After slogging through World of Warcraft for several years, the last thing I want in a game is something that requires me to basically live a double life. I'd like an MMO where I could pop in and out, instead of dedicating multi-hour blocks that become the equivalent of a part-time job by the end of the week. And that doesn't include researching content for efficient strategies, researching in-game equipment for optimized tactics, bickering with people on the Internet about various aspects of gameplay, or ultimately regretting all the time I didn't spend socializing, reading books, accumulating income, learning a real-world employment skill, exercising, eating decently, or traveling.
About ten years ago, $100 was the norm for a very solid video card. Not coincidentally, there was a lot more competition in the market. Then came the dot-com collapse. ATI and nVidia emerged from the rubble, and people have been accusing them of price collusion for years. It would be pretty easy to do so, now that 3DFX, Matrox, S3, Rendition and the rest are largely out of the way in this sector of the market, or gone completely.
There's also the current economy to consider. The high-end cards have typically only comprised a small percentage of the market, and it's simply not realistic right now to expect someone to cough up $400-500 for just a video card when they can get an entire laptop for that much. Or, you know, pay the rent and put food on the table.
Somehow, I see this going a little like Apple's surprise price reduction for the iPod just before the Zune came along: Microsoft employees scrambling to hack some last-minute changes into their strategy after hearing what Apple is doing.
I don't know about y'all, but I am dog tired of trying to read about technology, only to have my news and analysis cluttered with daily speculation of what might be up Apple's sleeves. I guess it's fun to speculate, but this is getting downright Pavlovian. Apple doesn't have to create any buzz any more -- but this trend just makes for disappointment. I'd rather be pleasantly surprised by some small changes, rather than rolling my eyes at the cyclical -- and inescapable -- outrage of the Cult of Mac.
This article has absolutely nothing to do with Apple, yet here we are. And never mind the fact that you can already get Intel-based Macs for cheaper than their Dell-ish Windows counterparts. What more do you want from Steve Jobs? Stigmata?
I remember when Windows 95 came out, with its weak, obviously-an-afterthought "web browser" (IE 3.0). It was painfully obvious that Microsoft had missed the Internet boat, and shortly thereafter, Bill Gates sent his historic all-hands memo pointing the company in the direction of the Internet.
[Hi, my name is Stonedonkey. I noticed that your extremely shitty post got marked "5 interesting." My notations will be in brackets. Enjoy!]
It took them some time to get it right, but eventually IE took over.
[By being bundled into every version of the OS for the last ten years.]
Now, you'd have a hard time finding a Microsoft product more complex than Minesweeper or calc.exe that doesn't connect to the Net somehow.
[Specious exaggeration that isn't really relevant.]
And let's not forget that Netscape provided Microsoft with some much-appreciated help in taking over the Web, by screwing up their own release schedule so badly that there never was a Netscape 5.0.
[IE won because of its default desktop placement.]
Flash-forward to a couple of years ago, when Bill sent out yet another all-hands memo, pointing the company in the direction of security. At first, we all laughed. But now it's becoming more and more obvious that they're taking security every bit as seriously as they once took the Internet. They are aiming to be the top of the heap in security, and they've got drive, ambition and aggression.
[In what sector? Desktop consumers? Can you provide some supporting material for all these pronouns?]
Make no mistake, this kind of event is exactly what a company that wants to get secure should be doing. Thomlinson's comments about how seeing their code exploited "hits people in the gut", and the fact that "he was glad to see the crowd of engineers taking things personally" -- these things are right on the money. These things say to me that, within a few years, we're going to see some really damn secure stuff coming out of Microsoft.
[That's great. But right now, I can get superior software for free. Then again, you didn't specify what sector you're talking about, so I can't say for sure.]
In the meantime, Firefox exploits are cropping up at a seemingly greater pace. This worries me.
[See the other guy's response about open source.]
