I'd guess the actual deal is more like, "You're the ones who get to sell the game guides." Thottbot, Goblin's Workshop, and WoWWiki are all free, and still online. And they're GOOD. I suspect that Blizzard doesn't like these websites, but they're still operational, though they happen to contain a ton of copyrighted text. There's just something about charging money for services such as these that gets a lawyer's bloodlust up.
Another possibility is that they just have a bunch of noob lawyers, paralegals and legal secretaries sitting around scouring EBay for anything WoW related, gold or guides or what have you. If they find something, they mechanically send a take-down notice. They probably send out hundreds of these a day.
It seems to my layman's eye that trademark cases fall on a sort of continuum, with blatent infringement on one side (e.g., I stick an Apple logo on cheap PCs and sell them under the false pretense that they are Apples, cackling all the way to the bank), non-infringement on the other, and a wide gray area in between.
Precisely proof that Apple Computer has diluted the trademark of Apple Corps to the extent that they have illegally substituted their brand for that of the original owners.
It seems to me that this is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, with hoc being the success and popularization of Apple Computers. It strikes me, as a young man of 22, that somebody my age is just as likely to enjoy the Beetles as to be pretty damn ignorant of them. For example, my parents dislike the Beetles. My formative years were colored to a great extent by Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, AC/DC, and The Clash. Even now, I don't mind the Beetles, but I don't particularly like them. The Yellow Submarine movie was entertaining. However, most of their music strikes me as either insipid or self-indulgently experimental, and their personal lives - with a hip fascination with soft spirituality, yoga and anything eastern - disgust me as the jackass hipsters of today, who think sitting around coffee shops drinking Yerba Matte Lattes makes them more enlightened than everyone else. And if you're a hip-hop fan, god, you're probably likely to have no interest in or particular knowledge of the Beetles whatsoever.
And if for some reason I was possessed to go out and buy a few Beetles albums, I don't think I'd find the Apple label anywhere. I mean, I'm looking on Amazon right now and I can't find Apple Corps on any of their albums which were, according to this wikipedia article in another tab, released under that label. Everything's under Capitol as far as I can tell. Maybe it's different in the UK, maybe not.
Apple Corps has not fallen into obscurity because Apple Computer is on the ascendant, but rather because they are no longer relevent. For example, do you know who Beethoven's patron was, or Dante's? If you lack this knowledge, does it impede your enjoyment of their works? The 60's are over, hippies are old, and if young people care at all about the Beetles, they are quite unlikely to have read a history book about them, which is about the only place you'd find anything related to that antedilivian label, which now amounts to an historical footnote of no particular interest. Trademarks are 'use it or lose it,' and they stopped using it.
It strikes me, just now, that this is because everyone in the Federation is (effectively) super-affluent and rich.
"Oh, hole in the wall of my lavish one-bedroom luxury apartment with a starside view and no discernable toilet, make me a perfect filet mignon dinner with a cup of tea."
"Oh ship's psychologist with attractive boobies, listen to my problems for a couple of hours."
"What ever did people do before they had machines that would wash, press, and delint their uniforms, and make the as impervious to wrinkles as duranium? They had servents and slaves! Hahaha!"
"Dr. Crusher, can I have a hypospray for my chronic fatigue syndrome?" (universal health insurance)
Generally speaking, it's not just different artistic preference which gives rise to the 'ornamented' structures of a building, but also necessity. Yeah, there's pedaments and sculptures and gargoyles and things. That stuff is nonfunctional, and they wanted it for basically the same reason we put facades on buildings: to look pretty. But it's too easy, I think, to look at all of that stuff, think it's pretty, and then start making buildings like an ass without a few art history & architecture courses.
Let's take Notre Dame de Paris, for example. To the modern eye, flying buttresses look fanciful and romantic. In fact, those are necessary to support the weight of the building, since it was built way, way before people figured out skeleton & skin construction. By the time late gothic cathedrals was built, the masons had figured out how to make them look passably attractive, but they still served a vital structural purpose. Without them, the walls would have to be really thick like those of a Romanesque building, and the windows wouldn't be nearly as big, nor the building as tall.
