EA doesn't give a fuck about their customers. They'll take away our new game because we installed windows one too many times. Why should we give a fuck that they're not making money off of our legitimate purchase? For that matter, why should I give a fuck that Ford isn't making any money off of the 25 year old truck I bought used?
Re:Saw It in Music! Coming Soon in Games, E-Books
on
Why Bother With DRM?
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· Score: 1
I bought World of Goo for my cousins from the Wii Store. Interesting looking game, but it wasn't really my thing.
The problem with folks like you is you're ignorant of the concept of a 'root cause'.
How was I able to predict the collapse of the credit market to coincide with the collapse of the housing market, way back in 2005 when everyone was saying the market was dandy and we were headed for the best boom ever? If the cause of the collapse was really an obscure financial instrument, then it would have been impossible to predict.
The fundamental problem, the problem that led to the problems with these financial instruments, was exactly that everyone believed housing prices would continue to go up at double digit percentages.
People figured you could lend to idiots who couldn't afford houses because by the time they defaulted the house will have increased in value more than the loss on the mortgage and suddenly the bank would own a valuable property it could sell to the next buyer. Further up the chain, everyone thought mortgage backed securities were ultra-safe for the same reason. Further up the chain, insurance companies considered CDOs ultra-safe for the same reason.
Fundamentally, the problem all stemmed from the assumption that house prices would go up indefinitely. People like me looked and realised that at the end of the day it was completely unsustainable. At the end of the day, someone would be left holding the bag on a million dollar mortgage, and when that happened, the whole scheme would collapse because simple economics says the properties aren't worth what they paid.
So what happened? Shockingly, people who were loaned way more money than they could afford to pay back couldn't pay it back. Shockingly, this caused a huge glut of houses for sale on the market as it wasn't possible to attract new investors at the massively inflated prices. Shockingly, this caused the value of the asssets as a whole to drop to something much closer to true levels. Shocking, this caused massive problems with all the financial instruments whose existence depended on the idea that housing prices would always rise.
The root cause being people assuming house prices could go up forever. If house prices go up forever, it's only natural to depend on them as the financial markets did. If I expected certain assets to continuously outperform the market forever, I'd use that as a base to make even more extreme profits too. It's only logical. What isn't logical, as both the dot-com boom, the housing boom, and the credit boom all show, is assuming your short-term gains on an asset are inexhaustable. Eventually your 300 dollar tech stocks for an online pet shoe store will have to return something tangible to be worth it because you won't be able to find someone willing to pay 600 dollars for them. Eventually your house will reach a maximum value that people can possibly pay for it. And eventually, you can't just lend more money to make more money from the same pool of people who already can't afford to pay their bills.
Without approximation, the world is far too complicated. Without approximation, you wouldn't be able to do a simple velocity calculation because the real world is infinitely variable.
It's so close to linear from about 20% to 75% that no observer would know it's not.
Just like here. Everyone goes "zomg it's going up 5% per year" when we both know it's not going up in a linear manner because linearity doesn't exist in the real world. They're approximating.
It's utterly ignorant to believe trends will continue indefinitely in a linear manner. We're in a global recession caused in large part by this destructive thinking. People saw a couple years of double digit returns and assumed they'd continue indefinitely.
Firefox will rise at a linear rate until it captures its natural market share. After that point, it'll quickly level out. It's a basic first order process.
Firefox is a quality product, but acting as if the current meteoric rise is sustainable is to join the ignorati who have forgotten history, time and time again.
As my.sig mentions, I predicted the economic meltdown that Keynesians begging for socialist policies today never saw coming.
The problem was obvious: Taking out excessive debt with limited means to pay it back. People took out huge amounts of debt, and while that caused a short-term bubble, they were removed from the economy because their income was afterwards locked up in a million dollar mortgage that'd take 30 years to pay off. Telling the government to go do the same thing is incredibly ignorant. Even if you could pump out enough debt-driven cash to cause a reversal of the economic downturn, it'd mean raising taxes during the good times to much higher levels to compensate. I'm positive you don't intend to raise taxes during good things, which makes this policy incredibly ignorant.
