitted immensely from piracy. I contend that half of all Apple ][ (][+ and//x) sales came about due to pirated copies of Visicalc.
I am not buying Vista primarily because Nvidia has yest to release actual working drivers with the same performance characteristics as the XP drivers. I play games I need performance, pretty simple. Not Microsoft's fault directly, but still not going that route until I can get the same or better performance.
Yep, this is the single biggest problem with Vista. Go check out the forums for Supreme Commander (Gas Power Games) and Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine). Both of these are "Games for Windows" showcase applications, and both have users screaming bloody murder over the constant crashes and poor performance in Vista with the latest NVIdia hardware (8800's). Naturally the majority of people are buying new computers with Vista and these video cards because they want to play DirectX 10 games when they become available. But they are finding they can barely play games recently released for Vista and DX 9.
Consumers beware. Vista is a fine and stable OS UNLESS you want to play modern games, which is probably the only advantage Windows really has over OS X and Linux.
What is really worrying is the fact that NVidia and Microsoft still haven't resolved these issues months after the products have released. I am beginning to worry that there is actually a problem with NVidia's hardware that can't be worked around with drivers.
Fortunately I have an ATI X1950 Pro, which I will keep until a suitable DX 10 card appears on the market.
My father died in the mid 70's when he was still relatively young. I was having some problems making sense of it and I discovered Vonnegut. Somehow his writing provided a fresh perspective on the nature of reality, humanity and mortality. While I later drifted away from Vonnegut's narcissism, I still recall those days as his novels became the perfect form of escape for me during a really tough time.
I don't think I'll trust Microsoft to do the math for a discount. I recently purchased Vista Home Premium. When I went to find out how much the live (Anytime) upgrade would cost to switch to Ultimate should I ever need to do that I found that it was retailing for $179.99. Now let me see, I bought the Vista Home Premium upgrade for $159.99. The Ultimate Upgrade would have cost me $259.99, a difference of $100.00. But to upgrade it will cost me $179.99.
No thanks MS. I'm gonna have to pass up that great deal.
Capitalism requires marketing, and marketing requires advertising. All true. However, that doesn't give you the right to use my personal resources for your marketing. You aren't effectively advertising by filling my bandwidth with crap that won't even get a second thought. If I DO see a corporate logo as I am hitting the "Junk" button, it will only register as a company that I won't be doing business with in the future.
Let me give a true life analogy. When I was a kid my dad took us to one of those road-side attractions that you see while traveling. When we came out again, we discovered that the owner of said attraction had a kid going around sticking bumper stickers on every car in the parking lot. Capitalism requires advertising.
Long story shorter, my father called the local authorities, who not only had the manager remove every bumper sticker, but made him pay for professional cleaning in the cases where the stickers couldn't be removed because of the super glue backing they contained.
I think the so called legitimate marketers need to remember that the consumers are paying for the bandwidth, the email box and the computer it is being downloaded onto. None of this is free. If you want to advertise, buy TV time. I can fast forward over that with my TiVo.
Capitalism needs advertising, and advertisers need common sense. Being reviled by the public at large is NOT good marketing. Hopefully that is being taught in business schools today.
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As the Technical Director of a group doing telecom related multimedia application development back in 1995 and a long time Mac User, I was sad when I had to make the decision to develop for Windows '95 instead of Mac OS. The reason was simply that Apple had abandoned the home and educational markets and there were far more development options in Windows by that time. I remember writing a letter about the problem to Mac Weekly (Now defunct I believe).
Getting back into the educational system is Apple's best hope of retaining the desktop market they once dominated.
It's good to see any run of the mill village idiot can still start a game company. I was beginning to think it was only for smart people.
I see why he is concerned, however. When your game is utter crap, who wants people finding out before they fork over large sums of cash? A free demo is just a way for people to discover the game is junk and let their friends know.
I can't tell you how many games I sat on the fence for and only decided to purchase AFTER the free demo proved the game might be worth it.
But maybe he's right, maybe Chik Fil'A will stop handing out free samples. Maybe movie theatres will stop showing trailers of upcoming movies. Maybe MMO companies will stop giving out 5-10 day free trials.
Maybe the Sun will stop coming up in the East.
Until then, I suspect Crytek is in trouble with their current management.
If the law is unfair, unjust, or just plain disproportionate, then yes, I'd prefer to see the enforcers refuse to do the law's bidding.
That is far too broad a brush for the police to decide. Life isn't fair, I suspect most people who are mature enough to get through a Police Academy are mature enough to understand that. If the law is clearly immoral or unethical then I'd agree with you. However I don't see this law as being either of those.
