I was willing to attack the piracy problem but I'm not ready to deal with the used book question. For now I'm willing to accept the notion that a fertile used book business supports the new book business because it makes it easier for people to get some of their money back when they're done with the book.
But what you say makes no sense. Allow me to explain.
12 years ago when I was a freshman in college, I bought more of my books new because the used textbook market sucked. I remember selling my first year of books to a used book buyer for twenty three bucks (such a pittance). After that, I never sold books again unless I was selling directly to another student; the middle-man ruined textbook sales.
Today, you have places like Ebay and Amazon Marketplace making it very easy for ANYONE to sell direct and get top-dollar for their books, so people are a lot more likely to sell them. Suddenly that used book market that was artificially limited by middlemen is now thriving, and you get less new sales as a result.
If you no-longer have to go out of your way to find used books, and you no-longer get pennies on the dollar for your book sales, you can see how the used market today would be insular and quite self-perpetuating. One thing is for certain: today, a healthy used book market is not going to help you sell new copies.
I don't mind text ads, and static graphical banners i can tolerate..
On the other hand i don't like flash ads, and absolutely detest ads with sound (they interfere with whatever else i might be listening to), any kind of popups are also incredibly annoying.
So do what I do, and just run Flashblock (I run nothing else). Now the pages you visit can make SOME ad revenues without driving you insane, plus you get the security of no flash hijacking. And if you decide you want to see the content, you click on the button (or add the site to the whitelist).
I consider Flashblock to be the ultimate compromise, because it's one that advertisers and I can definitely live with. And since I like my web free as in beer, I'm willing to do what I can...within reason.
In addition, a quick guide to understanding IMDB ratings:
If it has been directed by Quentin Tarantino, it is automatically gold (7.0 or higher), even if it sucks.
If it has been so much as TOUCHED by Alfred Hitchcock, it is automatically gold encrusted with diamonds, even if it sucks.
If Clint Eastwood has so much as BREATHED on a project, it already has a greater collective worth than the wealth of all nations on earth...even if it sucks.
Yeah, well it hasn't stopped software bloat, because (thanks to Moore's law) the extra bits don't cost you extra nor weigh any more.
Really folks, software bloat predates Windows (you mean Macintosh requires 128k of RAM??? WTF!), and will continue even after Windows is gone (just look at Ubuntu, it CRAVES 512MB of ram).
Absolutely. Until I discovered that you could use the six lists as relatively unlimited variable space, my early games on my TI-82 were limited to 27 variables (A-Z + theta) and 37 goto labels.
Once I pushed the boundaries of memory it forced me to use proper looping and drop the goto statements. I discovered this because, as my projects got larger and I mixed goto with loops, my programs kept running out of memory. This is because TI-OS creates memory tags every time you enter a control path (and remove them when you exit), and using goto to exit a control path means those tags remain hanging in memory.
My greatest creation was a 2-player scorched earth clone, I was really proud of that one. I never could get multiplayer over the link working, as it was just too slow.
You don't like Powers? It's my favorite Irish whiskey that's easily available here. It's got a spicy flavor that most of the other smoother varieties can't match.
But then again, everyone has their preferences. I mean, some people actually LIKE Scotch, if you can believe that:)
The sad thing is, by the time these long-term total conversions are done, the hype has moved on, and the engine is usually so outdated that hardly anyone cares. Black Mesa Source does have an out in this case, since the Source engine is constantly receiving updates, but even with this the result will be outdated before it is released.
I was excited about Black Mesa Source for a couple years after the release of HL2, but now that SIX years have passed, I just don't care anymore. Neither does anyone else, if you consider that yours was the only post on the subject.
No, that's not a good solution because monitors don't typically have high-performance scaling processors. In fact, scaling to 2560x1600 was, until recently, impossible to do cost-effectively, so 30" monitors only accepted native resolution input.
The best solution is to build hqx into emulators, which is already happening:
FCE Ultra, SNES9x, ZSNES, Gens - this is just a short list.
In addition, there's nothing all that wrong with AMD's latest processors. Shanghai is clocked very fast, and has improved single-threaded IPC decently over Barcelona, and dramatically over the Athlon 64. It almost keeps pace with Core 2 Quad processors, and that's a hell of an improvement.
Sure, you might call it "too little too late" because of Intel's i7, but think about it this way: i7 is a very expensive platform to buy into, with a premium on processors and motherboards. For some applications this premium is well-justified, but for the average user who occasionally watches videos or plays a game, Shanghai is just as good for half the price.