Secondly, what makes you think increased federal spending will help the global recession? What makes you think reduced taxes will help the global recession? We're talking about a massive global problem, and you seem to think that throwing our budget out of whack for 80 billion dollars is going to be a magic bullet. It isn't. 80 billion isn't even a drop in the bucket. It's a raindrop into a swimming pool. Let the private sector get themselves out of the recession on their own, and the country will be stronger for it. Our economy is stronger than the federal government, it's beyond the means of the federal government to simply spend their way out of it. It's childish to think you can just pump more money into the economy and make everyone rich.
See? Ignorant and childish. Ignorant because you pretend deficit spending doesn't mean additional hardship later thus prolonging the economic downturn, and childish in the idealism and bravado that makes you believe such policies could actually do anything other than harm our economy.
So sorry, it was 8 years of balanced budgets the conservatives managed to cock up in 2 years, not 10 years of balanced budgets the conservatives managed to cock up in 2 years.
I'm sick of you socialists wasting money I haven't even earned yet. Could you just move to the states? They love irresponsible socialists down there. I prefer not having the government spending money I haven't even earned yet.
It's not special flash. I've got a regular 2GB SD card I stick into the expansion slot (one of two SD card readers on the Aspire One), and it asks if I want to use readyboost. Using it greatly reduces the amount of disk access.
I was thinking the same sort of thing, but in a different direction -- these benchmarks don't deal with Vista's problems.
The complaints about Vista's speed were almost never about throughput. They were about high memory consumption, poorly optimized visual elements, and huge amounts of disk rattling. All of these issues have been improved in Windows 7.
Windows 7 may not increase throughput in this test environment, but it runs the full aero theme on a netbook almost as quickly as Windows XP runs its default theme. I've got it on my Aspire One, and it works great -- I bet it'll become the new XP over time (that is, reliable enough, fast enough, useful enough to become a major standard).
When 3d realms was in its heyday, game development was a much much much smaller endeavor than today. Interactivity consisted of playing a sound file when you cross a certain line.
At the time, anyone could make a game with the BUILD engine, and there were lots of non-commerical full-length TCs of very good quality. Even a bunch of kids could put together something of fairly good quality. Today, game development is a much more involved process. Creating a single level is a massive achievement of art, programming, design.
I bet the people at 3d Realms simply were overwhelmed by the challenge of managing a project of that size. The quirky rapid-fire development cycle and snap decision-making that's kept DNF from being released also resulted in some of the most incredible 3d games of the 3drealms era.
On a couple occasions, I've bought a PDA, imagining It'd be great -- Gaming, music, applications, and it integrated with my phone (and gps too).
It's never been very good. Battery life was greatly reduced compared to dedicated units. The interface for gaming and music was horrible compared to a dedicated unit. GPS routing and mapping was a joke.
The PDA/Phone combination makes sense because the usage patterns tend to be similar. Most people only flip open their PDA for 2-3 seconds to do something or take a note. This is comparable to usage patterns for a phone. By contrast, an MP3 player or a video game console are on all the time.
But I'm an old fogey in this regard. My phone doesn't have a camera. It doesn't have the Internet. It doesn't have special ringtones. It doesn't have a touchscreen. It doesn't have applications. It makes phone calls and lasts weeks without a charge. My iPod will last a full 24 hours playing music. My DS will last hours and hours. Combining them all, my phone, mp3 player, and DS would all be dead all the time.
Casual gaming is a perfect example of a market doomed to be taken over by free and open source software. An A-list game might have excessive barriers to entry, but a casual game is often equivalent to a single puzzle in an adventure game. The OSS crowd has shown they're very good at solving such simple problems.
They ran up 40 billion in debt this year. Incidentally, their budget includes 40 billion dollars in tax cuts and stimulus.
Destroying a balanced budget to follow a Keynesian nightmare is child-like and ignorant. If the buffoons had a brain cell in their collective heads, they'd see the value in maintaining a balanced budget, like we'd had for over a decade before those buffoons showed up..
You guys are about to learn what I learned 10 years ago: Discrete devices work best. A dedicated gaming platform will have better performance, better form factor, and better battery life than a device that's a million things and also a gaming platform. A dedicated music device will have better form factor and better battery life than a device that's a million things and also a music device. A dedicated phone will have better form factor and better battery life than something that's a million things and a phone.