It looks like a repeat of 1997, when Netscape lost huge amounts of ground to IE by producing a product that wasn't as good as the competition.
[There you go again, glossing over IE's default inclusion.]
SP2 was huge leap forward in security for Windows and for IE, and Blue Hat makes it obvious that Microsoft is just going to get better at it.
[Oh, shut yo mouth. SP2 was not a "huge leap forward." Not when MS was so far behind to begin with. It sealed some painfully obvious cracks, but I wouldn't hand them any trophies for it.]
In the meantime, Firefox appears to be standing still on the security front, or maybe even losing a little ground.
[A little subjective. Is your assured tone suppose to make your reaction generalizable and trustworthy?]
Sure, it's still miles ahead of IE's security, but if IE keeps up the pace, it will overtake Firefox sooner or later -- probably sooner.
[This is a contradiction. Or, at best, a back-handed compliment.]
Is there any way the Firefox development team (and the OO.o team, and anyone else who's working on high-profile F/OSS projects) can take a lesson from Blue hat? Can we get together events like this of our own?
[Will it be another failure of open source if we don't? Should I be surprised when you sieze that "failure" as an example of some larger and wholly imagined problem?]
If we don't, I can already see that by 2009 or so, at the latest, I'll be telling clients to go with Microsoft products, because they're more secure than F/OSS.
[Suit yourself, Nostradamus. Maybe by then Microsoft will "share" some of its code to assuage your worries. By the way, how in the flaming fuck do you make the leap from "Mozilla" to "F/OSS"? I'm sorry, but that's pure jackassery, pal.]
In practice, of course, the sheer amount of data coming in could not possibly be parsed in human terms. I wouldn't be surprised if they aggregated links (by tracking outgoing behavior, not by scanning text, natch), but I'd be very surprised if they were tracking IPs, let alone keeping track of some random asshole's Friends list.
Thank God you're not the only one. I can't believe I got this far before someone finally pointed out that Joss Whedon's newest statements do not, in fact, refute the original article. Here's more of Whedon's newest statements, but I pieced them together differently and got a much different result.
Here's a thing: when "Firefly" was cancelled, my heart got broke. Sounds a bit much, but it changed me. Not even "Serenity" could patch that wound. I'm wearier, warier -- after all those years as a movie writer, you'd think I'd be prepared for another lesson on my unimportance in the scheme of things, but I wasn't. There are two very separate worlds: the marketplace, and the bustling bazaar that is my brain...You know the horse caught bwtween two pools of water? Add seven pools, and make the horse wicked A.D.D. The other world, the marketplace, I don't even begin to understand or predict. All these rumor of projects or the death of projects... When the two worlds align and something actually happens, whatever it is, you guys know I'll be on this site as soon as I'm allowed to be. And I'll be very very clear. There is no news. Not never, just now. I'm off to lunch with Lonelygirl.
Either the submitter is not reading clearly or is not being honest with him or herself. Whedon does not refute the original article's claim. All he is saying is "never say never." He's not being cleverly vague. He's trying to tell you gently.
Guess you are screwed then. This is what happens when you buy locked down products - and if you want more examples, just look at what happened to SWG (did you get a refund when the game turned into something that you were not sold? could you carry on playing the game you *were* sold?) or World of Warcraft (goodbye, forty man raids, around which a lot of players have built their guilds).
As far as WoW, the current 40-man dungeons will remain as such. The new limit affects the dungeons that will appear in the expansion pack. (They're not all 25-man, that is -- 25 is simply the max that Blizzard will now design for.) It strikes me that one could do two 25-man raids at the same location, increasing the overall participation to 50.
Personally, I won't miss the lag. Nor will I miss having to pit my DKP against 39 other guildies.