I admit that AMD is screwed on the server arena - anything I/O-bound just loves the i7's triple-channel memory and SMT threads. But in the consumer space, AMD still has a decent product to sell, so they're gonna do whatever it takes to market to budget computer users/enthusiasts.
The movie was fairly close to the book, but the fact is THE BOOK alone doesn't make for a good movie. A simple view: the storyline is some strange combination of a drama (fucked-up in the head people) bridging multiple generations with a limited amount of brutal action. It's harder to reconcile the two different halves in a movie, because people expect one or the other.
I'm really not surprised nobody went to see it, the storyline is too complicated to bring in the crowds.
Sure, and I use an even more elegant mod here that allows me to bypass the problem entirely, by upping attributes automatically when skills go up. Thus, levels mean absolutely nothing, except for level requirements for quests. Or, you can choose from several different solutions, as it is quite flexible.
Anyway, Fallout 3 has the same flexibility to be modded, and has exactly what you're looking for here. The mod linked reduces your skill points to 1 per INT, which means you can challenge yourself by adding more or less INT to your character at creation time. But even if you max-out INT, you'll still earn less than in the standard game.
I'm sure you can find a mod that similarly limits perks.
You missed the most important distinction between Oblivion and Fallout 3.
LEVELING-UP IN OBLIVION:
1. Decide which THREE attributes I want to level-up this time around.
2. For each attribute, analyze the THREE skills attached to it. Increases in your group of skills translates directly to an increase in the parent attribute when you level-up. The best-possible level-up for your attribute involves getting 10 points of skill-group increases.
3. Unfortunately, level-ups are driven by your "major skills," a small subset of all your skills. You get a level-up once you increase any of your "major skills" by a sum total of 10 points. You can get into situations where the attributes you want to level have too many attached skills that are also "major skills." Do the math in this situation: you can't get a good level for two different attributes at-once if the child skills are all "major skills" - you need 10 points per-group (20 total) to get the best level-up for each attribute, but you can only increase your major skills by 10 points before triggering a level-up. This means you really have to custom-build a character in order to get "major skill" combinations that are compatible with each other for leveling, to save you tearing your hair-out.
4. (No, we're not done yet!) While leveling one of your three selected attributes, god help you if you accidentally raise a skill belonging in an unrelated attribute - since you can only raise three attributes when you gain a level, any additional skill increases you get for other attributes are thrown-away when you level-up. You still get the skill increases, but your attributes do not increase. Since attributes determine all sorts of important things (like say, your magic, hitpoints, etc.), you don't benefit when the skills increase and your attributes don't.
LEVELING-UP IN FALLOUT 3
1. Get experience. When you level, pick the skills you want to increase, and pick your perk (if applicable).
I was amazed when I discovered just how much Fallout 3's leveling system was like Fallout 2. Sure, the stats and their distribution may be different, but Fallout 3 leveling is NOTHING LIKE Oblivion. And for that, I am ETERNALLY HAPPY.
If I were Nintendo, I would have saved this for the next-generation console they will have to release in 2-3 years. Everyone knows peripherals don't sell, especially ones that don't add much to a game.
As it is, it makes the already heavy Wiimote downright clunky.
Yeah, brutal, gritty graphics just don't work on something with such low resolution, and poor 3D rendering (15-bit color, no filtering, no AA, just 2048 triangles per-frame) means the low-resolution looks even worse.
This is the real reason they only do cartoony games on the DS.
I can't wait for a real upgrade to the DS graphics hardware.
A) Downloading music and movies and games for free actually makes people more likely to buy them, not less - my movie collection was tiny back when I just had to watch whatever was on TV or the cinema. A couple of months ago I had to buy a new set of shelves to keep my new DVDs on.
Yup, and it goes deeper than that, because pirates are also an excellent source of word-of-mouth advertising. Here' my personal example:
My roommate downloads tons of stuff off of torrent sites. Unfortunately, he is currently unemployed (thanks economy), but when he was employed, he paid for retail copies of movies/series he liked (has a whole wall of them). He still downloads movies and series, and anything good he passes to his friends.
Now, I don't have time to go scouring torrent sites all that often, so for me it's hard to find any movies or series that aren't mainstream. So when my roommate makes a suggestion and hands me a disc, I take a look at it. I've purchased several of these "suggestions" over time.
The most recent suggestion that piqued my interest? He realized I was a boxing fan and showed me "Hajime No Ippo," a series that ran almost six years ago. He spotted it on torrent sites, liked it, and then got me hooked after just a few episodes. Now, this series isn't very mainstream; I can tell because NONE of my hardcore anime friends ever mentioned it in the last half-decade. So, there's no way I would have found out about this without the help of torrent sites and word-of-mouth.