Is it unfair? Yes.
Should the police not enforce it because of that? No
That is for the courts to decide. If a jury of this man's peers cannot be convinced the law is wrong, then he's going to jail. I have no doubt that any worthy sheis...lawyer will be able to argue this well enough to keep the man out of jail. He may end up paying fines.
Same argument goes for "just plain disproportionate." I don't think the Police should be in the habit of deciding what laws have disproportionate penalties. That is also what the courts are for.
I am not a crackpot.
Lets just agree to disagree. :)
This reminds me of the 60's when there were actually people who believed that all of those little Japanese cars were programmed to fall apart when a signal came from Tokyo. We'd be stuck with no transportation and Japan would finally win the war.
I'm not saying this couldn't be done with computer software today. But obviously paranoia isn't limited by technology.
I have to agree on the UI front. The decision to move so many OS options and settings all over the place was simply baffling. It was like someone at MS said "If we move this stuff to new places, it will feel like a new OS."
At the very least I think they should have left hooks to allow users to go where they are used to when looking for something. Along with a note that tells people the new way to go about something. Instead they came up with some sort of "anti file link" mechanism. I wonder how many people double clicked on "Documents and Settings" and got frustrated and confused by the "You aren't allowed to go there" dialog box. The right thing to do would have been to make it a usable link. The next best thing would have been to pop up a kinder and gentler dialog that said "Please use the new 'Users' folder, we can take you there now if you like..." Simple and oh so un-Microsoft like. Instead they call the user an idiot for using a folder name they have been taught to use for years.
I'm a hardcore gamer, and when I got a machine with a Vista upgrade disk I decided to run Vista and XP side by side for awhile until I was convinced that Vista didn't cause me any performance degradation while playing games. After a few weeks and a couple of video driver updates, Vista was getting the same performance as XP in every game that mattered to me. At that point I uninstalled the XP partition and haven't looked back.
That isn't to say I like Vista. It has many features that I am disgusted with. UAC is one obvious one. However, while I saw it as necessary, the real problem with UAC was the way it was implemented. MS simply got it wrong. The biggest problem is that Vista has no features that make it a "must have" upgrade. Except for DirectX 10, there is nothing that Vista does that XP cannot do in one fashion or another.
I don't recommend Vista to anyone. My wife just got a new machine with XP and a Vista upgrade disk. She'll stay on XP. I upgraded because I have to support the platform in my network security job, and I wanted to be familiar with it.
But Vista can be made to perform at least as well as XP in almost every case.
I may wait until the weekend to find out. I work from home. I can avoid all news outlets for that long. The better to get drunk when I find out. Celebrating or commiserating, isn't it great that alcohol goes with both?
I still want to figure out how to ignore the fracking campaign.
Except it doesn't give back the tabs on the top. Having the tabs on the left go away is bliss. But I still want to get to my other Google pages...
There was a LONG LONG LONG thread on the Google discussion groups about this new interface when they forced many users into the Beta version. Of the hundreds of people who took the time to post, I don't think I read a single person who was happy with the change.
Many of us found a way to opt out of the experiment, much to our delight.
So apparently Google took all of those complaints (about 99% against the change, maybe 99.99%) and decided it was a good change because nobody threatened violence. Well, a couple did but the Google reps discounted them as fringe users.
So where is everyone moving too now that Google has decided that UI means User Interference.
You think anyone here was asked their opinion? Seriously?
"You're an idiot, here's your sign." - Jeff Foxworthy, but it applies.
A good game isn't determined by whether or not a computer can play it. Nor whether or not a specific person likes to play it.
A good game is determined by the value people find in playing it when they do. Do people keep coming back to it because they enjoy the experience? By that standard WoW is clearly a very good game.
Tic-tac-toe is a bad game, whether or not a computer can play it.
Apparently you don't understand the Engineering/Management process. In most companies firing is the path of least pain. If you really want to punish an engineer for making a mistake, you make them fix it.
Believe me with some software I've worked on that was the worst punishment.
What Apple DOES want Joe Average to know is that by purchasing Apple Hardware Apple will guarantee that their OS works properly. They may not make hardware that much different from a generic PC, but they build it and configure it so that they know the OS will run without problems.
That's the reason people BUY a Mac. They know it all "just works". That difference is not lost on the several million Apple customers who have been so loyal despite Windows market share.
I'm actually re-reading the book at this time. Partly in preparation to see the movie and have the book sort of fresh in my mind, and partly because I haven't read it in awhile and it is a fine Graphics Novel.
