At least give us the option of allowing things to be unlocked without having to spend hours doing it...
That's why the gods made cheat codes. Most games with such content have them buried somewhere, a quick look on GameFAQs will likely turn up many of them.
Racing games are, by in large, the worst offenders in this regard. There are right and wrong ways to do unlockable content, and racing games generally do it all the wrong way. My guess would be so that you are maximally exposed to the advertisements that EA got paid an extremely large amount of money to include on the billboards you drive past in-game.
Some unlocked content is well done. Sandbox games like GTA, Ultimate Spider-Man, and most RPGs with secret areas do it the correct way. Nothing stops me from beating Final Fantasy X without doing all the special extra bosses or obtaining any of the super secret weapons. Nothing stops me from just tooling around and having a damn good time in GTA if I don't take the time to dig around for every little extra scrap of content they put in there.
Fighting games, it really depends. Most have unlockable characters you need to beat the game a certain number of times to see, but in most instances I can recall, you can set the difficulty to "ridiculously easy" and you can still unlock them quickly.
I don't personally mind most unlockables in any case. I'm a completionist at heart, so it's fun rising to the challenge to unlock this, that, or the other thing, even if whatever is unlocked doesn't enhance the experience all that much.
This page has a bunch of charts with a bunch of data on it, not much of which is really clear as to a total aid picture. It does give snapshots of specific types of aid. (Most of it appears to deal with debt relief as opposed to humanitarian relief donations).
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Me personally, I think the current administration and its apologists are the worst thing to happen to this country since Eugene McCarthy, and wish President Bush could be impeached as soon as possible, to save this country from serious collapse, socially and economically. I think the UN is a good idea, is a good thing generally in the world today, and I think it would make the world a far more dangerous place than it already is if the US was out of the UN.
That said, I cordially invite the people of the world to put their money where their mouth is and STOP ASKING THE UNITED STATES FOR HELP. If they have an interest in dealing with Problem X, they should spend more time actually dealing with Problem X, instead of spending the bulk of their time trying to convince the USA to do something about it. Instead, they take the easy (for them) route of getting a problem addressed withoug having to do anything about it themselves, and they can point the finger of blame at someone else when whatever is happening goes wrong. Also, they have to spend less money on the problem. My country is already bankrupting itself with rampant spending, idiotic tax cuts. Pretty soon now, this debt burden is going to destroy my country and you're not going to have the USA to kick around anymore, I suggest you start learning to deal in a world without a "world cop" because it's going to happen one way or the other.
To be blunt, I've never seen this approach work if a guy is attempting to employ it. The bulk of the phone support people for Internet service that I've come in contact with have been men (though that is changing somewhat lately), and the power of a friendly female voice in the middle of a hellish day of dealing with problem after problem, and itrate customer after irate customer cannot be denied. I've worked in phone support, and those kinds of calls are the bright shining lights in your generally dark and miserable day.
Oh the times I've tried this and every "sure thing" strategy for dealing with ISP phone support, and the only one's, for me, that has worked consistently is civility, followed up by real threat to move if that's an option, or failing that constant calling back, the second after the bad tech hangs up, until you get someone who will actually push you up to level 2 tech support. The more money you cost them though phone charges, the more likely their managers will make someone deal with you just to get you to stop calling.
One thing that does help no matter what is, like you said, to make sure you have all your ducks in a row before you call. Being able to "lie" with confidence that you know you've already tried all the normal procedures and you know your hardware is fine, helps bypass the rigamarole a lot faster. Just get a good sense of timing for each of the steps they ask you to go through.
Believe it when you have the computer hardware and general-purpose, useful software in your hands and running in your living room and doing something useful, and not one second earlier.
I prefer to believe it when it happens in someone else's living room first. $700 is way too much to spend on something I don't believe in yet.
The politics are so far beyond anything, they're barely politics. What it really is, is a gigantic cyberspace gang war. National boundaries (the empires) can't be changed by user action, so all you have is the people who sit in the areas the cops protect, or the ones who are doing whatever they damn well please out in the zero zones where the cops won't go.
It would be a fascinating anthropology case study if I was an anthropologist. Not worth my time otherwise. I deal with enough of that shit in the real world, I don't need more of it in my escapism.
Frankly, in order for an IT union to get any real traction, you would have to unionize just about everyone in the world that's qualified, because outsourcing is so easy. Quality may suffer for a short period of time, but knowing what the IT people I know would try to demand, it would be cheaper to pour money into training of foreign workers than to cave to an IT union's demand.
Unions are organized and stay organized easier when the job cannot, at all, be exported. In-store workers, miners, hospitality workers, truck drivers, etc. I can't have someone in China clean my office in New York. I can employ a code monkey in China to code for my business in New York. In America, quality is job none, just look at the abysmal performance of our big car companies. Americans don't care about quality, they want cheap, and that's just what we'll be given. No IT union is going to be able to fight that.
Frankly, HD-DVD and BluRay displays at such a high resolution, I can't imagine that half the people that buy HDTV sets can even see any actual quality difference between an HDTV version of a movie and a standard DVD version without buy a television so large that few if any can afford it. My eyes aren't that good. Hell, my TV isn't that good, and I don't want to and am not going to buy one until this one gets broken beyond repair (and there's a very good TV repair place near here, so that's not very likely).