But to address the actual topic: In practice, the new CS:S pricing model hasn't made much difference so far. There is one weapon, the "Deagle," (short for Desert Eagle, the actual name of the ficticiously labeled weapon) that has spiked dramatically, currently pegged at 43%. However, nothing in the remainder of the arsenal has seen more than a 10% increase. In fact, the chart is trending *downward* overall. This was not the case at first, but of the 30 items, only 4 have seen an increase, and the Deagle is a significant outlier.
If anything, it appears that the overwhelming majority of the arsenal will become cheaper. It sucks for the Deagle to cost nearly $1000 -- but I'll take that if it means lower prices across the board.
Lower prices tends to mean quicker access, which helps to reduce the firepower delta that can occur when one side starts off with a string of wins.
If I didn't know any better, this would look like paid search routing. As in, Yahoo paid Earthlink to put a search box on this result page. Then Earthlink goes as far as to place banners and skyscrapers as well. All things considered, it smacks of financial desperation, since other posters in this discussion have pointed out just how much this behavior does not follow proper routing protocol.
Well, that hasn't been my experience. Once equipped with spells like Silence, Paralyze, Missile of Face Melting, Summon Eater of Worlds, and Now You See Me Now You're a Stain, the average opponent becomes easier. Wilderness beasts also do not level past 4, and there are some inredibly tough people like Umbra who will happily dice you like a tomato.
Reading the article, it seems like most of their "horsepower" statements were just backed up with the clock rate of each systems CPU and GPU. That, really, doesn't mean anything at all. Who cares if the Revolution's CPU is clocked twice as fast as the GameCube's? That doesn't really mean anything at all, unless they're both running exactly the same chip just clocked at different rates.
IGN works with Nintendo on some of the aspects of their online service. Someone at that company knows the truth.
IGN works with Nintendo on some of the aspects of the DS online service. As you may recall, the online infrastructure of N's consoles closely resembles two cans connected by a string.
Ya know what I'd like to say "Bullshit, I'm never gonna pay for a game that has advertisements". But the reality is thats not going to make a difference. Just look at TV. Most people pay around 50$ (or more) a month, and there are 15mn+ of commercials per hour.
Apples and oranges. You're paying for access to content, not the content itself. Those providing the content have to, you know, make money. So they do it with subscriptions, like HBO, or they're an organization that can't get enough subscribers to defray costs and must thereby show ads. Keep in mind that the Internet works on the same model. You pay for access, and content providers make their content profitable through advertisement.
Now, when a content provider asks for a subscription and hits me with ads, he can kiss my pucker. I don't see the market responding positively to this idea.
Does this mean DirectX 10 will be available exclusively on Vista? Or are they simply introducing an artificial restriction here? If the latter is the case, I imagine someone will work around it fairly quickly.
Well, considering that hardware desktop acceleration is a fundamental change to UI behavior, I would say that yeah, we'll probably only see it in Vista. There's also non-essential service auto-unloading when you start a game, another Vista bullet point which I assume is attached to DX10 as well.
The "Million Little Pieces" incedent is minor as far as I am concerned.
Step into the $2.55 million dollar Manhattan penthouse he bought with his lies and you might just change your mind. There's also mention of a summer home in cozy Amagansett.
It also almost got him a screenplay based on the book, and another based on the Hell's Angels. Look him up on IMDb.
Apple has been fighting tooth and nail against x86 since day one, a bitter war that's been raging for over twenty years. I don't know about you, but Apple switching to Intel is pretty fucking big to me. Likewise for the possibility of installing and running Windows on a Mac, and running OSX on an x86 PC.
"Unfortunately, it's not like they can edit that crap back out before the DVD release without affecting the show even more."
Sure they can. They don't just film one version of a scene.
This is doable in movies, but a television studio recording is typically too expensive for taping/filming alternate scenes. And I think the advertisment of the alts would make people buy the DVDs even more, instead of watching the broadcast.
Please stop calling copyright infringement theft. It is not theft. Theft deprives someone of something. Copyright infringement is a wholly separate thing. You are stupid. Thank you.