I'm purchasing the entire series as we speak ($160), and I will be following that up with the new seasons (if they are as-good as the original). I'd call that a complete win for the publisher. Sure, they won't be getting my roommate's money, but he really has none to give; what he does offer is free word-of-mouth targeted advertising, the kind that marketing departments would kill for.
Florida is a hurricane-prone area, and the houses aren't built to-code. Thus, every few years a hurricane comes along and blows roofs off, making more work (and more money) for the contractors. If the original builder's code violations aren't caught, it's a net-win for everyone except the homeowner and insurance company.
Florida offers a double-edged sword, as the code is poor to begin with, and is almost always not followed. Corrupt building inspectors allow this sort of crap to continue unabated. Just take a look at this damaging report from 1998.
A highlight:
Alex Major was the owner of a frame house in Country Walk, a development of more than 1,100 homes in unincorporated Dade County. Country Walk gained notoriety because virtually every building there was destroyed or damaged during Andrew due to inferior construction, and later property owners won a class-action suit against the developer. "Devastation was amazing--some houses were totally flattened," said Major, who won a separate lawsuit against the developer. "There were 52 code violations in my house, most of them in the roof." Major's roof gables had not been tightly attached to the frame walls, which had not been tied down to the slab. So when the roof gable was blown off, some of the walls collapsed. Fortunately, Major and his family were not at home during Andrew.
So now, they want to put panels costing tens of thousands of dollars on said crappy roof? You'd have to be nuts to agree to such a stupid idea. But they're already crazy in Florida, as this whole code-violation situation is accepted as-normal, so I'm sure you'll find some takers.
I remember running several games on Windows 2000 that were marked-as Windows XP ONLY. One that stands-out was Battlefield 2: when I loaded the game disc, it popped-up a warning that Windows 2000 was unsupported, and proceeded to install anyway. It worked fine.
The reality is, some companies may even do cursory testing on these unsupported platforms; the "unsupported" mantra means they don't have to do thorough testing, and they don't have to handle support calls.
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I was willing to attack the piracy problem but I'm not ready to deal with the used book question. For now I'm willing to accept the notion that a fertile used book business supports the new book business because it makes it easier for people to get some of their money back when they're done with the book.
But what you say makes no sense. Allow me to explain.
12 years ago when I was a freshman in college, I bought more of my books new because the used textbook market sucked. I remember selling my first year of books to a used book buyer for twenty three bucks (such a pittance). After that, I never sold books again unless I was selling directly to another student; the middle-man ruined textbook sales.
Today, you have places like Ebay and Amazon Marketplace making it very easy for ANYONE to sell direct and get top-dollar for their books, so people are a lot more likely to sell them. Suddenly that used book market that was artificially limited by middlemen is now thriving, and you get less new sales as a result.
If you no-longer have to go out of your way to find used books, and you no-longer get pennies on the dollar for your book sales, you can see how the used market today would be insular and quite self-perpetuating. One thing is for certain: today, a healthy used book market is not going to help you sell new copies.
Well, in IV time stopped as soon as you entered a menu. I'm not sure if this carries-over in the later games.
I don't mind text ads, and static graphical banners i can tolerate..
On the other hand i don't like flash ads, and absolutely detest ads with sound (they interfere with whatever else i might be listening to), any kind of popups are also incredibly annoying.
So do what I do, and just run Flashblock (I run nothing else). Now the pages you visit can make SOME ad revenues without driving you insane, plus you get the security of no flash hijacking. And if you decide you want to see the content, you click on the button (or add the site to the whitelist).
I consider Flashblock to be the ultimate compromise, because it's one that advertisers and I can definitely live with. And since I like my web free as in beer, I'm willing to do what I can...within reason.
In addition, a quick guide to understanding IMDB ratings:
If it has been directed by Quentin Tarantino, it is automatically gold (7.0 or higher), even if it sucks.
If it has been so much as TOUCHED by Alfred Hitchcock, it is automatically gold encrusted with diamonds, even if it sucks.
If Clint Eastwood has so much as BREATHED on a project, it already has a greater collective worth than the wealth of all nations on earth...even if it sucks.
For your average Slashdotter, you don't know how true this statement is :)
The world needs moar fucks.
For a new PC, yes. A ULV-Core2Duo @ 600-800MHz is going to run (TWICE) as fast as a 1.6Atom. Getting DIMMs in 1GB increments is dirt cheap.
FTFY
(You said -Duo-, not single core)
Yeah, well it hasn't stopped software bloat, because (thanks to Moore's law) the extra bits don't cost you extra nor weigh any more.
