These comments would all be dead-on today if not for one small detail: Apple decided to redesign and market the device to Windows users. There's nothing embarrassing about these comments, they are accurate in a world where Apple only sells iPods to Apple users (i.e. the world at the time)...
Don't know about the grandparent but my rebate-special HDs have a tendency to not come back on very well when the machine has been powered off, so I just leave her running 24/7 (energy crisis be damned!).
Actually in this modern world, soft content IS downloadable in perpetuity as long as the license is current with some vendors. See the MSDN for example; pay your license fee and log into the system, and you can pull down any MS software.
Anyway, as long as you require login, as Apple does with iTunes (duh), they know who you are and what you are doing. They are in control. They can see if you magically login from two places at once, or within 2 minutes, or whatever. They certainly know exactly which songs the original guy downloaded for $1500. And they have no excuse not to let him access them again. If they are very cheap they can charge a bandwidth fee for re-downloads.
No, Sega if you will recall had to fight the acceptance battle almost from scratch with Dreamcast because their last successful system was the Genesis, many years prior. And the reason fewer games came out for Dreamcast was because the market share was so low, not because of any Windows dev tie-ins. But you have a point about the DVD because that is what made people wait for PS2 and skip Dreamcast. They could justify PS2 as DVD player even if they would never use it that way. That will not happen with XBox 360 because both it and PS3 use similar DVD technology (similar enough for consumers to ignore). Another reply details some of the Sony blunders so I won't go into those.
Right now Google is really beating MS in 'coolness', which is translating to a preposterous stock price, which translates into massive cash, which translates into massive hiring of whoever they can find that might have gone to MS. They may strangle slowly MS in this manner, but it will be very slow indeed....
MSN is their biggest failure it's true. Don't blame MS for failure on Alpha however, Alpha itself was doomed. And while xbox is a money loser in theory, it is now accepted in the marketplace which is the major hurdle (dreamcast anyone). People are drooling waiting for the next one and I imagine by the time the 3rd generation comes out MS will own the market completely (if Sony and Nintendo's blunders continue apace).
Finally someone with a real reason why this article makes any sense. Google is OS-independent. However, the internet is far from OS-independent thanks to MS's IE. It follows no standards and since it owns the market most websites consumers care about are designed to run properly on it and it alone, they don't test on anything else and in some cases (ie activex controls) you can't really use anything else. So before there's any exodus from windows at all there will have to be a sweeping change in web design. And of course in the meantime MS will still own the desktop and be releasing new versions of Windows in which they can put anything they damn well please to exacerbate the situation...
Aside from losing sleep, I also have missed out on about 4 or 5 FPS games I normally would buy that have come out since WoW. Maybe the clearance bin will have 'em when I finally escape...
I did give in and buy them when I had some amazon credit. They have this ridiculous-yet-neat plastic shell on the outside and then on the inside it's two layers of paper products around a stack of loose single-dvd trays held together with a piece of tape, making a "book" with a scotch-tape spine. Lameness.
But still it's better than the original format and price: 2 (two) episodes per dvd at $14.99 each dvd. That's right folks, the initial dvd release of the series would cost about $600. So I guess paramount did us a favor!
The bottom line is that they know the demand is not going to fluctuate much on price for this kind of thing so they tend to gouge...
This brings up a very good point I don't see any one making. Nothing Should Ever Respawn In An Instance. There is no reason to make instances have respawns like the rest of the world does. Who are the respawns for? No one else is coming in. If people wanted to farm the trash instance mobs, resetting the instance is trivial. This is one of the (numerous) things which Diablo II got right. That game was essentially one big instance and when something died, it was dead until you restarted the game.
I guess the downside is it takes the "quest terrorist alert level" (ie green, yellow, orange, red) out of the picture. Everyting would always be yellow or whatever. So you couldn't just level up and overpower the mobs to get that hard quest out of the way...
I would kill for a World of "Diablo II"... that game was awesome. Hell I wish they'd just have made this game based on that universe, the warcraft universe is completely lame in comparison.
100% agree. If anything they have moved the story backwards by adding the PVP & Battlegrounds stuff, putting all players in a state of ongoing war which contradicts the story this game is based on.
If you are getting your info from the server status page you are an idiot - it's almost never up to date, I check it every time my server has an issue and it's only been on the list once.
A solo instance would be cool (could have some more interesting scripted events and give the designers a chance to flex all their gameplay muscle), I'm surprised there's not at least something like that for rogues...
One is reminded of the poor lemmings in that disney documentary. Documentaries often have the luxury of using whatever slight-of-hand and out-of-context shots are necessary to back up the point being made. People always get mad when Michael Moore does it, but then they go see the pengiun movie and think they learned something.
Ummm coke the drink may be more popular (which is debatable) but Pepsico is now a gigantic mega corp with much more than soda going on... Market cap for coke: 400 million. Market cap for pepsico: 91 BILLION.
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These comments would all be dead-on today if not for one small detail: Apple decided to redesign and market the device to Windows users. There's nothing embarrassing about these comments, they are accurate in a world where Apple only sells iPods to Apple users (i.e. the world at the time)...
Don't know about the grandparent but my rebate-special HDs have a tendency to not come back on very well when the machine has been powered off, so I just leave her running 24/7 (energy crisis be damned!).