Deprives them of something like... a return on their investment? According to your logic, I can take something you want to profit from, and secretly distribute it for my own profit -- but I better not take the original copy! Gotta draw the line there, muchacho!
Sure, "theft" and "copyright infringement" have different legal ramifications, but infringement doesn't necessarily cause less damage.
Slashdot Mirror
Just FYI, Nvidia's press release went out at 6 AM EST. Valve didn't provide this corroboration until 2:30 PM.
After slogging through World of Warcraft for several years, the last thing I want in a game is something that requires me to basically live a double life. I'd like an MMO where I could pop in and out, instead of dedicating multi-hour blocks that become the equivalent of a part-time job by the end of the week. And that doesn't include researching content for efficient strategies, researching in-game equipment for optimized tactics, bickering with people on the Internet about various aspects of gameplay, or ultimately regretting all the time I didn't spend socializing, reading books, accumulating income, learning a real-world employment skill, exercising, eating decently, or traveling.
About ten years ago, $100 was the norm for a very solid video card. Not coincidentally, there was a lot more competition in the market. Then came the dot-com collapse. ATI and nVidia emerged from the rubble, and people have been accusing them of price collusion for years. It would be pretty easy to do so, now that 3DFX, Matrox, S3, Rendition and the rest are largely out of the way in this sector of the market, or gone completely.
There's also the current economy to consider. The high-end cards have typically only comprised a small percentage of the market, and it's simply not realistic right now to expect someone to cough up $400-500 for just a video card when they can get an entire laptop for that much. Or, you know, pay the rent and put food on the table.
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
I see what you're saying, but I don't know if it's fair to compare an entire philosophy to a single product, even one the size of Vista.
I don't there's anything controversial about how his writing was almost universally disliked.
I don't know about y'all, but I am dog tired of trying to read about technology, only to have my news and analysis cluttered with daily speculation of what might be up Apple's sleeves. I guess it's fun to speculate, but this is getting downright Pavlovian. Apple doesn't have to create any buzz any more -- but this trend just makes for disappointment. I'd rather be pleasantly surprised by some small changes, rather than rolling my eyes at the cyclical -- and inescapable -- outrage of the Cult of Mac.
This article has absolutely nothing to do with Apple, yet here we are. And never mind the fact that you can already get Intel-based Macs for cheaper than their Dell-ish Windows counterparts. What more do you want from Steve Jobs? Stigmata?
I remember when Windows 95 came out, with its weak, obviously-an-afterthought "web browser" (IE 3.0). It was painfully obvious that Microsoft had missed the Internet boat, and shortly thereafter, Bill Gates sent his historic all-hands memo pointing the company in the direction of the Internet.
[Hi, my name is Stonedonkey. I noticed that your extremely shitty post got marked "5 interesting." My notations will be in brackets. Enjoy!]
It took them some time to get it right, but eventually IE took over.
[By being bundled into every version of the OS for the last ten years.]
Now, you'd have a hard time finding a Microsoft product more complex than Minesweeper or calc.exe that doesn't connect to the Net somehow.
[Specious exaggeration that isn't really relevant.]
And let's not forget that Netscape provided Microsoft with some much-appreciated help in taking over the Web, by screwing up their own release schedule so badly that there never was a Netscape 5.0.
[IE won because of its default desktop placement.]
Flash-forward to a couple of years ago, when Bill sent out yet another all-hands memo, pointing the company in the direction of security. At first, we all laughed. But now it's becoming more and more obvious that they're taking security every bit as seriously as they once took the Internet. They are aiming to be the top of the heap in security, and they've got drive, ambition and aggression.
[In what sector? Desktop consumers? Can you provide some supporting material for all these pronouns?]
Make no mistake, this kind of event is exactly what a company that wants to get secure should be doing. Thomlinson's comments about how seeing their code exploited "hits people in the gut", and the fact that "he was glad to see the crowd of engineers taking things personally" -- these things are right on the money. These things say to me that, within a few years, we're going to see some really damn secure stuff coming out of Microsoft.