I for one hope they get the situation sorted, and that the movie is as close to the book as all of the interviews and teasers have indicated.
No the problem is entirely with raising a generation of people who have seen countless friends call theft something else to quell their quilt. I couldn't afford it so I wouldn't have bought it anyway so I was justified in stealing it. You made money to purchase blank floppies, and your neighbor made money to buy the lock picks so he could come into your house and steal your computer.
Argue all you want, but any rationalization of theft is NOT a defense.
I'm not here to help you feel better or worse about your past actions. I hope to educate other kids, like I have educated my own.
That is perhaps the single most frightening statement I have ever read. Government education has been responsible for some of the biggest crimes in the past couple of centuries. See Germany in the 1930's or the Soviet Union for the first half of the 20th century for examples of this.
However, reading the rest of your post proves that government education is alive and working here in the U.S.
STOP listening to what the big government is trying to teach you, get out of the house and talk to real people. NOT just your close friends.
Don't rely on the Government for absolute education. People need to understand humans act like humans, and the same goes for institutions run by humans. If the Government is failing to educate, then take it as a fundamental truth that the Government is not the place to turn to for education.
Nice rationalization, so if a thief can't afford a CD it would be fine to steal the CD?
OTOH, I realize the Hardware companies have profitted immensely from piracy. I contend that half of all Apple ][ (][+ and
So if I tell you that Jeff Dahmer was responsible for fewer homicides than Charles Manson, would you want either one living next door?
Yep, this is the single biggest problem with Vista. Go check out the forums for Supreme Commander (Gas Power Games) and Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine). Both of these are "Games for Windows" showcase applications, and both have users screaming bloody murder over the constant crashes and poor performance in Vista with the latest NVIdia hardware (8800's). Naturally the majority of people are buying new computers with Vista and these video cards because they want to play DirectX 10 games when they become available. But they are finding they can barely play games recently released for Vista and DX 9.
Consumers beware. Vista is a fine and stable OS UNLESS you want to play modern games, which is probably the only advantage Windows really has over OS X and Linux.
What is really worrying is the fact that NVidia and Microsoft still haven't resolved these issues months after the products have released. I am beginning to worry that there is actually a problem with NVidia's hardware that can't be worked around with drivers.
Fortunately I have an ATI X1950 Pro, which I will keep until a suitable DX 10 card appears on the market.
Of course, Blizzards lawyers had a meeting with the staff and gave the usual, "Do not discuss this lawsuit with the public," speech.
Except I gave up my account because of all the gold spammers. So Blizzard is really trying to re-coop the money they are losing due to these sites.
My father died in the mid 70's when he was still relatively young. I was having some problems making sense of it and I discovered Vonnegut. Somehow his writing provided a fresh perspective on the nature of reality, humanity and mortality. While I later drifted away from Vonnegut's narcissism, I still recall those days as his novels became the perfect form of escape for me during a really tough time.
RIP Kurt.
I don't think I'll trust Microsoft to do the math for a discount. I recently purchased Vista Home Premium. When I went to find out how much the live (Anytime) upgrade would cost to switch to Ultimate should I ever need to do that I found that it was retailing for $179.99. Now let me see, I bought the Vista Home Premium upgrade for $159.99. The Ultimate Upgrade would have cost me $259.99, a difference of $100.00. But to upgrade it will cost me $179.99.
No thanks MS. I'm gonna have to pass up that great deal.
Capitalism requires marketing, and marketing requires advertising. All true. However, that doesn't give you the right to use my personal resources for your marketing. You aren't effectively advertising by filling my bandwidth with crap that won't even get a second thought. If I DO see a corporate logo as I am hitting the "Junk" button, it will only register as a company that I won't be doing business with in the future.
Let me give a true life analogy. When I was a kid my dad took us to one of those road-side attractions that you see while traveling. When we came out again, we discovered that the owner of said attraction had a kid going around sticking bumper stickers on every car in the parking lot. Capitalism requires advertising.
Long story shorter, my father called the local authorities, who not only had the manager remove every bumper sticker, but made him pay for professional cleaning in the cases where the stickers couldn't be removed because of the super glue backing they contained.
I think the so called legitimate marketers need to remember that the consumers are paying for the bandwidth, the email box and the computer it is being downloaded onto. None of this is free. If you want to advertise, buy TV time. I can fast forward over that with my TiVo.
Capitalism needs advertising, and advertisers need common sense. Being reviled by the public at large is NOT good marketing. Hopefully that is being taught in business schools today.