Whilst I enjoyed treking across the map in FC2 I was still bored overall. The missions are repetitive, the enemy AI is poor and they all have X-Ray vision (at least when it comes to bushes) with almost perfect aim.
For those reasons it's certainly not better than Crysis; Crytek clearly went to great lengths to make sure that if you can't see through something then the enemy can't either, the enemy AI in Crysis is far superior too.
You can't really compare it to Half Life either because HL is a corridor shooter, it's supposed to be linear. The fact that you can't make your own path means Valve were free to concentrate on memorable encounters. I can remember loads of great moments in the Half Life series but all the firefights in FC2 are just mushed together as one generic blob in my memory.
FC2 is a diamond in the rough. If they released the same game but with more mission variety, better enemy's and some memorable encounters (even if that means having a few corridor sections) then I think it'd be a massive success. It wouldn't please the people who're complaining about the checkpoints but they can fuck off back to CoD.
Yes, it is DRM. This certificate is the public key against which the signature is checked. The reason why the PE is signed is to make sure you don't circumvent the DRM. This certificate is an integral part of the GfW DRM.
I've always preferred pirate software. Old skool copy protection often consisted of typing in codes on unphotocopyable paper (PITA if you spilt anything as it was hard enough to read in mint condition), quoting words from the manual or some other brain-dead annoyance.
Pirated games had built-in cheat trainers and funky cracktros with awesome music. Pirated software has always been better.
But that's the same problem as storing bits of code on a dongle, you're adding another point of failure which crackers will be able to get around anyway i.e. by emulating the processor on the dongle.
The only way to reliably defeat pirates using such a scheme is to silently fail in subtle ways like the AutoCAD example the GP gave, unfortunately that means silent DRM bugs that make your product unreliable which is an epic fail for a product that's used to design actual physical things. That kind of protection has been defective by design since games on the Amiga did tricks like making the game impossibly difficult if you got the copy-protection questions (page 22, line 12, word 7) wrong.
It takes a week or two but it will eventually fail. That's why I'm kinda OK with Steams' DRM, I can't imagine ever having a gaming PC that can't, at the very least, transfer a few KB of data every week or two. If think you're likely to end up in such a scenario then don't use Steam but honestly, why would anyone use a digital download service if they didn't have an internet connection? It's a stupid argument.
Phone support is very expensive as it involves real human beings being available whenever the customer calls as opposed to (e)mail support where the workload can be spread out across a day or two. Encouraging disgruntled customers to make phone calls even though they're unlikely to get immediate redress is often an effective tactic for consumer campaigns for this reason.
Most economists would consider voluntarily agreeing to such a terrible deal to be irrational behaviour. Most of the arguments about free markets leading to the fairest distribution of resources are based on the idea of Nash Equilibrium which is based on the idea of people acting with rational self-interest.
It's because people don't act with rational self-interest that fundamentalist free market polices fail.
Piracy assumes the presence of an internet connection; even assuming your copying discs from a friend then getting cracked exes from gamecopyworld will transfer more data than just logging into steam every week or so via a mobile phone.
I make copies of books all the time in my head. Once you've read a book there's little point in re-reading it hence the adage that you don't lend books, you give them away.
Nobody lends music if they can avoid it though, it's something to do with the physical experience of particular patterns of pressure in your inner ear that can lead to a unique emotional response. Once you've connected with an artist like that then reason goes out the window and you'll support them because they represent you.
Is it really part of the problem? I'm an ethical pirate, if I like it I buy it. I don't trust demos because if you're going to release promotional material then of course it's going to feature the best bits and probably exclude the bad bits.
The GP wasn't trolling, the logical next step of Stardocks no DRM policy is to give away digital downloads. It's no coincidence that NINs' The Slip is top of last years' digital download charts at Amazon in the US - Trent loves his fans and we, his fans, love him. Even though the exact same mp3s are free to download at nin.com (in fact I think you can get better quality 96/24 FLACs) people still paid money for the mp3s.