Those pointed windows, too, are sort of an architectural necessity. If all you have is a bunch of rocks, how do you fit them together in such a way that you can build the top of a window? The stones can only be so big, because you're basically using manpower and maybe a few pulleys to move them. They had to build some temporary wooden supports, lay stones in an arc, and then put a keystone in the top, whereupon the window stands, the stones held together by their own weight. They used to use a similar method for domes, until Brunelleschi figured out how to build it in such a way that it supported itself as it was being constructed.
(I can go on about this ad nauseum, by the way; I *really* enjoyed art history class)
Decadence would be if you took a modern building and, in addition to a facade (which is no big deal, really) put big old flying buttresses and engaged columns and pillars on it for the hell of it. Not only is it silly, it's unsafe. One architect a civil engineer friend of mine talked about called for huge, square marble slabs to be on the side of the building, freestanding on one edge. Not only it silly and totally nonfunctional, but it might kill somebody if there's an earthquake.
Still, the price of a PS2 isn't nearly what I expected it to be - though I do see the original XBox for about $100. I think I saw the PS2 at Best Buy last month for like 179 and scoffed loudly enough for the entire store to hear, but now I see it on Amazon for 149. And yes, I know all of their sales associates have copulated with the Devil's rigid, icy member. I hate them too.
I'm sure I could get a well-loved console for next to nothing, but I don't want that.
The Revolution doesn't have to be that cheap in order to grab some market share. Yeah, the 360's prices are inflated because of production shortfalls, but I don't think it's gonna get that low that quickly. Besides, these days people spend $300-400 on MP3 players - and almost everyone I know has one.
Agreed. And at least I'm not getting shot in the head from a half-mile away through a cement wall by some 11 year-old script kiddie before I even have the opportunity to shoot at someone, and then I have to move around as a ghost for five minutes waiting for the next match *coughcounterstrikecough*.
I had in mind ThinkSecret, well in advance of the event. Anyway, I was talking less about what informed things people disseminated (leaked), and what they wrote because they were influenced by their own desires. Pure speculation, you see. Because if a person emotionally wants something to be true, they can come up with any number of justifications for that opinion that look like logic.
Your remarks remind me of when the girls on my co-ed dorm floor posted a vitriolic tyrade on how disgusting men are in the bathroom, anonymously of course. "There was urine on the seat - it must've been a man! Because men are the only ones who produce urine! Yeah!" In response to that, I posted an even longer note with my signature on it as big as John Hancock's, and put copies of The Lady's Dressing Room by Swift, which in my case counted as proof that women are, in fact, far more disgusting in the bathroom than men. Powders, chemicals, hair, etc.
You're as cowardly and platitudinous as they. "DRM bad! System not under my control!" You don't understand how it isn't under your control, if it's behind a firewall and has Linux installed in it. What has to happen? Does Steve Jobs have to beam down to your house and modulate his RDF to a particular frequency, activating the secret Trust chip and turning your computer's integrated Bluetooth system into a weapon to fry your balls?
Everybody expected them to be releasing an Intel iBook. They did not expect a Mac Mini, and then a contingent of people are fervently bitching that it doesn't have a Radeon X1600 on top of that.
The iBook sells a lot of units to college students. Inbound freshmen get the acceptence letters in like April-May for public universities. We'll see the launch of the MacBook Regular at a time that capitalizes on that. Just like we'll see a MacBook Pro that allows the video professionals to do editing while sipping a latte at Starbucks when the software to do this is actually available: the end of the year.
See, this is the problem: people are thinking, "Wow, this is what I've got a big boner for," and thinking that's what Apple's going to do, rather than Apple doing what will maximize Apple's profits and hit the target the best. "The new MBP doesn't have a firewire 800 or a super-fast smartcard interface!" they say. Yeah, of course. Because it's a programmer's notebook. Programmers have no use for firewire 800, and it would only drive up costs and cause delays.
Well, you've got to learn from the article submitters and moderates and only read the first paragraph of every submission, and then see how you can best angle that to stir up discontent between Mac using/.ers and Mac-hating/.ers.
Seriously, that summary is absurd. It might as well have read, "Apple Not As Cool As It Thinks, Study Shows," with bar graphs representing how cool Apple thinks it is (10), how cool it actually is (6), and how cool Steve Jobs thinks Apple is (und).