Really folks, software bloat predates Windows (you mean Macintosh requires 128k of RAM??? WTF!), and will continue even after Windows is gone (just look at Ubuntu, it CRAVES 512MB of ram).
Absolutely. Anyone who's seen Hackers knows that Angelina's current rack is high-impact plastic (see bottom picture).
Limitation breeds creativity, perhaps?
Absolutely. Until I discovered that you could use the six lists as relatively unlimited variable space, my early games on my TI-82 were limited to 27 variables (A-Z + theta) and 37 goto labels.
Once I pushed the boundaries of memory it forced me to use proper looping and drop the goto statements. I discovered this because, as my projects got larger and I mixed goto with loops, my programs kept running out of memory. This is because TI-OS creates memory tags every time you enter a control path (and remove them when you exit), and using goto to exit a control path means those tags remain hanging in memory.
My greatest creation was a 2-player scorched earth clone, I was really proud of that one. I never could get multiplayer over the link working, as it was just too slow.
You don't like Powers? It's my favorite Irish whiskey that's easily available here. It's got a spicy flavor that most of the other smoother varieties can't match.
But then again, everyone has their preferences. I mean, some people actually LIKE Scotch, if you can believe that :)
They already have this, it's called Porn Hub.
Free streaming low-def video. Pay-per download for high-quality content.
Exactly what I was thinking.
The sad thing is, by the time these long-term total conversions are done, the hype has moved on, and the engine is usually so outdated that hardly anyone cares. Black Mesa Source does have an out in this case, since the Source engine is constantly receiving updates, but even with this the result will be outdated before it is released.
I was excited about Black Mesa Source for a couple years after the release of HL2, but now that SIX years have passed, I just don't care anymore. Neither does anyone else, if you consider that yours was the only post on the subject.
No, that's not a good solution because monitors don't typically have high-performance scaling processors. In fact, scaling to 2560x1600 was, until recently, impossible to do cost-effectively, so 30" monitors only accepted native resolution input.
The best solution is to build hqx into emulators, which is already happening:
FCE Ultra, SNES9x, ZSNES, Gens - this is just a short list.
It's pathetic that Lionhead isn't going to release Fable II for PC. I really enjoyed Fable + expansion.
But did they fix the exploit in Quake 3 where players with higher frame rates jumped longer? It's a known bug in the physics engine.
In addition, there's nothing all that wrong with AMD's latest processors. Shanghai is clocked very fast, and has improved single-threaded IPC decently over Barcelona, and dramatically over the Athlon 64. It almost keeps pace with Core 2 Quad processors, and that's a hell of an improvement.
Sure, you might call it "too little too late" because of Intel's i7, but think about it this way: i7 is a very expensive platform to buy into, with a premium on processors and motherboards. For some applications this premium is well-justified, but for the average user who occasionally watches videos or plays a game, Shanghai is just as good for half the price.
I admit that AMD is screwed on the server arena - anything I/O-bound just loves the i7's triple-channel memory and SMT threads. But in the consumer space, AMD still has a decent product to sell, so they're gonna do whatever it takes to market to budget computer users/enthusiasts.
The movie was fairly close to the book, but the fact is THE BOOK alone doesn't make for a good movie. A simple view: the storyline is some strange combination of a drama (fucked-up in the head people) bridging multiple generations with a limited amount of brutal action. It's harder to reconcile the two different halves in a movie, because people expect one or the other.
I'm really not surprised nobody went to see it, the storyline is too complicated to bring in the crowds.
Sure, and I use an even more elegant mod here that allows me to bypass the problem entirely, by upping attributes automatically when skills go up. Thus, levels mean absolutely nothing, except for level requirements for quests. Or, you can choose from several different solutions, as it is quite flexible.
Anyway, Fallout 3 has the same flexibility to be modded, and has exactly what you're looking for here. The mod linked reduces your skill points to 1 per INT, which means you can challenge yourself by adding more or less INT to your character at creation time. But even if you max-out INT, you'll still earn less than in the standard game.
I'm sure you can find a mod that similarly limits perks.
You missed the most important distinction between Oblivion and Fallout 3.
LEVELING-UP IN OBLIVION:
1. Decide which THREE attributes I want to level-up this time around.
2. For each attribute, analyze the THREE skills attached to it. Increases in your group of skills translates directly to an increase in the parent attribute when you level-up. The best-possible level-up for your attribute involves getting 10 points of skill-group increases.