When you or I do it it's peeping tom; cops like to call it a stake out.
It's already well established that if the police can see something suspicious from the street then they have the right of entry, it just seems a little daft to limit them to passive sensing of the visible light spectrum!
That decision against thermal-imaging cameras is quite silly, wouldn't that mean cops would need a warrant to look through your window? It's all just radiation, be it light or infra-red. I know the decision has all sorts of silly language about how the tech isn't generally available but still, passive imaging should always be OK.
It's Ogg, as in Nanny Ogg, not OGG. Vorbis is a Discworld character too!
I expect naming their video codec Theora is the main reason it doesn't perform as well as the competition. Debian has Toy Story, Ogg has Discworld; don't mess with your naming scheme no matter how ridiculous it looks in retrospect!
Isn't Ogg Vorbis more intensive than AAC though? ISTR, back when I used an iPod and was looking into putting Linux on it, that Ogg support on my 3rd gen iPod was weak because the hardware was underpowered. Obviously all iPods can play back AAC just fine!
Also it's said elsewhere a lot of media players are using dedicated hardware decoders which actually could be useful. If the designers of those hardware decoders add Ogg support to their parts then support could become widespread quickly.
Indeed, telling us to ignore the extra minute in the X25-E RAID0 boot times compared to the other setups is highly disingenuous. RAID setups are slower to boot because you have to load the RAID BIOS first, if you really care about fast booting it's something you need to be aware of. There were also CPU bound case where the RAID0 setup performed slightly worse than the single disk, an obvious sign of a performance hit due to the RAID card.
Is that the TV psychic school of economics? The economy booms and busts as a function of peoples outlook? If that were true countries would just put happy drugs in the water and never see recession again.
In a Capitalist Democracy the government has almost no control over the market, that's why the left / right tub-thumping you see in Western countries is so ridiculous. The best that any government can hope in such circumstances is the Social Democracy seen in Europe where, in theory, tax revenue from the good days is used to offset the bad. Boom and bust is an inevitable part of Capitalism.
Oh god, Ayn Rands "philosophy" is based around attacking giant straw men, just like your post. Your argument has virtually nothing to do with free movement of labour, but venturing off-topic:
The most selfish people in this world are those who demand others to give of themselves.
That would make bosses and owners of firms the most selfish people in the world, oh, actually, maybe she has a point! The fact is that profits are based on the difference between the value generated by workers and the amount that workers are actually paid. For someone at the bottom of the ladder then the best that can be hoped for is a choice between different rates of exploitation and most people don't even have that.
Everyone knows that it's possible to scrape and save at the bottom and work your way to the top but it's not likely that it'll happen. Even if everyone was super strong with a 200 IQ there would still be billionaire captains of industry at the top and penniless paupers at the bottom; that's just the way capitalism is structured.
I'd view it more like raping someone with learning difficulties. Windows boxes often just don't have the capacity to say no or understand that what their doing might be wrong, they just lack that sort of basic awareness.
So it's more a case of someone asks a nice man for a lollipop but due to using Windows they can't tell if the man is really nice or indeed if that's really a lollipop.
No, outsourcing means using an outside contractor. Most firms outsource cleaning and security, for example. Offshoring is outsourcing overseas. In this case the GP was trying to imply that Sun is outsourcing code maintenance to the OSS community as a way of cutting costs.
Physics is pretty mystical though. Don't you find it incredible that, from the initial energy of the big bang, there now exists self replicating, self aware patterns of matter?
Here in the UK these roadside devices aren't used as evidence, they are only cause for arrest. They get a urine or blood sample from you at the police station which they can get a reading from straight away and that gets used as evidence. No arguing with that!
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Whilst I enjoyed treking across the map in FC2 I was still bored overall. The missions are repetitive, the enemy AI is poor and they all have X-Ray vision (at least when it comes to bushes) with almost perfect aim.