I've heard a lot of good things about the Nostromo SpeedPad n52. Seems like a great idea, because I often find that I play with one hand, and I have a hard time reaching the F7 key to trigger Bloodrage while trying to out-manuever a rogue in AV. However, apparently it's not compatible with Intel Macs, so no go yet.
The gamepad is a brain damaged interface for anything except Soul Calibur, Final Fantasy and possibly Mario Tennis. Its pestulence is part of what made Deus Ex 2 so horrible - they replaced a pretty decent drag & drop system with a laughably absurd, static screen where you had about 5 inventory slots total. However, if that had been the only thing wrong with DX2, it would've still been a fine game. The only thing more stupid than porting a PC FPS to console is porting a console FPS to the PC.
I'd characterize myself as the kind of person GP is talking about. However, I wouldn't characterize what I thrive on as stress, but focus and structure. Nothing makes me happier in the morning than knowing that I can go to work and focus intensely on something all day long, and go home with a sense of accomplishment that I finished it on time. When I have to multitask or I'm working on several non-essential projects at once, I feel dithery and lazy.
I say this is different from stress because when I was in college, I had several friends - we were all sort of higher-achieving humanities students - who would get very stressed. They would do things like stop cleaning their apartments, eat nothing but potato chips for a week, sleep two hours a night, and generally fall apart as human beings around finals time.
IANAL, but my close friend is a legal secretary and I have two friends in law school, and thought about applying until I heard about this:
Firms get paid by the man-hour. Most associates (non-partner lawyers) get a fixed salary, but are expected to pull a certain number of 'billable hours' per year. The number the firm sets down is typically 2000-2200. This is ideally a 40-hour work week, but it's usually 60 since it's hard to put in 8 nonstop hours, especially if you're working on multiple cases. Clients don't want to pay for the walk you took to clear your head, and associates are supposed to record their time with a granularity of 6 minutes. So really, an associate could ask for nothing better than an expansively time-consuming case to throw themselves wholeheartedly into.
Yeah, and history's shown us that some even evil has been done by people following the letter of the law. For example, every atrocity committed in Germany circa 1939-1945 was entirely legal. Everybody was "just following orders."
I'm not denying that Southern juries have been corrupt and have misapplied the law to African-Americans. However, if we stripped the right of jurors to judge the law, then it'd be even worse because you'd effectively be robbing those 12 human beings of their moral will, all the time. Tell me what is uglier: a person with laboring to get somebody off because of their demographic, or somebody forced to act as an agent of a law that they believe to be unjust. Or: Would you rather be the one to set OJ free, or imprison somebody for being homosexual?
It is pretty easy to see what a major mistake including the harddrive was in the Xbox.
Whether it's a bad business decision for MS is irrelivent to me. I really don't understand why everybody's crying a river because they got more value for their dollar and one of the richest entities on earth ran at a loss. Seriously, you console enthusiasts have the mindsets of serfs.
First, it racked up a huge portion of the billions in losses for the project that led to Microsoft having to pull the plug on the console early and scramble to rush a replacement out the door.
A four-year lifecycle is pretty good for most consumer electronics. That's about as long of an extended warrenty as you can buy, and there's a reason for that. Hell, did you not read the legislation that is going to make electronics more than five years old illegal to sell in Japan? The billions in losses are to be expected, at least initially - it's common knowledge that companies sell consoles at an initial loss and then hope to make back that money and more with third-party licensing and in-house game sales. Perhaps they would have dug a more shallow hole for themselves had they not bundled a hard drive, but larger problem is that the Xbox did not sell as well as the PS2, and you'll need more than glittering generalities and unlinked citations to convince me that they lost this round of the console wars because of a feature they included.
Second, the dual-SKU mess it created for 360 that has split the userbase and caused major problems for people with major features like backwards compatibility.
I'm not sure how you'd pull off dynamic binary translation without some kind of local mass storage. Remember, the Xbox 360 is a big-endian, 64-bit G5 derivative, and the original is a generic x86. Maybe you should blame this on IBM's snake oil instead of the spinning magnetic media boogeyman, because if they'd gone with a dual-core AMD server chip or something, backwards compatibility would've been absolutely trivial. A 2GB flash dongle bundled with every box probably would've sufficed for local storage.