[That's great. But right now, I can get superior software for free. Then again, you didn't specify what sector you're talking about, so I can't say for sure.]
In the meantime, Firefox exploits are cropping up at a seemingly greater pace. This worries me.
[See the other guy's response about open source.]
It looks like a repeat of 1997, when Netscape lost huge amounts of ground to IE by producing a product that wasn't as good as the competition.
[There you go again, glossing over IE's default inclusion.]
SP2 was huge leap forward in security for Windows and for IE, and Blue Hat makes it obvious that Microsoft is just going to get better at it.
[Oh, shut yo mouth. SP2 was not a "huge leap forward." Not when MS was so far behind to begin with. It sealed some painfully obvious cracks, but I wouldn't hand them any trophies for it.]
In the meantime, Firefox appears to be standing still on the security front, or maybe even losing a little ground.
[A little subjective. Is your assured tone suppose to make your reaction generalizable and trustworthy?]
Sure, it's still miles ahead of IE's security, but if IE keeps up the pace, it will overtake Firefox sooner or later -- probably sooner.
[This is a contradiction. Or, at best, a back-handed compliment.]
Is there any way the Firefox development team (and the OO.o team, and anyone else who's working on high-profile F/OSS projects) can take a lesson from Blue hat? Can we get together events like this of our own?
[Will it be another failure of open source if we don't? Should I be surprised when you sieze that "failure" as an example of some larger and wholly imagined problem?]
If we don't, I can already see that by 2009 or so, at the latest, I'll be telling clients to go with Microsoft products, because they're more secure than F/OSS.
[Suit yourself, Nostradamus. Maybe by then Microsoft will "share" some of its code to assuage your worries. By the way, how in the flaming fuck do you make the leap from "Mozilla" to "F/OSS"? I'm sorry, but that's pure jackassery, pal.]
And I don't want to see that happen.
[In that, we agree.]
In practice, of course, the sheer amount of data coming in could not possibly be parsed in human terms. I wouldn't be surprised if they aggregated links (by tracking outgoing behavior, not by scanning text, natch), but I'd be very surprised if they were tracking IPs, let alone keeping track of some random asshole's Friends list.
Here's more of Whedon's newest statements, but I pieced them together differently and got a much different result.
Either the submitter is not reading clearly or is not being honest with him or herself. Whedon does not refute the original article's claim. All he is saying is "never say never." He's not being cleverly vague. He's trying to tell you gently.
As far as WoW, the current 40-man dungeons will remain as such. The new limit affects the dungeons that will appear in the expansion pack. (They're not all 25-man, that is -- 25 is simply the max that Blizzard will now design for.) It strikes me that one could do two 25-man raids at the same location, increasing the overall participation to 50.
Personally, I won't miss the lag. Nor will I miss having to pit my DKP against 39 other guildies.
But to address the actual topic: In practice, the new CS:S pricing model hasn't made much difference so far. There is one weapon, the "Deagle," (short for Desert Eagle, the actual name of the ficticiously labeled weapon) that has spiked dramatically, currently pegged at 43%. However, nothing in the remainder of the arsenal has seen more than a 10% increase. In fact, the chart is trending *downward* overall. This was not the case at first, but of the 30 items, only 4 have seen an increase, and the Deagle is a significant outlier.
If anything, it appears that the overwhelming majority of the arsenal will become cheaper. It sucks for the Deagle to cost nearly $1000 -- but I'll take that if it means lower prices across the board.
Lower prices tends to mean quicker access, which helps to reduce the firepower delta that can occur when one side starts off with a string of wins.
...what it's like to be on the artist's end of the contract.
If I didn't know any better, this would look like paid search routing. As in, Yahoo paid Earthlink to put a search box on this result page. Then Earthlink goes as far as to place banners and skyscrapers as well. All things considered, it smacks of financial desperation, since other posters in this discussion have pointed out just how much this behavior does not follow proper routing protocol.