Also, there's little actual advantage that I can see in the HD-DVD/BluRay over the DVD format, aside from a reduction in the number of discs needed for big movie sets (like the LotR special editions, TV series, etc) but that kind of economy isn't going to last very long. The content size will expand to fit the media. Video games used to be dwarfed by the capacity of CDs, now they're pushing the limits of multiple DVDs, multiple HD-DVD/BluRay will soon follow so that doesn't really solve the multiple disc problem permanently. DVD had very clear advantages over VHS. HD-DVD's advantages are not so clear.
I ditched cable over a year ago and haven't missed it since. The only subscriptions I have are to things that both get me more content and remove the ads. (If paying won't remove the ads, you won't see a dime from me) A couple websites and an MMO. I don't contribute to public radio specifically because I can't dodge the pledge drives by contributing. If I could, I most certainly would. I subscribe to the iTunes video downloads of the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report precisely because all the ads are stripped from them. I get the few TV shows I'd like to see, Comcast doesn't get a red cent from me, Tivo doesn't see a red cent from me, I see no ads, and it's even completely legal!
All it requires is a willingness to live without something if it's not provided under terms you can deal with. Something most people seem to lack, and something which the media companies are continuing to happily exploit to their great financial benefit.
In a conversation concerning the requirement of systems to use standards in order to be conisidered acceptable, it helps to not counter your entire culture by declaring unilaterally that you choose to ignore your own mandated standards.
You're not from Massachussetts, are you. We invented the gerrymander here for goodness sake.
What the EULA more than likely does (and this is from an extrapolation from the informed sources I've read on the subject, I'm not a tax lawyer, and the IRS hasn't provided me with a written opinion) is provide a shield to the normal, in-game economy from the tax man, but not the secondary economy.
That means, Uncle Sam can't (yet) tax me for the 100 gold that I got from the dragon I just killed, because it isn't income. I don't own it, it never got transferred to me, my avatar is merely interacting with stuff someone else generates. Now, if I go on eBay, and I post a listing for 100g in WoW gold, the service I'm selling of taking my avatar, finding that particular amount of stuff (100g worth) and my avatar handing it to the avatar of the person I sold the service to. The money I earn off that is most certainly taxable income, even if the Terms of Service say I shouldn't do that. It's perfectly legal income, it's just moving that 100g around in a manner that its owners don't approve of. I'm not even stealing it from them, as they can expunge the "dirty money" with a mouse click, and make more at their whim, and it has no value on its own by their own declaration. People that play Second Life really ought to be aware of this, as their in-game assets have definite real world values, and are income, because they own it.
Now, theoretically some jurisdiction in the US could decide that it's going to levy a property tax on accounts, so some poor shlub with a stacked WoW account would recieve a huge bill from the IRS, but that would only likely happen if Blizzard suddenly reverses its position on the ownership of in-game items and gold, and your municipality levies a perperty tax specifically on MMO accounts. A 100% tax on something with a value of zero is still zero, and for tax purposes, that's what an account you don't plan on transferring to the secondary market is worth these days. Zero.
It basically comes down to your view of whether "elitism" is good or bad.
If you think elitism is a good, and a function of the meritocracy you believe the world should be, then the complexity forcing people to learn how to use it is a good thing. It means that, in general, only those who are intelligent enough to correctly use the software will be able to, causing less problems down the line.
If you think elitism is a bad thing, fostering an oppressive society with a second class citizenry with fewer rights than other, "better" people, then the complexity is another tool of the establishment to put a glass ceiling stopping the little guy from climbing the ladder, and messing up the elite's cushy deal, where they force you to pay them to do what is now vital work, or spend a lot of time you may not have to join their secret society.
My own opinion is that it's a bit of both. Some stuff can't be simplified by the nature of the task, and most computing tasks can't be simplified easily. The simpler interfaces to complex tasks that you find in software such as MacOS X (whose server config front ends are really quite easy to understand, judging from the utterly non-technical people I know who make a lot of money runing their OS X web servers) and Windows XP (more complicated than Mac for server tasks, but for day-to-day normal people's computing is really as easy as long as your brain's aligned to the Windows paradigm) cost Apple and Microsoft respectively an extremely large pile of money spent on developer time, tester time, and UI designer time. The majority of open source projects don't have the kind of money available to them to spend that kind of time making their particular server easy for Joe Bob to use. Especially not when they can generally rely on companies like Apple, Red Hat, or a devoted fan coder, to write some kind of simpler front-end for their application.
That said, if the widest possible adoption of your software is your goal, you're never going to get that without aiming to satisfy the lowest common denominator of users. If you are unwilling to bother with the lowest common denominator, your cries of outrage and curses at the stupidity of your users are going to be met with well deserved scorn. If you're unwilling to make your software's interface simpler, and can't find anyone willing to do it for you, don't be shocked if it's not the hottest software in your market niche. If you get lucky and it does become a roaring success despite its complexity, buy yourself a beer and congratulate yourself on your luck. =)
I finally left around the time of what I recall as The Great Queueing back after the Ahn'Quiraj patch.