Finally, online content distribution is the future. Period. I don't care how big a hardon you get when you go into Best Buy: there's a reason Comcast is offering movies for free and giving away DVRs. The major telcos are talking about a teired internet and laying big, fat pipes into most American homes for the same reason. Microsoft is working towards delivering applications online. Read the writing on the wall, people.
If you can't understand just how fucking stupid it is to include a harddrive in a console, and the myriad problems doing so creates, you have absolutely no business participating in a discussion on consoles.
If you can't post a response without saying fuck, and can't say fuck without posting as Anonymous Coward, I won't bother feeding you, troll.
There is no question that any next gen system needs to have some type of local mass storage. The only question is how big it needs to be. The 360's 20GB HD is already looking way too small.
Hard drives are so cheap nowadays I don't see why they don't bundle them with 250GB drives. Of course, it was very smart of them to have the hard drives be user-swappable in the 360, which makes upgrades in the future a very real possibility. If they're smart, they'll start letting people download full games soon. I had a friend in college with a modded Xbox, and the ability to swap games without physically getting up was such a great feature I'm surprised it's not standard. Plus, they'd get to cut the retailer and the wholesaler out of the equation entirely.
If I had to make a bet, though, I'd say Sony's never going to allow full game downloads because their music, movie, and consumer electronics companies depend on retail distribution, and these divisions have already proven themselves a dozen times over to be stupid, tightfisted, shortsighted, penny wise and pound foolish. Microsoft as a company makes most of its cash through OEM sales and is making a strong push into online content and applications. Who do you think is going to win the 'Live' wars: Microsoft, which owes allegiance to no one and is desparately trying to get into online content, or Sony, whose seven heads are constantly bickering and is conjoined at the hip to Best Buy and Walmart?
That was really insightful. I'm just going to add some supporting evidence to your argument.
When you get paid by the month, it's in your interest to have the most control possible of the progression curve (and thus how long you get paid) - and that's why pretty much all MMOs end up with time-locked progression.
Since it's on a weekly timer and anybody who wants to run it more than once a week should probably be institutionalized, Molten Core takes about six months to farm for everything you want. In the guilds that run it regularly, you need to have some pretty awesome gear to even be considered as a recruit (+160 fire resistance for warriors and rogues). Here's a sample (I get to cut some corners because I'm an armorsmith):
2 drops from dungeon bosses
1 drop from a miniboss
3 questable items, including one that's insanely long and difficult
2 craftable items (money)
5 items which must be bought on the auction house, usually for about 100-200g a pop
So, if you roll together the items that just require time, and the items that require cold, hard cash, you get 6 items that require time only and 7 that require cold, hard cash - like, 450ish. Half of an epic mount. Damn, I'm tempted to buy gold.
Now, Molten Core is designed to gear you up for Blackwing Lair. In order to even attempt Blackwing Lair, everyone must be wearing a special cloak or they will die in one hit. And - get this - you can only make three of these cloaks per week, by killing a special dragon. 50 / 3 = 16 1/3, or about four months nonstop. And I wouldn't even attempt the next dungeon without a full set of gear from Blackwing Lair.
As an addendum to this, I'd like to point out that everybody I know in an uber raiding guilds really and truly knows what they're doing. Time is what determines your gear, but you're never getting a shot without a brain. Skill probably isn't the right word. Extensive, in-depth knowledge and the ability to follow instructions and communicate come to mind. I don't think there's any other useful definition of skill in an MMO. Johnny Rogue may do 2% more damage than Billy because he hits buttons faster, but if everybody dies because Johnny doesn't follow directions, that's when people get mad.
Thanks for not pouncing on me for drawing a blank there.
Generally speaking, I've found that like Microsoft Windows, it is often best just to plug (say) a given USB device in and see if it works. For example, I have these pretty cheap dual-analog controllers. They're fine if you just plug them in, but you're pretty much screwed if you try to use the company's outdated, buggy drivers, which in addition to being really weird and crashing your system on SP2, do not allow you to calibrate the joysticks at all. Seriously.
These same pads work fine on a Mac, too. For that matter, I think all USB input devices are pretty much using the same standard these days, with the exception of tablets. Printers are basically plug-and-play, since I'm pretty sure the print system is based on CUPS and Gimp-Print. Basically, if it prints on Linux, it prints on Mac, except without all of the horrible, gut-wrenching pains.