And you know what? When my DS is dead, I'll still be able to call a taxi, and I'll still have 11 hours of music left on my iPod.
Not just money, people. Imagine if the huge number of engineers, scientists, and programmers who worked on creating the latest death machine had worked on something else.
Suddenly, Canada's 50% of gdp looks positively cheery.
At rates we were going before the child-like and ignorant Conservatives decided to follow the Americans into the pit of despair and debt, it was going to take only 50 years to pay off the debt at current rates(before accounting for inflation).
If you look at the same idea from a conservative and a liberal and come to the same conclusion, odds are you're open-minded to the point that you consider all arguments based on their merits rather than their source.
The problem is obvious, and you were so busy flailing about with your ad hominem attacks that you missed it.
Public schools aren't very good, private schools tend to be (at least percieved as) better.
If the Federal government uses tax money to start dictating to private schools just as they dictate to (not very good) public schools, then it's only logical that the private schools will stop being better.
It's ok to tolerate a well formulated idea. It's not ok to tolerate a poorly forumulated idea.
Attack an idea based on either factually incorrect information(children need to be taught not all sources are created equal)
Attack an idea that is logically unsound(children need to be taught that not all arguments can be made)
Attack a backwards rationalization of an emotional position(children need to be taught that if your idea is wrong you have to change it, so you can't get too emotionally invested)
The last one is very important. People these days seem to think scientific thought requires choosing your political preference for an outcome first, searching for any sort of information that you can rationalize proves you right, then blindly attacking any information that proves you wrong. All children should be forced to investigate their arguments until they get used to proving their own ideas wrong. "Shit, I thought the Democrats spent more than the Republicans, but the data shows the Democrats spend much less!"
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Jeepers, this complaining is for the birds! 23 skedadle, Jack.
That's not funny, you asshole. Relativists sort of killed my father, and kinda raped my mother. Well.... It's sort of a grey area, what they did...
It's a bit of a troublesome bit of ethics there.
EA doesn't give a fuck about their customers. They'll take away our new game because we installed windows one too many times. Why should we give a fuck that they're not making money off of our legitimate purchase? For that matter, why should I give a fuck that Ford isn't making any money off of the 25 year old truck I bought used?
I bought World of Goo for my cousins from the Wii Store. Interesting looking game, but it wasn't really my thing.
I refer you to my previous statement.
The problem with folks like you is you're ignorant of the concept of a 'root cause'.
How was I able to predict the collapse of the credit market to coincide with the collapse of the housing market, way back in 2005 when everyone was saying the market was dandy and we were headed for the best boom ever? If the cause of the collapse was really an obscure financial instrument, then it would have been impossible to predict.
The fundamental problem, the problem that led to the problems with these financial instruments, was exactly that everyone believed housing prices would continue to go up at double digit percentages.
People figured you could lend to idiots who couldn't afford houses because by the time they defaulted the house will have increased in value more than the loss on the mortgage and suddenly the bank would own a valuable property it could sell to the next buyer. Further up the chain, everyone thought mortgage backed securities were ultra-safe for the same reason. Further up the chain, insurance companies considered CDOs ultra-safe for the same reason.
Fundamentally, the problem all stemmed from the assumption that house prices would go up indefinitely. People like me looked and realised that at the end of the day it was completely unsustainable. At the end of the day, someone would be left holding the bag on a million dollar mortgage, and when that happened, the whole scheme would collapse because simple economics says the properties aren't worth what they paid.
So what happened? Shockingly, people who were loaned way more money than they could afford to pay back couldn't pay it back. Shockingly, this caused a huge glut of houses for sale on the market as it wasn't possible to attract new investors at the massively inflated prices. Shockingly, this caused the value of the asssets as a whole to drop to something much closer to true levels. Shocking, this caused massive problems with all the financial instruments whose existence depended on the idea that housing prices would always rise.