There was a stretch of damn near a month after Christmas where there were queues on all the listed servers save for a single handful. I was so frustrated with waiting through a 1000 person queue on the couple month old server I'd moved to that I went through the entire list checking on whether they had queues. I believe there were three servers that didn't have a queue.
Even after we'd get in, either Kalimdor or the Eastern Kingdoms would be down, so if you were unlucky enough to have zoned out in the wrong area, sucks to be you.
I quit not long after for that and some other reasons (playing too much, not having as much fun while playing, and the ridiculously immature WoW "culture" to name a few). I went so far as to throw away the discs so I didn't spend more money on wondering whether things have gotten better, because I really do know the answer: Hell will freeze over before it gets any better.
I was a major Palladium fan for a very long time. The first RPG I ever played wasn't D&D, but their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG.
The real problems came when they started throwing everything including the kitchen sink into their new sourcebooks for just about every game. Rifts was really a groundbreaking and thrilling RPG until it started ranging WAY farther afield, and the world started looking like a GURPS campaign where every single published sourcebook was part of the game world. Too much confusion, WAY too many character classes. Equipment lists were pedantic, with pages upon pages of vehicles, battle armor, and such that were only slightly different from ones listed on the last 10 pages you went through. What really made this clear to me was when I was fiddling around with making a Ritfs version of Angband just as a personal project, and browsing through the books to figure out what the character classes should be, et al, was a ridiculously monumental task. I started off trying to list every class, and that text file alone ended up being a few pages long.
Then came the era, about 5 years ago, when it seemed like half of Siembada's time was spent on yelling at the people on alt-binaries.e-book.rpg. I'm not sure if any legal proceedings were ever hatched from that, but it was a good year at least of solid argument threads on these topics, with posters taunting Palladium people, and Palladium people responding with righteous indignation. It was a hoot to watch, but it pretty much decided that I'd never obtain a Palladium book ever again in any way that sent a red cent to Palladium themselves. Plenty of Rifts stuff gets dropped into used book stores, and that's fine with me. It's not like any of the new crap they've put out has been worth downloading for free, let alone actually playing with.
The fewer free livejournal/blogger/myspace sites there are on the Internet, the better. If it's free, you're far more likely to flood your space with useless crap. If you pay for it, or require some (pretty minor in terms of writing web pages) learning to do it yourself, you're far more likely to actually take some care when publishing to it.
Unless of course, you just feel like tossing money at stupid shit, in which case go for it.
I just unchecked that little box in my preferences that says "Willing To Moderate".
A good moderator is someone willing to read through all the 0 rated stuff to find the hidden gems that deserve moderation up, and frankly I'm not willing to waste time reading the drivel at that level, so rather than just spending points on already high rated stuff (I browse slashdot at +4) I just got out of the system altogether. I haven't missed it.
What I generally tell people is to just install it and to be prepared to reinstall it many times until you get the hang of it. It was the way I learned (because of the Linux snob phenomenon, I had no one to ask questions of). Usually I'll get a few IMs with common problems (though less common, as Fedora and it's ilk are WAY better at automating hardware detection than any Linux distro was back when I was learning) and they get up and running within a couple days.
In Washington, politicians are using their definition of software (already taxable), 'a set of coded instructions designed to cause a computer...to perform a task,' to justify taxation of online media
What exact justification do politicians need to levy a tax other than:
1. We need the money for something.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm no anti-taxation true believer, but come on. Who needs to justify it?
I love the Dreamcast. Still have mine plugged in, and my collection of Dreamcast games close at hand.
My top five would be:
1. SoulCalibur. It still looks great, still plays great. Raised the bar on fighting game quality higher than any other game had, and kept it high for a long time after the Dreamcast was dead.
2. Jet Grind Radio. Possibly the only Dreamcast game I've played more than SoulCalibur.
3. Skies of Arcadia. I consider this to be one of the top 5 console RPGs I've ever played, and boy have I played a lot. Huge explorable world, a plotline you didn't see every twist coming a mile off in, and characters that weren't paper cutouts. And at the time the graphics were jaw dropping.
4. Toy Commander. One of the most difficult "kids games" I've ever played. The replay value is great, it's quite a long game, the variety of vehicles and environments are awesome. It really does feel like playing with toys as a hyper-imaginative kid.
5. Ikaruga. I downloaded this game once it became obvious that it wasn't going to be released in the US for the Dreamcast (and its release was unconfirmed for the Cube) and this was the title that decided that I was buying a GameCube. It may not be the best shoot-em-up ever made, but it just blew my mind the first time I played it.
There are SO many more awesome games that hit this system that languished in obscurity that I could (and have) talk for hours about them. The day the Dreamcast died was a sad day for me.
But they got a huge black-eye from it and have to now build back their customer confidence.
Well, the Sony/BMG portion of the company needs to. Sony's strength in this area comes from the fact that there are so many Sonys out there, that a problem in one doesn't necessarily tar the other portions of the company.