As for like, random PCI card, that's a bit of a minefield. I'm not sure if x pci card can just be plugged into a Mac, since I've only been using them for about a year and I've never owned a PowerMac besides, and they've changed standards no less than twice in the last year - first to PCI-X and now to PCI-Express.
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500 lbs is too generous with Microsoft. 800-1000 lbs is the more common figure ascribed to them.
Dual booting may be a good solution, but Virtual PC for Mac/Intel running Windows at near-native speeds will be a better one.
And by the way, the comment about Apple releasing a dual booting laptop themselves is nonsense.
I'd guess the actual deal is more like, "You're the ones who get to sell the game guides." Thottbot, Goblin's Workshop, and WoWWiki are all free, and still online. And they're GOOD. I suspect that Blizzard doesn't like these websites, but they're still operational, though they happen to contain a ton of copyrighted text. There's just something about charging money for services such as these that gets a lawyer's bloodlust up.
Another possibility is that they just have a bunch of noob lawyers, paralegals and legal secretaries sitting around scouring EBay for anything WoW related, gold or guides or what have you. If they find something, they mechanically send a take-down notice. They probably send out hundreds of these a day.
It seems to my layman's eye that trademark cases fall on a sort of continuum, with blatent infringement on one side (e.g., I stick an Apple logo on cheap PCs and sell them under the false pretense that they are Apples, cackling all the way to the bank), non-infringement on the other, and a wide gray area in between.
It seems to me that this is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, with hoc being the success and popularization of Apple Computers. It strikes me, as a young man of 22, that somebody my age is just as likely to enjoy the Beetles as to be pretty damn ignorant of them. For example, my parents dislike the Beetles. My formative years were colored to a great extent by Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, AC/DC, and The Clash. Even now, I don't mind the Beetles, but I don't particularly like them. The Yellow Submarine movie was entertaining. However, most of their music strikes me as either insipid or self-indulgently experimental, and their personal lives - with a hip fascination with soft spirituality, yoga and anything eastern - disgust me as the jackass hipsters of today, who think sitting around coffee shops drinking Yerba Matte Lattes makes them more enlightened than everyone else. And if you're a hip-hop fan, god, you're probably likely to have no interest in or particular knowledge of the Beetles whatsoever.
And if for some reason I was possessed to go out and buy a few Beetles albums, I don't think I'd find the Apple label anywhere. I mean, I'm looking on Amazon right now and I can't find Apple Corps on any of their albums which were, according to this wikipedia article in another tab, released under that label. Everything's under Capitol as far as I can tell. Maybe it's different in the UK, maybe not.
Apple Corps has not fallen into obscurity because Apple Computer is on the ascendant, but rather because they are no longer relevent. For example, do you know who Beethoven's patron was, or Dante's? If you lack this knowledge, does it impede your enjoyment of their works? The 60's are over, hippies are old, and if young people care at all about the Beetles, they are quite unlikely to have read a history book about them, which is about the only place you'd find anything related to that antedilivian label, which now amounts to an historical footnote of no particular interest. Trademarks are 'use it or lose it,' and they stopped using it.
It strikes me, just now, that this is because everyone in the Federation is (effectively) super-affluent and rich.
"Oh, hole in the wall of my lavish one-bedroom luxury apartment with a starside view and no discernable toilet, make me a perfect filet mignon dinner with a cup of tea."
"Oh ship's psychologist with attractive boobies, listen to my problems for a couple of hours."
"What ever did people do before they had machines that would wash, press, and delint their uniforms, and make the as impervious to wrinkles as duranium? They had servents and slaves! Hahaha!"
"Dr. Crusher, can I have a hypospray for my chronic fatigue syndrome?" (universal health insurance)
etc, etc, etc
So what you're saying... is that Ballmer is an angry Klingon? Thanks, that makes his actions make so much more sense.
Generally speaking, it's not just different artistic preference which gives rise to the 'ornamented' structures of a building, but also necessity. Yeah, there's pedaments and sculptures and gargoyles and things. That stuff is nonfunctional, and they wanted it for basically the same reason we put facades on buildings: to look pretty. But it's too easy, I think, to look at all of that stuff, think it's pretty, and then start making buildings like an ass without a few art history & architecture courses.