Actually in this modern world, soft content IS downloadable in perpetuity as long as the license is current with some vendors. See the MSDN for example; pay your license fee and log into the system, and you can pull down any MS software.
Anyway, as long as you require login, as Apple does with iTunes (duh), they know who you are and what you are doing. They are in control. They can see if you magically login from two places at once, or within 2 minutes, or whatever. They certainly know exactly which songs the original guy downloaded for $1500. And they have no excuse not to let him access them again. If they are very cheap they can charge a bandwidth fee for re-downloads.
I don't know anyone who uses iTunes.
No, Sega if you will recall had to fight the acceptance battle almost from scratch with Dreamcast because their last successful system was the Genesis, many years prior. And the reason fewer games came out for Dreamcast was because the market share was so low, not because of any Windows dev tie-ins. But you have a point about the DVD because that is what made people wait for PS2 and skip Dreamcast. They could justify PS2 as DVD player even if they would never use it that way. That will not happen with XBox 360 because both it and PS3 use similar DVD technology (similar enough for consumers to ignore). Another reply details some of the Sony blunders so I won't go into those.
Right now Google is really beating MS in 'coolness', which is translating to a preposterous stock price, which translates into massive cash, which translates into massive hiring of whoever they can find that might have gone to MS. They may strangle slowly MS in this manner, but it will be very slow indeed....
MSN is their biggest failure it's true. Don't blame MS for failure on Alpha however, Alpha itself was doomed. And while xbox is a money loser in theory, it is now accepted in the marketplace which is the major hurdle (dreamcast anyone). People are drooling waiting for the next one and I imagine by the time the 3rd generation comes out MS will own the market completely (if Sony and Nintendo's blunders continue apace).
Finally someone with a real reason why this article makes any sense. Google is OS-independent. However, the internet is far from OS-independent thanks to MS's IE. It follows no standards and since it owns the market most websites consumers care about are designed to run properly on it and it alone, they don't test on anything else and in some cases (ie activex controls) you can't really use anything else. So before there's any exodus from windows at all there will have to be a sweeping change in web design. And of course in the meantime MS will still own the desktop and be releasing new versions of Windows in which they can put anything they damn well please to exacerbate the situation...
Shipping is a tax unto itself...
Oh yeah, and also me and my roommate would normally have already started playing Madden '06 but thanks to WoW we can't even be bothered to buy it...
Aside from losing sleep, I also have missed out on about 4 or 5 FPS games I normally would buy that have come out since WoW. Maybe the clearance bin will have 'em when I finally escape...
It's Labor Day weekend, the web guy is either unavailable or fired, so they got in touch with the pager guy (ie network admin) who did what he could.
Nuff said
I did give in and buy them when I had some amazon credit. They have this ridiculous-yet-neat plastic shell on the outside and then on the inside it's two layers of paper products around a stack of loose single-dvd trays held together with a piece of tape, making a "book" with a scotch-tape spine. Lameness.
But still it's better than the original format and price: 2 (two) episodes per dvd at $14.99 each dvd. That's right folks, the initial dvd release of the series would cost about $600. So I guess paramount did us a favor!
The bottom line is that they know the demand is not going to fluctuate much on price for this kind of thing so they tend to gouge...
This brings up a very good point I don't see any one making. Nothing Should Ever Respawn In An Instance. There is no reason to make instances have respawns like the rest of the world does. Who are the respawns for? No one else is coming in. If people wanted to farm the trash instance mobs, resetting the instance is trivial. This is one of the (numerous) things which Diablo II got right. That game was essentially one big instance and when something died, it was dead until you restarted the game.
I guess the downside is it takes the "quest terrorist alert level" (ie green, yellow, orange, red) out of the picture. Everyting would always be yellow or whatever. So you couldn't just level up and overpower the mobs to get that hard quest out of the way...
I would kill for a World of "Diablo II"... that game was awesome. Hell I wish they'd just have made this game based on that universe, the warcraft universe is completely lame in comparison.
All players should shout their own names and run amok. Hell, all people in real life should do it.
100% agree. If anything they have moved the story backwards by adding the PVP & Battlegrounds stuff, putting all players in a state of ongoing war which contradicts the story this game is based on.
If you are getting your info from the server status page you are an idiot - it's almost never up to date, I check it every time my server has an issue and it's only been on the list once.
A solo instance would be cool (could have some more interesting scripted events and give the designers a chance to flex all their gameplay muscle), I'm surprised there's not at least something like that for rogues...
One is reminded of the poor lemmings in that disney documentary. Documentaries often have the luxury of using whatever slight-of-hand and out-of-context shots are necessary to back up the point being made. People always get mad when Michael Moore does it, but then they go see the pengiun movie and think they learned something.
It doesnt say that you cannot program, or make a living, but not with a competitor.
Here's a funny joke: who doesn't qualify as a competitor of Microsoft in the modern software universe?
Remember that Windows XP stood for the Windows Experience:
0 1/02-05NamingPR.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/Feb
Once you start down the dark path... forever will it dominate your product naming conventions.
Ummm coke the drink may be more popular (which is debatable) but Pepsico is now a gigantic mega corp with much more than soda going on... Market cap for coke: 400 million. Market cap for pepsico: 91 BILLION.