Sure, I'm never going to buy a Sony/BMG music disc ever again, but I'm not especially worried about my Playstation 2 installing a rootkit on anything and don't have a problem with that.
Microsoft is so welded to Windows (and doesn't help matters by making Windows run or require just about everything they produce) that people aren't likely to compartmentalize the problems of the company.
So I guess you could generalize that the reason Sony's trust rating is better, is because there are more PS2 owners than Xbox owners.
This is exactly the kind of thing our intelligence communities should be getting involved in. First off, this kind of stunt would be the first thing our own intelligence agencies would try to do if the Chinese government were buying computers built by an American company on American soil. Some arm of the US intelligence community planted bugs in wine bottles and other amusing places near the UN ambassadors on the Security Council during the buildup to the Iraq War.
The Chinese practically wrote the book on espionage. For some interesting reading on the subject take a look at The Tao of Spycraft". Interesting, if extremely dry, reading if you're interested in the intelligence community. A very good look at the LONG history of intelligence practice that the Chinese government has to draw on. I got interested working in computer security when everyone else in my office was ex-mil intelligence.
And not being particularly antagonistic toward us doesn't mean anything. Back in 1999/2000, the general opinion by most of my co-workers who knew something about it was that France and Israel were the countries that were spying on us the most, with China coming in third. The only reason Britain wasn't number 1 on the list was "we already give them everything we know."
I wouldn't put it past us to try it on them, so it would be ridiculous to trust that they wouldn't try it to us too.
There are so many bullshit posts in this thread from anti-dressup types that I decided to pick one near the top. Don't take it personally, I just picked the first self-important, self-proclaimed geek who was full of crap.
There are also so many bullshit posts fom the "dressing in business attire makes you feel better about yourself" crowd, that I decided to pick the one with the most self-righteous and needlessly inflammatory prologue. Take it personally. I picked you. Feel special?
It also makes you feel better about yourself once you get over the rightous rebel bullshit.
Getting over the "righteous rebel bullshit" is what makes you feel better, not dressing in a button down shirt and slacks. People who feel better about themselves because they're dressed in a suit and tie are just as insecure and in need of some self-esteem building as the people who only feel good wearing full goth makeup and gear, or have the latest New York fashions. People who need to attach something to themselves in order to feel good have problems. Of course, that means the vast majority of humanity has problems, but who can really deny that? I know I've got a share.
Choosing to dress nicer does make a difference though. I still can't get myself to do it every day, but it's obvious the way people's attitudes change towards you when you put in the effort.
For the record, I'm a long-haired, van-dyke-sporting techie (I get the 'are you in a rock band?' question all the time). In the end, I'm a plumber that deals with data pipes instead of water pipes. I have clients including big-shot lawyers, bank VPs, doctors, ad people, etc. Rich people who wear suits in their everyday life and make decisions. My long-hair hasn't stopped them from being very happy with my work fixing their computers and wrangling with their ISPs, because I'm a handyman. No one complains that their plumber or carpenter doesn't wear business casual, as long as they fix the plumbing. Even so, with new clients I generally show up the first time in slacks and a polo shirt at minimum. More than half the time, I'm overdressed. Especially in the design/ad houses, unless someone just got back from a sales meeting. As the saying goes, when in Rome do as the Romans do. If Romans get better service in restaurants or stores, dressing like a Roman is likely to get me better service. However, I rarely go to those kinds of places to eat, and I don't require stellar service. I know how shitty a lot of those jobs are, because I've done a few. Being nice and respectful to the waitstaff, complimenting them when they do a good job, and not being a skinflint with the tip if they did a good job, work wonders for getting good service too, regardless of your dress. And as far as shopping goes, I despise having to deal with sales personnel, whether it's corporate sales or going down to Best Buy. The less "service" I get, the better. They all respond to dead presidents no matter what I'm dressed like.
And frankly, though you didn't directly say this, the people who assume that long-haired men don't shower and wash their clothes just amaze me. It's like assuming that long-haired women don't shower or wash their clothes.
No one will move to OO.org over this.
on
Office Delayed, Too
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
Since the vast majority of the features are exactly the same as the version of office they currently have, I can't imagine they'll bother looking at OpenOffice just because it got delayed a year. If you have Office these days, you've already drunk the KoolAid. There's no going back unless something major happens, and a mere delay in the next version is not a major thing. And if there's some spiffy new feature the person needs in 12, they need that feature and it's not likely to be replicated in OpenOffice.
Some issue that causes a move to Linux on the desktop is the ONLY reason I can see for any corporate customer to throw their current Office licenses down the toilet in favor of OpenOffice. On OSX, OpenOffice is not a viable option for anyone other than a fairly tech-savvy individual. NeoOffice/J isn't an option (believe me, I've tried).
I take it you've never seen the Speed Demos Archive. An good number of people doing a lot of things you'll never be able to do at home without an awful lot of painful practice.
If you like the game, it can be really interesting (and helpful to your gameplay) to see the kinds of tricks they pull off in order to blast through these games.
Slashdot Mirror
At least give us the option of allowing things to be unlocked without having to spend hours doing it...