Let's take Notre Dame de Paris, for example. To the modern eye, flying buttresses look fanciful and romantic. In fact, those are necessary to support the weight of the building, since it was built way, way before people figured out skeleton & skin construction. By the time late gothic cathedrals was built, the masons had figured out how to make them look passably attractive, but they still served a vital structural purpose. Without them, the walls would have to be really thick like those of a Romanesque building, and the windows wouldn't be nearly as big, nor the building as tall.
Those pointed windows, too, are sort of an architectural necessity. If all you have is a bunch of rocks, how do you fit them together in such a way that you can build the top of a window? The stones can only be so big, because you're basically using manpower and maybe a few pulleys to move them. They had to build some temporary wooden supports, lay stones in an arc, and then put a keystone in the top, whereupon the window stands, the stones held together by their own weight. They used to use a similar method for domes, until Brunelleschi figured out how to build it in such a way that it supported itself as it was being constructed.
(I can go on about this ad nauseum, by the way; I *really* enjoyed art history class)
Decadence would be if you took a modern building and, in addition to a facade (which is no big deal, really) put big old flying buttresses and engaged columns and pillars on it for the hell of it. Not only is it silly, it's unsafe. One architect a civil engineer friend of mine talked about called for huge, square marble slabs to be on the side of the building, freestanding on one edge. Not only it silly and totally nonfunctional, but it might kill somebody if there's an earthquake.
Still, the price of a PS2 isn't nearly what I expected it to be - though I do see the original XBox for about $100. I think I saw the PS2 at Best Buy last month for like 179 and scoffed loudly enough for the entire store to hear, but now I see it on Amazon for 149. And yes, I know all of their sales associates have copulated with the Devil's rigid, icy member. I hate them too.
I'm sure I could get a well-loved console for next to nothing, but I don't want that.
The Revolution doesn't have to be that cheap in order to grab some market share. Yeah, the 360's prices are inflated because of production shortfalls, but I don't think it's gonna get that low that quickly. Besides, these days people spend $300-400 on MP3 players - and almost everyone I know has one.
Okay. Drop barbaric. How about they're a deeply sexist culture with widespread disregard for human life?
Agreed. And at least I'm not getting shot in the head from a half-mile away through a cement wall by some 11 year-old script kiddie before I even have the opportunity to shoot at someone, and then I have to move around as a ghost for five minutes waiting for the next match *coughcounterstrikecough*.
I had in mind ThinkSecret, well in advance of the event. Anyway, I was talking less about what informed things people disseminated (leaked), and what they wrote because they were influenced by their own desires. Pure speculation, you see. Because if a person emotionally wants something to be true, they can come up with any number of justifications for that opinion that look like logic.
Your remarks remind me of when the girls on my co-ed dorm floor posted a vitriolic tyrade on how disgusting men are in the bathroom, anonymously of course. "There was urine on the seat - it must've been a man! Because men are the only ones who produce urine! Yeah!" In response to that, I posted an even longer note with my signature on it as big as John Hancock's, and put copies of The Lady's Dressing Room by Swift, which in my case counted as proof that women are, in fact, far more disgusting in the bathroom than men. Powders, chemicals, hair, etc.
You're as cowardly and platitudinous as they. "DRM bad! System not under my control!" You don't understand how it isn't under your control, if it's behind a firewall and has Linux installed in it. What has to happen? Does Steve Jobs have to beam down to your house and modulate his RDF to a particular frequency, activating the secret Trust chip and turning your computer's integrated Bluetooth system into a weapon to fry your balls?
Everybody expected them to be releasing an Intel iBook. They did not expect a Mac Mini, and then a contingent of people are fervently bitching that it doesn't have a Radeon X1600 on top of that.
The iBook sells a lot of units to college students. Inbound freshmen get the acceptence letters in like April-May for public universities. We'll see the launch of the MacBook Regular at a time that capitalizes on that. Just like we'll see a MacBook Pro that allows the video professionals to do editing while sipping a latte at Starbucks when the software to do this is actually available: the end of the year.
See, this is the problem: people are thinking, "Wow, this is what I've got a big boner for," and thinking that's what Apple's going to do, rather than Apple doing what will maximize Apple's profits and hit the target the best. "The new MBP doesn't have a firewire 800 or a super-fast smartcard interface!" they say. Yeah, of course. Because it's a programmer's notebook. Programmers have no use for firewire 800, and it would only drive up costs and cause delays.