The root cause being people assuming house prices could go up forever. If house prices go up forever, it's only natural to depend on them as the financial markets did. If I expected certain assets to continuously outperform the market forever, I'd use that as a base to make even more extreme profits too. It's only logical. What isn't logical, as both the dot-com boom, the housing boom, and the credit boom all show, is assuming your short-term gains on an asset are inexhaustable. Eventually your 300 dollar tech stocks for an online pet shoe store will have to return something tangible to be worth it because you won't be able to find someone willing to pay 600 dollars for them. Eventually your house will reach a maximum value that people can possibly pay for it. And eventually, you can't just lend more money to make more money from the same pool of people who already can't afford to pay their bills.
Approximation. Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Without approximation, the world is far too complicated. Without approximation, you wouldn't be able to do a simple velocity calculation because the real world is infinitely variable.
It's so close to linear from about 20% to 75% that no observer would know it's not.
Just like here. Everyone goes "zomg it's going up 5% per year" when we both know it's not going up in a linear manner because linearity doesn't exist in the real world. They're approximating.
Erm... Do you have any idea what a hockey stick looks like?
It's basically one virtually linear line (explosive growth), followed by a quick levelling off.Sort of like this
A first order process, just like I said.
Basically, until you hit about 80%, it's virtually linear, after which you level out fairly quickly.
Regarding your sig,
I don't want to set the world on fire.
It's utterly ignorant to believe trends will continue indefinitely in a linear manner. We're in a global recession caused in large part by this destructive thinking. People saw a couple years of double digit returns and assumed they'd continue indefinitely.
Firefox will rise at a linear rate until it captures its natural market share. After that point, it'll quickly level out. It's a basic first order process.
Firefox is a quality product, but acting as if the current meteoric rise is sustainable is to join the ignorati who have forgotten history, time and time again.
As my .sig mentions, I predicted the economic meltdown that Keynesians begging for socialist policies today never saw coming.
The problem was obvious: Taking out excessive debt with limited means to pay it back. People took out huge amounts of debt, and while that caused a short-term bubble, they were removed from the economy because their income was afterwards locked up in a million dollar mortgage that'd take 30 years to pay off. Telling the government to go do the same thing is incredibly ignorant. Even if you could pump out enough debt-driven cash to cause a reversal of the economic downturn, it'd mean raising taxes during the good times to much higher levels to compensate. I'm positive you don't intend to raise taxes during good things, which makes this policy incredibly ignorant.
Secondly, what makes you think increased federal spending will help the global recession? What makes you think reduced taxes will help the global recession? We're talking about a massive global problem, and you seem to think that throwing our budget out of whack for 80 billion dollars is going to be a magic bullet. It isn't. 80 billion isn't even a drop in the bucket. It's a raindrop into a swimming pool. Let the private sector get themselves out of the recession on their own, and the country will be stronger for it. Our economy is stronger than the federal government, it's beyond the means of the federal government to simply spend their way out of it. It's childish to think you can just pump more money into the economy and make everyone rich.
See? Ignorant and childish. Ignorant because you pretend deficit spending doesn't mean additional hardship later thus prolonging the economic downturn, and childish in the idealism and bravado that makes you believe such policies could actually do anything other than harm our economy.
So sorry, it was 8 years of balanced budgets the conservatives managed to cock up in 2 years, not 10 years of balanced budgets the conservatives managed to cock up in 2 years.
I'm sick of you socialists wasting money I haven't even earned yet. Could you just move to the states? They love irresponsible socialists down there. I prefer not having the government spending money I haven't even earned yet.
It's not special flash. I've got a regular 2GB SD card I stick into the expansion slot (one of two SD card readers on the Aspire One), and it asks if I want to use readyboost. Using it greatly reduces the amount of disk access.
I was thinking the same sort of thing, but in a different direction -- these benchmarks don't deal with Vista's problems.
The complaints about Vista's speed were almost never about throughput. They were about high memory consumption, poorly optimized visual elements, and huge amounts of disk rattling. All of these issues have been improved in Windows 7.
Windows 7 may not increase throughput in this test environment, but it runs the full aero theme on a netbook almost as quickly as Windows XP runs its default theme. I've got it on my Aspire One, and it works great -- I bet it'll become the new XP over time (that is, reliable enough, fast enough, useful enough to become a major standard).
I have another proposal.
When 3d realms was in its heyday, game development was a much much much smaller endeavor than today. Interactivity consisted of playing a sound file when you cross a certain line.