That's why the gods made cheat codes. Most games with such content have them buried somewhere, a quick look on GameFAQs will likely turn up many of them.
Racing games are, by in large, the worst offenders in this regard. There are right and wrong ways to do unlockable content, and racing games generally do it all the wrong way. My guess would be so that you are maximally exposed to the advertisements that EA got paid an extremely large amount of money to include on the billboards you drive past in-game.
Some unlocked content is well done. Sandbox games like GTA, Ultimate Spider-Man, and most RPGs with secret areas do it the correct way. Nothing stops me from beating Final Fantasy X without doing all the special extra bosses or obtaining any of the super secret weapons. Nothing stops me from just tooling around and having a damn good time in GTA if I don't take the time to dig around for every little extra scrap of content they put in there.
Fighting games, it really depends. Most have unlockable characters you need to beat the game a certain number of times to see, but in most instances I can recall, you can set the difficulty to "ridiculously easy" and you can still unlock them quickly.
I don't personally mind most unlockables in any case. I'm a completionist at heart, so it's fun rising to the challenge to unlock this, that, or the other thing, even if whatever is unlocked doesn't enhance the experience all that much.
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAi d.asp
This page has a bunch of charts with a bunch of data on it, not much of which is really clear as to a total aid picture. It does give snapshots of specific types of aid. (Most of it appears to deal with debt relief as opposed to humanitarian relief donations).
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Me personally, I think the current administration and its apologists are the worst thing to happen to this country since Eugene McCarthy, and wish President Bush could be impeached as soon as possible, to save this country from serious collapse, socially and economically. I think the UN is a good idea, is a good thing generally in the world today, and I think it would make the world a far more dangerous place than it already is if the US was out of the UN.
That said, I cordially invite the people of the world to put their money where their mouth is and STOP ASKING THE UNITED STATES FOR HELP. If they have an interest in dealing with Problem X, they should spend more time actually dealing with Problem X, instead of spending the bulk of their time trying to convince the USA to do something about it. Instead, they take the easy (for them) route of getting a problem addressed withoug having to do anything about it themselves, and they can point the finger of blame at someone else when whatever is happening goes wrong. Also, they have to spend less money on the problem. My country is already bankrupting itself with rampant spending, idiotic tax cuts. Pretty soon now, this debt burden is going to destroy my country and you're not going to have the USA to kick around anymore, I suggest you start learning to deal in a world without a "world cop" because it's going to happen one way or the other.
To be blunt, I've never seen this approach work if a guy is attempting to employ it. The bulk of the phone support people for Internet service that I've come in contact with have been men (though that is changing somewhat lately), and the power of a friendly female voice in the middle of a hellish day of dealing with problem after problem, and itrate customer after irate customer cannot be denied. I've worked in phone support, and those kinds of calls are the bright shining lights in your generally dark and miserable day.
Oh the times I've tried this and every "sure thing" strategy for dealing with ISP phone support, and the only one's, for me, that has worked consistently is civility, followed up by real threat to move if that's an option, or failing that constant calling back, the second after the bad tech hangs up, until you get someone who will actually push you up to level 2 tech support. The more money you cost them though phone charges, the more likely their managers will make someone deal with you just to get you to stop calling.
One thing that does help no matter what is, like you said, to make sure you have all your ducks in a row before you call. Being able to "lie" with confidence that you know you've already tried all the normal procedures and you know your hardware is fine, helps bypass the rigamarole a lot faster. Just get a good sense of timing for each of the steps they ask you to go through.
Believe it when you have the computer hardware and general-purpose, useful software in your hands and running in your living room and doing something useful, and not one second earlier.
I prefer to believe it when it happens in someone else's living room first. $700 is way too much to spend on something I don't believe in yet.
The politics are so far beyond anything, they're barely politics. What it really is, is a gigantic cyberspace gang war. National boundaries (the empires) can't be changed by user action, so all you have is the people who sit in the areas the cops protect, or the ones who are doing whatever they damn well please out in the zero zones where the cops won't go.
It would be a fascinating anthropology case study if I was an anthropologist. Not worth my time otherwise. I deal with enough of that shit in the real world, I don't need more of it in my escapism.
Frankly, in order for an IT union to get any real traction, you would have to unionize just about everyone in the world that's qualified, because outsourcing is so easy. Quality may suffer for a short period of time, but knowing what the IT people I know would try to demand, it would be cheaper to pour money into training of foreign workers than to cave to an IT union's demand.
Unions are organized and stay organized easier when the job cannot, at all, be exported. In-store workers, miners, hospitality workers, truck drivers, etc. I can't have someone in China clean my office in New York. I can employ a code monkey in China to code for my business in New York. In America, quality is job none, just look at the abysmal performance of our big car companies. Americans don't care about quality, they want cheap, and that's just what we'll be given. No IT union is going to be able to fight that.
I concur.
Frankly, HD-DVD and BluRay displays at such a high resolution, I can't imagine that half the people that buy HDTV sets can even see any actual quality difference between an HDTV version of a movie and a standard DVD version without buy a television so large that few if any can afford it. My eyes aren't that good. Hell, my TV isn't that good, and I don't want to and am not going to buy one until this one gets broken beyond repair (and there's a very good TV repair place near here, so that's not very likely).