Well, you've got to learn from the article submitters and moderates and only read the first paragraph of every submission, and then see how you can best angle that to stir up discontent between Mac using /.ers and Mac-hating /.ers.
Seriously, that summary is absurd. It might as well have read, "Apple Not As Cool As It Thinks, Study Shows," with bar graphs representing how cool Apple thinks it is (10), how cool it actually is (6), and how cool Steve Jobs thinks Apple is (und).
I've heard a lot of good things about the Nostromo SpeedPad n52. Seems like a great idea, because I often find that I play with one hand, and I have a hard time reaching the F7 key to trigger Bloodrage while trying to out-manuever a rogue in AV. However, apparently it's not compatible with Intel Macs, so no go yet.
The gamepad is a brain damaged interface for anything except Soul Calibur, Final Fantasy and possibly Mario Tennis. Its pestulence is part of what made Deus Ex 2 so horrible - they replaced a pretty decent drag & drop system with a laughably absurd, static screen where you had about 5 inventory slots total. However, if that had been the only thing wrong with DX2, it would've still been a fine game. The only thing more stupid than porting a PC FPS to console is porting a console FPS to the PC.
Just like the Martians, living in their reservations deep underneath Mars' crust after trading all of their land away for a single bead.
I'd characterize myself as the kind of person GP is talking about. However, I wouldn't characterize what I thrive on as stress, but focus and structure. Nothing makes me happier in the morning than knowing that I can go to work and focus intensely on something all day long, and go home with a sense of accomplishment that I finished it on time. When I have to multitask or I'm working on several non-essential projects at once, I feel dithery and lazy.
I say this is different from stress because when I was in college, I had several friends - we were all sort of higher-achieving humanities students - who would get very stressed. They would do things like stop cleaning their apartments, eat nothing but potato chips for a week, sleep two hours a night, and generally fall apart as human beings around finals time.
It depends.
IANAL, but my close friend is a legal secretary and I have two friends in law school, and thought about applying until I heard about this:
Firms get paid by the man-hour. Most associates (non-partner lawyers) get a fixed salary, but are expected to pull a certain number of 'billable hours' per year. The number the firm sets down is typically 2000-2200. This is ideally a 40-hour work week, but it's usually 60 since it's hard to put in 8 nonstop hours, especially if you're working on multiple cases. Clients don't want to pay for the walk you took to clear your head, and associates are supposed to record their time with a granularity of 6 minutes. So really, an associate could ask for nothing better than an expansively time-consuming case to throw themselves wholeheartedly into.
Yeah, and history's shown us that some even evil has been done by people following the letter of the law. For example, every atrocity committed in Germany circa 1939-1945 was entirely legal. Everybody was "just following orders."
I'm not denying that Southern juries have been corrupt and have misapplied the law to African-Americans. However, if we stripped the right of jurors to judge the law, then it'd be even worse because you'd effectively be robbing those 12 human beings of their moral will, all the time. Tell me what is uglier: a person with laboring to get somebody off because of their demographic, or somebody forced to act as an agent of a law that they believe to be unjust. Or: Would you rather be the one to set OJ free, or imprison somebody for being homosexual?
Whether it's a bad business decision for MS is irrelivent to me. I really don't understand why everybody's crying a river because they got more value for their dollar and one of the richest entities on earth ran at a loss. Seriously, you console enthusiasts have the mindsets of serfs.
A four-year lifecycle is pretty good for most consumer electronics. That's about as long of an extended warrenty as you can buy, and there's a reason for that. Hell, did you not read the legislation that is going to make electronics more than five years old illegal to sell in Japan? The billions in losses are to be expected, at least initially - it's common knowledge that companies sell consoles at an initial loss and then hope to make back that money and more with third-party licensing and in-house game sales. Perhaps they would have dug a more shallow hole for themselves had they not bundled a hard drive, but larger problem is that the Xbox did not sell as well as the PS2, and you'll need more than glittering generalities and unlinked citations to convince me that they lost this round of the console wars because of a feature they included.