At the time, anyone could make a game with the BUILD engine, and there were lots of non-commerical full-length TCs of very good quality. Even a bunch of kids could put together something of fairly good quality. Today, game development is a much more involved process. Creating a single level is a massive achievement of art, programming, design.
I bet the people at 3d Realms simply were overwhelmed by the challenge of managing a project of that size. The quirky rapid-fire development cycle and snap decision-making that's kept DNF from being released also resulted in some of the most incredible 3d games of the 3drealms era.
On a couple occasions, I've bought a PDA, imagining It'd be great -- Gaming, music, applications, and it integrated with my phone (and gps too).
It's never been very good. Battery life was greatly reduced compared to dedicated units. The interface for gaming and music was horrible compared to a dedicated unit. GPS routing and mapping was a joke.
The PDA/Phone combination makes sense because the usage patterns tend to be similar. Most people only flip open their PDA for 2-3 seconds to do something or take a note. This is comparable to usage patterns for a phone. By contrast, an MP3 player or a video game console are on all the time.
But I'm an old fogey in this regard. My phone doesn't have a camera. It doesn't have the Internet. It doesn't have special ringtones. It doesn't have a touchscreen. It doesn't have applications. It makes phone calls and lasts weeks without a charge. My iPod will last a full 24 hours playing music. My DS will last hours and hours. Combining them all, my phone, mp3 player, and DS would all be dead all the time.
Casual gaming is a perfect example of a market doomed to be taken over by free and open source software. An A-list game might have excessive barriers to entry, but a casual game is often equivalent to a single puzzle in an adventure game. The OSS crowd has shown they're very good at solving such simple problems.
They ran up 40 billion in debt this year. Incidentally, their budget includes 40 billion dollars in tax cuts and stimulus.
Destroying a balanced budget to follow a Keynesian nightmare is child-like and ignorant. If the buffoons had a brain cell in their collective heads, they'd see the value in maintaining a balanced budget, like we'd had for over a decade before those buffoons showed up..
You guys are about to learn what I learned 10 years ago: Discrete devices work best. A dedicated gaming platform will have better performance, better form factor, and better battery life than a device that's a million things and also a gaming platform. A dedicated music device will have better form factor and better battery life than a device that's a million things and also a music device. A dedicated phone will have better form factor and better battery life than something that's a million things and a phone.
And you know what? When my DS is dead, I'll still be able to call a taxi, and I'll still have 11 hours of music left on my iPod.
I think an iPhone app would be extremely hard to sell in 1999.
Not just money, people. Imagine if the huge number of engineers, scientists, and programmers who worked on creating the latest death machine had worked on something else.
Yes, economic suicide, we get it.
Suddenly, Canada's 50% of gdp looks positively cheery.
At rates we were going before the child-like and ignorant Conservatives decided to follow the Americans into the pit of despair and debt, it was going to take only 50 years to pay off the debt at current rates(before accounting for inflation).
If you look at the same idea from a conservative and a liberal and come to the same conclusion, odds are you're open-minded to the point that you consider all arguments based on their merits rather than their source.
The problem is obvious, and you were so busy flailing about with your ad hominem attacks that you missed it.
Public schools aren't very good, private schools tend to be (at least percieved as) better.
If the Federal government uses tax money to start dictating to private schools just as they dictate to (not very good) public schools, then it's only logical that the private schools will stop being better.
It's ok to tolerate a well formulated idea. It's not ok to tolerate a poorly forumulated idea.
Attack an idea based on either factually incorrect information(children need to be taught not all sources are created equal)
Attack an idea that is logically unsound(children need to be taught that not all arguments can be made)
Attack a backwards rationalization of an emotional position(children need to be taught that if your idea is wrong you have to change it, so you can't get too emotionally invested)
The last one is very important. People these days seem to think scientific thought requires choosing your political preference for an outcome first, searching for any sort of information that you can rationalize proves you right, then blindly attacking any information that proves you wrong. All children should be forced to investigate their arguments until they get used to proving their own ideas wrong. "Shit, I thought the Democrats spent more than the Republicans, but the data shows the Democrats spend much less!"