Also, there's little actual advantage that I can see in the HD-DVD/BluRay over the DVD format, aside from a reduction in the number of discs needed for big movie sets (like the LotR special editions, TV series, etc) but that kind of economy isn't going to last very long. The content size will expand to fit the media. Video games used to be dwarfed by the capacity of CDs, now they're pushing the limits of multiple DVDs, multiple HD-DVD/BluRay will soon follow so that doesn't really solve the multiple disc problem permanently. DVD had very clear advantages over VHS. HD-DVD's advantages are not so clear.
I ditched cable over a year ago and haven't missed it since. The only subscriptions I have are to things that both get me more content and remove the ads. (If paying won't remove the ads, you won't see a dime from me) A couple websites and an MMO. I don't contribute to public radio specifically because I can't dodge the pledge drives by contributing. If I could, I most certainly would. I subscribe to the iTunes video downloads of the Daily Show, and the Colbert Report precisely because all the ads are stripped from them. I get the few TV shows I'd like to see, Comcast doesn't get a red cent from me, Tivo doesn't see a red cent from me, I see no ads, and it's even completely legal!
All it requires is a willingness to live without something if it's not provided under terms you can deal with. Something most people seem to lack, and something which the media companies are continuing to happily exploit to their great financial benefit.
In a conversation concerning the requirement of systems to use standards in order to be conisidered acceptable, it helps to not counter your entire culture by declaring unilaterally that you choose to ignore your own mandated standards.
You're not from Massachussetts, are you. We invented the gerrymander here for goodness sake.
What the EULA more than likely does (and this is from an extrapolation from the informed sources I've read on the subject, I'm not a tax lawyer, and the IRS hasn't provided me with a written opinion) is provide a shield to the normal, in-game economy from the tax man, but not the secondary economy.
That means, Uncle Sam can't (yet) tax me for the 100 gold that I got from the dragon I just killed, because it isn't income. I don't own it, it never got transferred to me, my avatar is merely interacting with stuff someone else generates. Now, if I go on eBay, and I post a listing for 100g in WoW gold, the service I'm selling of taking my avatar, finding that particular amount of stuff (100g worth) and my avatar handing it to the avatar of the person I sold the service to. The money I earn off that is most certainly taxable income, even if the Terms of Service say I shouldn't do that. It's perfectly legal income, it's just moving that 100g around in a manner that its owners don't approve of. I'm not even stealing it from them, as they can expunge the "dirty money" with a mouse click, and make more at their whim, and it has no value on its own by their own declaration. People that play Second Life really ought to be aware of this, as their in-game assets have definite real world values, and are income, because they own it.
Now, theoretically some jurisdiction in the US could decide that it's going to levy a property tax on accounts, so some poor shlub with a stacked WoW account would recieve a huge bill from the IRS, but that would only likely happen if Blizzard suddenly reverses its position on the ownership of in-game items and gold, and your municipality levies a perperty tax specifically on MMO accounts. A 100% tax on something with a value of zero is still zero, and for tax purposes, that's what an account you don't plan on transferring to the secondary market is worth these days. Zero.
It basically comes down to your view of whether "elitism" is good or bad.
If you think elitism is a good, and a function of the meritocracy you believe the world should be, then the complexity forcing people to learn how to use it is a good thing. It means that, in general, only those who are intelligent enough to correctly use the software will be able to, causing less problems down the line.
If you think elitism is a bad thing, fostering an oppressive society with a second class citizenry with fewer rights than other, "better" people, then the complexity is another tool of the establishment to put a glass ceiling stopping the little guy from climbing the ladder, and messing up the elite's cushy deal, where they force you to pay them to do what is now vital work, or spend a lot of time you may not have to join their secret society.
My own opinion is that it's a bit of both. Some stuff can't be simplified by the nature of the task, and most computing tasks can't be simplified easily. The simpler interfaces to complex tasks that you find in software such as MacOS X (whose server config front ends are really quite easy to understand, judging from the utterly non-technical people I know who make a lot of money runing their OS X web servers) and Windows XP (more complicated than Mac for server tasks, but for day-to-day normal people's computing is really as easy as long as your brain's aligned to the Windows paradigm) cost Apple and Microsoft respectively an extremely large pile of money spent on developer time, tester time, and UI designer time. The majority of open source projects don't have the kind of money available to them to spend that kind of time making their particular server easy for Joe Bob to use. Especially not when they can generally rely on companies like Apple, Red Hat, or a devoted fan coder, to write some kind of simpler front-end for their application.
That said, if the widest possible adoption of your software is your goal, you're never going to get that without aiming to satisfy the lowest common denominator of users. If you are unwilling to bother with the lowest common denominator, your cries of outrage and curses at the stupidity of your users are going to be met with well deserved scorn. If you're unwilling to make your software's interface simpler, and can't find anyone willing to do it for you, don't be shocked if it's not the hottest software in your market niche. If you get lucky and it does become a roaring success despite its complexity, buy yourself a beer and congratulate yourself on your luck. =)
I finally left around the time of what I recall as The Great Queueing back after the Ahn'Quiraj patch.
