FF5 was obviously the best Final Fantasy evar. And you only need one look at FFXI to see that there is an absolute worst to the series. FF5's pause menu completely changed and redefined an entire era of video games, while FFXI's boot screen was a disgrace that should have every copy burned and the ashes buried with all the remaining copies of "ET".
To a large extent, the US and Americans do, because to many countries, Dollars ARE de-facto gold. That works... until it is taken advantage of by the government. And it has been, and soon no longer will be the case.
There is not enough gold on the whole planet to cover the money now in circulation, much less the Nine Trillion dollar debt! And at one point there was. And now there isn't (if you used the original prices), why is that? Who benefits?
It's sad to see the state of affairs that make people hate/fear Ron Paul so much. Is he a perfect candidate? No, of course not! Is he more perfect than the others? This internet bot thinks so.
Tele Atlas says they will release truck-appropriate databases at some point, but until then they advise local governments to make use of a technology dating back to the Romans: road signs. Why not the Roman phalanx? That could be more effective.
There's no such thing as a "amount of years spent playing" that will predict when someone will snap and start shooting random people. So you're saying there IS such a thing as an "amount of years spent smoking" that will predict when someone will get cancer? Sorry, cancer has many input factors as well, including genetics and environment that you cited for smoking.
Music and cinema have declined in the last 10 years. This may be why (not piracy). If music and cinema didn't want their lunches stolen they should have marked there lunches and not left them in the fridge over the weekend.
In an average week of work + home computing, I see maybe two or three UAC prompts the entire time, and I'm running with UAC on.
That's three times more than are necessary.
How do you define what's necessary? Weren't we all complaining about computers getting hacked because it was too simple to do so? Any warnings I see (very few now myself) stop and make me think.
They are infrequent enough that it really means something is up that you need to pay attention to.
Valve doesn't bother supporting DirectX 10 because they can do everything it can using DirectX 9, although I understand that they have to use some card-specific extensions to do so. As for number of gamers playing Vista, I can say that no hard-core gamer will touch Vista because it lowers the framerate a couple of percentage points. (From say 60 to 58 - not a terrible amount, but enough.) I certainly don't know the exact definition of a hard-core gamer but I play quite a few games and have Vista. If you're talking about a hardcore-gamer card that can support DX10 you're talking about going from 120 fps to 116 fps so losing a couple percentage points isn't an issue.
I rather like Vista actually. My computer is more stable than under XP and I rarely get the UAC stuff anymore now that I've had it for awhile.
There should be no sympathy for those who pose as fictitious characters only to create malice and havoc in others lives, whether it's online or in real life. I'm unsure if this woman will have charges brought upon her, but it wouldn't be unreasonable, imo. The simple fact she even did this shows that she's not even mature enough to have kids. Unfortunately, she'll probably plead "insanity" and get away with it. The woman who ran the phony page read your post and felt so bad she killed herself. Police are on the way to your house now.
Anyway, one program was driving me bananas. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working properly. I dis-assembled my printout over and over again and I could not find any mistake yet the code did not work. Then I figured out that if one particular instruction was wrong (a call instead of a jump perhaps) it would account for the errant behavior, yet the instruction was correct in the printout. So I printed out another hex dump and sure enough, that instruction was wrong. It turned out that I had made a typo when typing in the hex codes and then the damned teletype made a symmetric typo converting the mistyped character back to the one I thought I had typed in, hiding my mistake. I think it was actually a perfect flaw in the yellow paper that made a "3" look like a "B". I got 11 replies to my little joke and I just wanted to say yours was the most interesting.
We looked through the code on paper, literally line by line, and just couldn't for the life of us imagine what the problem was. This may be the least effective method of debugging in existence.
Anyway, why pick on Steam for refusing to refund a game? You should be picking on every game retailer online or off. I can resell a game that doesn't work on ebay. If it's in new condition, and near release, for very near what I paid for it. It's easy to do as well because Ebay has specific categories for it.
With Steam I had no recourse, not even an exchange.
at this point, a consumer has purchased a PC, Vista, a tuner card, and a Zune, but still can't be trusted with high-def content? C'mon, if they'd purchased Vista and a Zune they'd be pretty pissed off and I wouldn't trust them either.
(Seriously, I have Vista and have been more than happy with it.)
Here is an exchange that just completed today. I purchased Company of Heores: Opposing Fronts off steam. It hung as detailed below. Never worked. I spent about three hours trying to fix it before buying a retail copy which worked immediately.
Me: 10/30/07 This game hangs at the "Preparing to launch..." from Steam. I tried verifying it, un-installing it, re-installing it, but no success. I even looked on the forums and tried a few things from there with no luck. I would like a refund for this game and for it to be removed from my account. Thanks.
Steam: 11/08/07 Hello,
Have you already gone through this FAQ?
Me: 11/08/07 Hi there. I tried reading the FAQ and the forums and spent two or three hours on it. Here's a link to the thread on your forums with the list of many people who had the same problem:
I think Steam is great for Valve Games and has worked well with older games. I would love to keep using it, but will need Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces removed and refunded.
Thanks.