I'm not sure how you'd pull off dynamic binary translation without some kind of local mass storage. Remember, the Xbox 360 is a big-endian, 64-bit G5 derivative, and the original is a generic x86. Maybe you should blame this on IBM's snake oil instead of the spinning magnetic media boogeyman, because if they'd gone with a dual-core AMD server chip or something, backwards compatibility would've been absolutely trivial. A 2GB flash dongle bundled with every box probably would've sufficed for local storage.
Finally, online content distribution is the future. Period. I don't care how big a hardon you get when you go into Best Buy: there's a reason Comcast is offering movies for free and giving away DVRs. The major telcos are talking about a teired internet and laying big, fat pipes into most American homes for the same reason. Microsoft is working towards delivering applications online. Read the writing on the wall, people.
If you can't post a response without saying fuck, and can't say fuck without posting as Anonymous Coward, I won't bother feeding you, troll.
Hard drives are so cheap nowadays I don't see why they don't bundle them with 250GB drives. Of course, it was very smart of them to have the hard drives be user-swappable in the 360, which makes upgrades in the future a very real possibility. If they're smart, they'll start letting people download full games soon. I had a friend in college with a modded Xbox, and the ability to swap games without physically getting up was such a great feature I'm surprised it's not standard. Plus, they'd get to cut the retailer and the wholesaler out of the equation entirely.
If I had to make a bet, though, I'd say Sony's never going to allow full game downloads because their music, movie, and consumer electronics companies depend on retail distribution, and these divisions have already proven themselves a dozen times over to be stupid, tightfisted, shortsighted, penny wise and pound foolish. Microsoft as a company makes most of its cash through OEM sales and is making a strong push into online content and applications. Who do you think is going to win the 'Live' wars: Microsoft, which owes allegiance to no one and is desparately trying to get into online content, or Sony, whose seven heads are constantly bickering and is conjoined at the hip to Best Buy and Walmart?
That was really insightful. I'm just going to add some supporting evidence to your argument.
Since it's on a weekly timer and anybody who wants to run it more than once a week should probably be institutionalized, Molten Core takes about six months to farm for everything you want. In the guilds that run it regularly, you need to have some pretty awesome gear to even be considered as a recruit (+160 fire resistance for warriors and rogues). Here's a sample (I get to cut some corners because I'm an armorsmith):
So, if you roll together the items that just require time, and the items that require cold, hard cash, you get 6 items that require time only and 7 that require cold, hard cash - like, 450ish. Half of an epic mount. Damn, I'm tempted to buy gold.
Now, Molten Core is designed to gear you up for Blackwing Lair. In order to even attempt Blackwing Lair, everyone must be wearing a special cloak or they will die in one hit. And - get this - you can only make three of these cloaks per week, by killing a special dragon. 50 / 3 = 16 1/3, or about four months nonstop. And I wouldn't even attempt the next dungeon without a full set of gear from Blackwing Lair.
As an addendum to this, I'd like to point out that everybody I know in an uber raiding guilds really and truly knows what they're doing. Time is what determines your gear, but you're never getting a shot without a brain. Skill probably isn't the right word. Extensive, in-depth knowledge and the ability to follow instructions and communicate come to mind. I don't think there's any other useful definition of skill in an MMO. Johnny Rogue may do 2% more damage than Billy because he hits buttons faster, but if everybody dies because Johnny doesn't follow directions, that's when people get mad.
Thanks for not pouncing on me for drawing a blank there.
Generally speaking, I've found that like Microsoft Windows, it is often best just to plug (say) a given USB device in and see if it works. For example, I have these pretty cheap dual-analog controllers. They're fine if you just plug them in, but you're pretty much screwed if you try to use the company's outdated, buggy drivers, which in addition to being really weird and crashing your system on SP2, do not allow you to calibrate the joysticks at all. Seriously.
These same pads work fine on a Mac, too. For that matter, I think all USB input devices are pretty much using the same standard these days, with the exception of tablets. Printers are basically plug-and-play, since I'm pretty sure the print system is based on CUPS and Gimp-Print. Basically, if it prints on Linux, it prints on Mac, except without all of the horrible, gut-wrenching pains.
As for like, random PCI card, that's a bit of a minefield. I'm not sure if x pci card can just be plugged into a Mac, since I've only been using them for about a year and I've never owned a PowerMac besides, and they've changed standards no less than twice in the last year - first to PCI-X and now to PCI-Express.
Gift hardware? What on earth are you talking about?