There was a stretch of damn near a month after Christmas where there were queues on all the listed servers save for a single handful. I was so frustrated with waiting through a 1000 person queue on the couple month old server I'd moved to that I went through the entire list checking on whether they had queues. I believe there were three servers that didn't have a queue.
Even after we'd get in, either Kalimdor or the Eastern Kingdoms would be down, so if you were unlucky enough to have zoned out in the wrong area, sucks to be you.
I quit not long after for that and some other reasons (playing too much, not having as much fun while playing, and the ridiculously immature WoW "culture" to name a few). I went so far as to throw away the discs so I didn't spend more money on wondering whether things have gotten better, because I really do know the answer: Hell will freeze over before it gets any better.
I was a major Palladium fan for a very long time. The first RPG I ever played wasn't D&D, but their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG.
The real problems came when they started throwing everything including the kitchen sink into their new sourcebooks for just about every game. Rifts was really a groundbreaking and thrilling RPG until it started ranging WAY farther afield, and the world started looking like a GURPS campaign where every single published sourcebook was part of the game world. Too much confusion, WAY too many character classes. Equipment lists were pedantic, with pages upon pages of vehicles, battle armor, and such that were only slightly different from ones listed on the last 10 pages you went through. What really made this clear to me was when I was fiddling around with making a Ritfs version of Angband just as a personal project, and browsing through the books to figure out what the character classes should be, et al, was a ridiculously monumental task. I started off trying to list every class, and that text file alone ended up being a few pages long.
Then came the era, about 5 years ago, when it seemed like half of Siembada's time was spent on yelling at the people on alt-binaries.e-book.rpg. I'm not sure if any legal proceedings were ever hatched from that, but it was a good year at least of solid argument threads on these topics, with posters taunting Palladium people, and Palladium people responding with righteous indignation. It was a hoot to watch, but it pretty much decided that I'd never obtain a Palladium book ever again in any way that sent a red cent to Palladium themselves. Plenty of Rifts stuff gets dropped into used book stores, and that's fine with me. It's not like any of the new crap they've put out has been worth downloading for free, let alone actually playing with.
The fewer free livejournal/blogger/myspace sites there are on the Internet, the better. If it's free, you're far more likely to flood your space with useless crap. If you pay for it, or require some (pretty minor in terms of writing web pages) learning to do it yourself, you're far more likely to actually take some care when publishing to it.
Unless of course, you just feel like tossing money at stupid shit, in which case go for it.
I just unchecked that little box in my preferences that says "Willing To Moderate".
A good moderator is someone willing to read through all the 0 rated stuff to find the hidden gems that deserve moderation up, and frankly I'm not willing to waste time reading the drivel at that level, so rather than just spending points on already high rated stuff (I browse slashdot at +4) I just got out of the system altogether. I haven't missed it.
What I generally tell people is to just install it and to be prepared to reinstall it many times until you get the hang of it. It was the way I learned (because of the Linux snob phenomenon, I had no one to ask questions of). Usually I'll get a few IMs with common problems (though less common, as Fedora and it's ilk are WAY better at automating hardware detection than any Linux distro was back when I was learning) and they get up and running within a couple days.
In Washington, politicians are using their definition of software (already taxable), 'a set of coded instructions designed to cause a computer...to perform a task,' to justify taxation of online media
What exact justification do politicians need to levy a tax other than:
1. We need the money for something.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm no anti-taxation true believer, but come on. Who needs to justify it?
I love the Dreamcast. Still have mine plugged in, and my collection of Dreamcast games close at hand.
My top five would be:
1. SoulCalibur. It still looks great, still plays great. Raised the bar on fighting game quality higher than any other game had, and kept it high for a long time after the Dreamcast was dead.
2. Jet Grind Radio. Possibly the only Dreamcast game I've played more than SoulCalibur.
3. Skies of Arcadia. I consider this to be one of the top 5 console RPGs I've ever played, and boy have I played a lot. Huge explorable world, a plotline you didn't see every twist coming a mile off in, and characters that weren't paper cutouts. And at the time the graphics were jaw dropping.
4. Toy Commander. One of the most difficult "kids games" I've ever played. The replay value is great, it's quite a long game, the variety of vehicles and environments are awesome. It really does feel like playing with toys as a hyper-imaginative kid.
5. Ikaruga. I downloaded this game once it became obvious that it wasn't going to be released in the US for the Dreamcast (and its release was unconfirmed for the Cube) and this was the title that decided that I was buying a GameCube. It may not be the best shoot-em-up ever made, but it just blew my mind the first time I played it.
There are SO many more awesome games that hit this system that languished in obscurity that I could (and have) talk for hours about them. The day the Dreamcast died was a sad day for me.
But they got a huge black-eye from it and have to now build back their customer confidence.
Well, the Sony/BMG portion of the company needs to. Sony's strength in this area comes from the fact that there are so many Sonys out there, that a problem in one doesn't necessarily tar the other portions of the company.