When it comes to a company as enormous and economically important as Microsoft, I'll take dishonesty over incompetence any day.
Fights never get easier, or harder, as you level.
Well, that hasn't been my experience. Once equipped with spells like Silence, Paralyze, Missile of Face Melting, Summon Eater of Worlds, and Now You See Me Now You're a Stain, the average opponent becomes easier. Wilderness beasts also do not level past 4, and there are some inredibly tough people like Umbra who will happily dice you like a tomato.
Reading the article, it seems like most of their "horsepower" statements were just backed up with the clock rate of each systems CPU and GPU. That, really, doesn't mean anything at all. Who cares if the Revolution's CPU is clocked twice as fast as the GameCube's? That doesn't really mean anything at all, unless they're both running exactly the same chip just clocked at different rates.
Bingo! You win a free toaster.
IGN works with Nintendo on some of the aspects of their online service. Someone at that company knows the truth.
IGN works with Nintendo on some of the aspects of the DS online service. As you may recall, the online infrastructure of N's consoles closely resembles two cans connected by a string.
Ya know what I'd like to say "Bullshit, I'm never gonna pay for a game that has advertisements". But the reality is thats not going to make a difference. Just look at TV. Most people pay around 50$ (or more) a month, and there are 15mn+ of commercials per hour.
Apples and oranges. You're paying for access to content, not the content itself. Those providing the content have to, you know, make money. So they do it with subscriptions, like HBO, or they're an organization that can't get enough subscribers to defray costs and must thereby show ads. Keep in mind that the Internet works on the same model. You pay for access, and content providers make their content profitable through advertisement.
Now, when a content provider asks for a subscription and hits me with ads, he can kiss my pucker. I don't see the market responding positively to this idea.
Does this mean DirectX 10 will be available exclusively on Vista? Or are they simply introducing an artificial restriction here? If the latter is the case, I imagine someone will work around it fairly quickly.
Well, considering that hardware desktop acceleration is a fundamental change to UI behavior, I would say that yeah, we'll probably only see it in Vista. There's also non-essential service auto-unloading when you start a game, another Vista bullet point which I assume is attached to DX10 as well.
The "Million Little Pieces" incedent is minor as far as I am concerned.
Step into the $2.55 million dollar Manhattan penthouse he bought with his lies and you might just change your mind. There's also mention of a summer home in cozy Amagansett.
It also almost got him a screenplay based on the book, and another based on the Hell's Angels. Look him up on IMDb.
Apple has been fighting tooth and nail against x86 since day one, a bitter war that's been raging for over twenty years. I don't know about you, but Apple switching to Intel is pretty fucking big to me. Likewise for the possibility of installing and running Windows on a Mac, and running OSX on an x86 PC.
So now what are the odds of me being able to install an x86-compatible retail copy of OSX on my home-built P4 rig?
Because that sounds pretty damned high to me. I wouldn't have put it over $10 billion, but then again, I'm no economist.
When in doubt ask Google.
Also a a Wiki.
"Unfortunately, it's not like they can edit that crap back out before the DVD release without affecting the show even more."
Sure they can. They don't just film one version of a scene.
This is doable in movies, but a television studio recording is typically too expensive for taping/filming alternate scenes. And I think the advertisment of the alts would make people buy the DVDs even more, instead of watching the broadcast.
Please stop calling copyright infringement theft. It is not theft. Theft deprives someone of something. Copyright infringement is a wholly separate thing. You are stupid. Thank you.
Deprives them of something like... a return on their investment? According to your logic, I can take something you want to profit from, and secretly distribute it for my own profit -- but I better not take the original copy! Gotta draw the line there, muchacho!
Sure, "theft" and "copyright infringement" have different legal ramifications, but infringement doesn't necessarily cause less damage.