For those reasons it's certainly not better than Crysis; Crytek clearly went to great lengths to make sure that if you can't see through something then the enemy can't either, the enemy AI in Crysis is far superior too.
You can't really compare it to Half Life either because HL is a corridor shooter, it's supposed to be linear. The fact that you can't make your own path means Valve were free to concentrate on memorable encounters. I can remember loads of great moments in the Half Life series but all the firefights in FC2 are just mushed together as one generic blob in my memory.
FC2 is a diamond in the rough. If they released the same game but with more mission variety, better enemy's and some memorable encounters (even if that means having a few corridor sections) then I think it'd be a massive success. It wouldn't please the people who're complaining about the checkpoints but they can fuck off back to CoD.
Yes, it is DRM. This certificate is the public key against which the signature is checked. The reason why the PE is signed is to make sure you don't circumvent the DRM. This certificate is an integral part of the GfW DRM.
QED, bitch.
I've always preferred pirate software. Old skool copy protection often consisted of typing in codes on unphotocopyable paper (PITA if you spilt anything as it was hard enough to read in mint condition), quoting words from the manual or some other brain-dead annoyance.
Pirated games had built-in cheat trainers and funky cracktros with awesome music. Pirated software has always been better.
But that's the same problem as storing bits of code on a dongle, you're adding another point of failure which crackers will be able to get around anyway i.e. by emulating the processor on the dongle.
The only way to reliably defeat pirates using such a scheme is to silently fail in subtle ways like the AutoCAD example the GP gave, unfortunately that means silent DRM bugs that make your product unreliable which is an epic fail for a product that's used to design actual physical things. That kind of protection has been defective by design since games on the Amiga did tricks like making the game impossibly difficult if you got the copy-protection questions (page 22, line 12, word 7) wrong.
The UCC allows sellers to disclaim the implied warranty of merchantability, provided the disclaimer is made conspicuously
I hardly think a EULA counts as conspicuous.
It takes a week or two but it will eventually fail. That's why I'm kinda OK with Steams' DRM, I can't imagine ever having a gaming PC that can't, at the very least, transfer a few KB of data every week or two. If think you're likely to end up in such a scenario then don't use Steam but honestly, why would anyone use a digital download service if they didn't have an internet connection? It's a stupid argument.
Phone support is very expensive as it involves real human beings being available whenever the customer calls as opposed to (e)mail support where the workload can be spread out across a day or two. Encouraging disgruntled customers to make phone calls even though they're unlikely to get immediate redress is often an effective tactic for consumer campaigns for this reason.
Most economists would consider voluntarily agreeing to such a terrible deal to be irrational behaviour. Most of the arguments about free markets leading to the fairest distribution of resources are based on the idea of Nash Equilibrium which is based on the idea of people acting with rational self-interest.
It's because people don't act with rational self-interest that fundamentalist free market polices fail.
Piracy assumes the presence of an internet connection; even assuming your copying discs from a friend then getting cracked exes from gamecopyworld will transfer more data than just logging into steam every week or so via a mobile phone.
I make copies of books all the time in my head. Once you've read a book there's little point in re-reading it hence the adage that you don't lend books, you give them away.
Nobody lends music if they can avoid it though, it's something to do with the physical experience of particular patterns of pressure in your inner ear that can lead to a unique emotional response. Once you've connected with an artist like that then reason goes out the window and you'll support them because they represent you.
Is it really part of the problem? I'm an ethical pirate, if I like it I buy it. I don't trust demos because if you're going to release promotional material then of course it's going to feature the best bits and probably exclude the bad bits.
The GP wasn't trolling, the logical next step of Stardocks no DRM policy is to give away digital downloads. It's no coincidence that NINs' The Slip is top of last years' digital download charts at Amazon in the US - Trent loves his fans and we, his fans, love him. Even though the exact same mp3s are free to download at nin.com (in fact I think you can get better quality 96/24 FLACs) people still paid money for the mp3s.