Sure, I'm never going to buy a Sony/BMG music disc ever again, but I'm not especially worried about my Playstation 2 installing a rootkit on anything and don't have a problem with that.
Microsoft is so welded to Windows (and doesn't help matters by making Windows run or require just about everything they produce) that people aren't likely to compartmentalize the problems of the company.
So I guess you could generalize that the reason Sony's trust rating is better, is because there are more PS2 owners than Xbox owners.
This is exactly the kind of thing our intelligence communities should be getting involved in. First off, this kind of stunt would be the first thing our own intelligence agencies would try to do if the Chinese government were buying computers built by an American company on American soil. Some arm of the US intelligence community planted bugs in wine bottles and other amusing places near the UN ambassadors on the Security Council during the buildup to the Iraq War.
The Chinese practically wrote the book on espionage. For some interesting reading on the subject take a look at The Tao of Spycraft". Interesting, if extremely dry, reading if you're interested in the intelligence community. A very good look at the LONG history of intelligence practice that the Chinese government has to draw on. I got interested working in computer security when everyone else in my office was ex-mil intelligence.
And not being particularly antagonistic toward us doesn't mean anything. Back in 1999/2000, the general opinion by most of my co-workers who knew something about it was that France and Israel were the countries that were spying on us the most, with China coming in third. The only reason Britain wasn't number 1 on the list was "we already give them everything we know."
I wouldn't put it past us to try it on them, so it would be ridiculous to trust that they wouldn't try it to us too.
Yeah, I read it as Phil Harris.
My first thought was "How the hell is he still alive?" followed quickly by "What the hell is he doing making video games?"
There are so many bullshit posts in this thread from anti-dressup types that I decided to pick one near the top. Don't take it personally, I just picked the first self-important, self-proclaimed geek who was full of crap.
There are also so many bullshit posts fom the "dressing in business attire makes you feel better about yourself" crowd, that I decided to pick the one with the most self-righteous and needlessly inflammatory prologue. Take it personally. I picked you. Feel special?
It also makes you feel better about yourself once you get over the rightous rebel bullshit.
Getting over the "righteous rebel bullshit" is what makes you feel better, not dressing in a button down shirt and slacks. People who feel better about themselves because they're dressed in a suit and tie are just as insecure and in need of some self-esteem building as the people who only feel good wearing full goth makeup and gear, or have the latest New York fashions. People who need to attach something to themselves in order to feel good have problems. Of course, that means the vast majority of humanity has problems, but who can really deny that? I know I've got a share.
Choosing to dress nicer does make a difference though. I still can't get myself to do it every day, but it's obvious the way people's attitudes change towards you when you put in the effort.
For the record, I'm a long-haired, van-dyke-sporting techie (I get the 'are you in a rock band?' question all the time). In the end, I'm a plumber that deals with data pipes instead of water pipes. I have clients including big-shot lawyers, bank VPs, doctors, ad people, etc. Rich people who wear suits in their everyday life and make decisions. My long-hair hasn't stopped them from being very happy with my work fixing their computers and wrangling with their ISPs, because I'm a handyman. No one complains that their plumber or carpenter doesn't wear business casual, as long as they fix the plumbing. Even so, with new clients I generally show up the first time in slacks and a polo shirt at minimum. More than half the time, I'm overdressed. Especially in the design/ad houses, unless someone just got back from a sales meeting. As the saying goes, when in Rome do as the Romans do. If Romans get better service in restaurants or stores, dressing like a Roman is likely to get me better service. However, I rarely go to those kinds of places to eat, and I don't require stellar service. I know how shitty a lot of those jobs are, because I've done a few. Being nice and respectful to the waitstaff, complimenting them when they do a good job, and not being a skinflint with the tip if they did a good job, work wonders for getting good service too, regardless of your dress. And as far as shopping goes, I despise having to deal with sales personnel, whether it's corporate sales or going down to Best Buy. The less "service" I get, the better. They all respond to dead presidents no matter what I'm dressed like.
And frankly, though you didn't directly say this, the people who assume that long-haired men don't shower and wash their clothes just amaze me. It's like assuming that long-haired women don't shower or wash their clothes.
What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
Since the vast majority of the features are exactly the same as the version of office they currently have, I can't imagine they'll bother looking at OpenOffice just because it got delayed a year. If you have Office these days, you've already drunk the KoolAid. There's no going back unless something major happens, and a mere delay in the next version is not a major thing. And if there's some spiffy new feature the person needs in 12, they need that feature and it's not likely to be replicated in OpenOffice.
Some issue that causes a move to Linux on the desktop is the ONLY reason I can see for any corporate customer to throw their current Office licenses down the toilet in favor of OpenOffice. On OSX, OpenOffice is not a viable option for anyone other than a fairly tech-savvy individual. NeoOffice/J isn't an option (believe me, I've tried).
I take it you've never seen the Speed Demos Archive. An good number of people doing a lot of things you'll never be able to do at home without an awful lot of painful practice.
If you like the game, it can be really interesting (and helpful to your gameplay) to see the kinds of tricks they pull off in order to blast through these games.