3. Unfortunately, level-ups are driven by your "major skills," a small subset of all your skills. You get a level-up once you increase any of your "major skills" by a sum total of 10 points. You can get into situations where the attributes you want to level have too many attached skills that are also "major skills." Do the math in this situation: you can't get a good level for two different attributes at-once if the child skills are all "major skills" - you need 10 points per-group (20 total) to get the best level-up for each attribute, but you can only increase your major skills by 10 points before triggering a level-up. This means you really have to custom-build a character in order to get "major skill" combinations that are compatible with each other for leveling, to save you tearing your hair-out.
4. (No, we're not done yet!) While leveling one of your three selected attributes, god help you if you accidentally raise a skill belonging in an unrelated attribute - since you can only raise three attributes when you gain a level, any additional skill increases you get for other attributes are thrown-away when you level-up. You still get the skill increases, but your attributes do not increase. Since attributes determine all sorts of important things (like say, your magic, hitpoints, etc.), you don't benefit when the skills increase and your attributes don't.
LEVELING-UP IN FALLOUT 3
1. Get experience. When you level, pick the skills you want to increase, and pick your perk (if applicable).
I was amazed when I discovered just how much Fallout 3's leveling system was like Fallout 2. Sure, the stats and their distribution may be different, but Fallout 3 leveling is NOTHING LIKE Oblivion. And for that, I am ETERNALLY HAPPY.
If I were Nintendo, I would have saved this for the next-generation console they will have to release in 2-3 years. Everyone knows peripherals don't sell, especially ones that don't add much to a game.
As it is, it makes the already heavy Wiimote downright clunky.
Yeah, brutal, gritty graphics just don't work on something with such low resolution, and poor 3D rendering (15-bit color, no filtering, no AA, just 2048 triangles per-frame) means the low-resolution looks even worse.
This is the real reason they only do cartoony games on the DS.
I can't wait for a real upgrade to the DS graphics hardware.
A) Downloading music and movies and games for free actually makes people more likely to buy them, not less - my movie collection was tiny back when I just had to watch whatever was on TV or the cinema. A couple of months ago I had to buy a new set of shelves to keep my new DVDs on.
Yup, and it goes deeper than that, because pirates are also an excellent source of word-of-mouth advertising. Here' my personal example:
My roommate downloads tons of stuff off of torrent sites. Unfortunately, he is currently unemployed (thanks economy), but when he was employed, he paid for retail copies of movies/series he liked (has a whole wall of them). He still downloads movies and series, and anything good he passes to his friends.
Now, I don't have time to go scouring torrent sites all that often, so for me it's hard to find any movies or series that aren't mainstream. So when my roommate makes a suggestion and hands me a disc, I take a look at it. I've purchased several of these "suggestions" over time.
The most recent suggestion that piqued my interest? He realized I was a boxing fan and showed me "Hajime No Ippo," a series that ran almost six years ago. He spotted it on torrent sites, liked it, and then got me hooked after just a few episodes. Now, this series isn't very mainstream; I can tell because NONE of my hardcore anime friends ever mentioned it in the last half-decade. So, there's no way I would have found out about this without the help of torrent sites and word-of-mouth.
I'm purchasing the entire series as we speak ($160), and I will be following that up with the new seasons (if they are as-good as the original). I'd call that a complete win for the publisher. Sure, they won't be getting my roommate's money, but he really has none to give; what he does offer is free word-of-mouth targeted advertising, the kind that marketing departments would kill for.
Florida is a hurricane-prone area, and the houses aren't built to-code. Thus, every few years a hurricane comes along and blows roofs off, making more work (and more money) for the contractors. If the original builder's code violations aren't caught, it's a net-win for everyone except the homeowner and insurance company.
Florida offers a double-edged sword, as the code is poor to begin with, and is almost always not followed. Corrupt building inspectors allow this sort of crap to continue unabated. Just take a look at this damaging report from 1998.
A highlight:
So now, they want to put panels costing tens of thousands of dollars on said crappy roof? You'd have to be nuts to agree to such a stupid idea. But they're already crazy in Florida, as this whole code-violation situation is accepted as-normal, so I'm sure you'll find some takers.
What I did was I took nature's most perfect killing machine and needlessly turned it into a space station.
I remember running several games on Windows 2000 that were marked-as Windows XP ONLY. One that stands-out was Battlefield 2: when I loaded the game disc, it popped-up a warning that Windows 2000 was unsupported, and proceeded to install anyway. It worked fine.
The reality is, some companies may even do cursory testing on these unsupported platforms; the "unsupported" mantra means they don't have to do thorough testing, and they don't have to handle support calls.