Don't speak so freely of the spiral nemesis lest we incur the wrath of the anti-spirals!
When you or I do it it's peeping tom; cops like to call it a stake out.
It's already well established that if the police can see something suspicious from the street then they have the right of entry, it just seems a little daft to limit them to passive sensing of the visible light spectrum!
That decision against thermal-imaging cameras is quite silly, wouldn't that mean cops would need a warrant to look through your window? It's all just radiation, be it light or infra-red. I know the decision has all sorts of silly language about how the tech isn't generally available but still, passive imaging should always be OK.
Not that I support prohibition or anything.
It's Ogg, as in Nanny Ogg, not OGG. Vorbis is a Discworld character too!
I expect naming their video codec Theora is the main reason it doesn't perform as well as the competition. Debian has Toy Story, Ogg has Discworld; don't mess with your naming scheme no matter how ridiculous it looks in retrospect!
Isn't Ogg Vorbis more intensive than AAC though? ISTR, back when I used an iPod and was looking into putting Linux on it, that Ogg support on my 3rd gen iPod was weak because the hardware was underpowered. Obviously all iPods can play back AAC just fine!
Also it's said elsewhere a lot of media players are using dedicated hardware decoders which actually could be useful. If the designers of those hardware decoders add Ogg support to their parts then support could become widespread quickly.
Indeed, telling us to ignore the extra minute in the X25-E RAID0 boot times compared to the other setups is highly disingenuous. RAID setups are slower to boot because you have to load the RAID BIOS first, if you really care about fast booting it's something you need to be aware of. There were also CPU bound case where the RAID0 setup performed slightly worse than the single disk, an obvious sign of a performance hit due to the RAID card.
Is that the TV psychic school of economics? The economy booms and busts as a function of peoples outlook? If that were true countries would just put happy drugs in the water and never see recession again.
In a Capitalist Democracy the government has almost no control over the market, that's why the left / right tub-thumping you see in Western countries is so ridiculous. The best that any government can hope in such circumstances is the Social Democracy seen in Europe where, in theory, tax revenue from the good days is used to offset the bad. Boom and bust is an inevitable part of Capitalism.
Oh god, Ayn Rands "philosophy" is based around attacking giant straw men, just like your post. Your argument has virtually nothing to do with free movement of labour, but venturing off-topic:
The most selfish people in this world are those who demand others to give of themselves.
That would make bosses and owners of firms the most selfish people in the world, oh, actually, maybe she has a point! The fact is that profits are based on the difference between the value generated by workers and the amount that workers are actually paid. For someone at the bottom of the ladder then the best that can be hoped for is a choice between different rates of exploitation and most people don't even have that.
Everyone knows that it's possible to scrape and save at the bottom and work your way to the top but it's not likely that it'll happen. Even if everyone was super strong with a 200 IQ there would still be billionaire captains of industry at the top and penniless paupers at the bottom; that's just the way capitalism is structured.
I'd view it more like raping someone with learning difficulties. Windows boxes often just don't have the capacity to say no or understand that what their doing might be wrong, they just lack that sort of basic awareness.
So it's more a case of someone asks a nice man for a lollipop but due to using Windows they can't tell if the man is really nice or indeed if that's really a lollipop.
That depends if you're a deceased French philosopher.
No, outsourcing means using an outside contractor. Most firms outsource cleaning and security, for example. Offshoring is outsourcing overseas. In this case the GP was trying to imply that Sun is outsourcing code maintenance to the OSS community as a way of cutting costs.
Physics is pretty mystical though. Don't you find it incredible that, from the initial energy of the big bang, there now exists self replicating, self aware patterns of matter?
What singing? The music in Cowboy Bebop is mostly jazz of the bebop variety.
Here in the UK these roadside devices aren't used as evidence, they are only cause for arrest. They get a urine or blood sample from you at the police station which they can get a reading from straight away and that gets used as evidence. No arguing with that!