Steam: 11/09/07
Hello XXXXXX,
I see many mentions of Vista in that Forum post. If you installed Steam when UAC was enabled, there is a reasonable likelihood that UAC prevent a few keys from being properly generated. Assuming that you have already attempted to disable UAC to fix the issue, please try re-installing Steam with UAC disabled. Please use the latest Steam installer: http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=getsteamnow&cc=US
You may prevent all of your game files from being lost by moving the Steamapps folder out of the steam directory before uninstalling and putting it back after re-installing.
If the issue persists, please right-click on the game and go to Properties > Local Content > Verify Game Cache, and try again.
Finally, the the following suggestion is usually used for a specifie error message, but I would be very interested to know if this affects the issue you are experiencing:
Vista Home Users
Go to: Start > Run and type in: cmd
type in the following:
net localgroup Administrators/add Local service
Restart your computer.
Vista Business & Ultimate Users
Right-click on Computer and select Manage.
Go to: Groups > Administrators > Add to group > Add > Advanced > Find Now > Local Service and click OK.
Restart your computer.
Me: 11/09/07
I already tried several things before to get it to work, including messing
about with UAC, finding the key, and verifying the local game files, etc...
I'm sorry, but as I said I purchased a physical copy a week ago and I'm not
interested in using Steam for COF:OF at this point.
Here are my choices:
1) Get a refund, continue to use Steam to purchase Valve products and other
games after reading the steampowered forum to ensure other people are
successful using them. Share my experience with other gamers.
2) Do a chargeback, at which point I am assuming my Steam account will be
disabled from what I've read online. Share my experience with other gamers.
As I also said, I would very much like to continue using Steam. I haven't
yet chosen whether to buy Orange Box. At this point Valve's response will
be a deciding factor.
Thanks,
Steam: 11/13/07:Hello,
As requested, we have processed a refund to your account.
Your confirmation number is: XXXXX
Your bank or credit card issuer will return the funds to your account - please allow 3-5 business days for the funds to be posted.
Please note in the future that Steam purchases, per the Steam Subscriber Agreement, are not refunda
For all those reading this where were/are on a submarine: can you find all the EAB manifolds between shaft alley and the watertight door blindfolded? Did you every try? Nah, but I can find all the EPS conduits in the jeffries tubes between engineering and the holodeck.
The exercise was presumably planned, so all he had to do was sit by the bottom and wait for the fleet to go overhead.
I won't be able to remark any more on the issue though (at least not on/.) as I'm about to read the article. My thought as well. They have 14 of them so they wouldn't have to know the exact route. It's not like it's that big an area and they probably have used similar routes in the past.
[My game platform of choice] totally r00lz, and is going to pwn the game market this year! On the other hand, [your preferred game platform] is ugly, hard to use, buggy, and will soon be remembered as the game platform nobody can remember! You leave my nGage alone!
Am I reading a different wikipedia from you?... the BBC is, per its charter, to be "free from both political and commercial influence and answers only to its viewers and listeners"... No. You're not, though I'm sure Pravda has a similar charter. But you just missed the paragraph before the one you quoted:
Founded on 18 October 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd, it was subsequently granted a Royal Charter and made a state-owned corporation in 1927. While I think of the BBC as a good news source, the fact that it is state-owned allows the question posed by the original article. That's all I'm saying.
I'm not questioning the accuracy of the BBC at all. If I had to list three sources I trusted, the BBC would be on there and off-hand I can't think of the other two.
It's not owned by the state False.
but by the British people True, if you look at the state as comprised of the British people.
who pay for it directly with licence fees. True, but irrelevant to either of the above statements.
Slashdot Mirror
Stupid anonymous troll.
FF5 was obviously the best Final Fantasy evar. And you only need one look at FFXI to see that there is an absolute worst to the series. FF5's pause menu completely changed and redefined an entire era of video games, while FFXI's boot screen was a disgrace that should have every copy burned and the ashes buried with all the remaining copies of "ET".
It's sad to see the state of affairs that make people hate/fear Ron Paul so much. Is he a perfect candidate? No, of course not! Is he more perfect than the others? This internet bot thinks so.
That something designed to protect communication infrastructure in time of war has instead become "easier to attack" than the target itself.
So you can lose all your files during a copy, an upgrade will break your computer requiring a re-install of the OS...
...and Vista is the one we're supposed to give up on?
That's three times more than are necessary.
How do you define what's necessary? Weren't we all complaining about computers getting hacked because it was too simple to do so? Any warnings I see (very few now myself) stop and make me think.
They are infrequent enough that it really means something is up that you need to pay attention to.
How old are you? Everything you're describing worked great for me until around 33. Then, not so much.
I rather like Vista actually. My computer is more stable than under XP and I rarely get the UAC stuff anymore now that I've had it for awhile.
What do you think your sentence should be?
There's e-commerce for you, in a nutshell. More than you know man, more than you know...
With Steam I had no recourse, not even an exchange.
I was so polite in the e-mails because I thought that would assist my refund.
(Seriously, I have Vista and have been more than happy with it.)
Me: 10/30/07 This game hangs at the "Preparing to launch..." from Steam. I tried verifying it, un-installing it, re-installing it, but no success. I even looked on the forums and tried a few things from there with no luck. I would like a refund for this game and for it to be removed from my account. Thanks.
/add Local service
Steam: 11/08/07 Hello, Have you already gone through this FAQ?
Me: 11/08/07 Hi there. I tried reading the FAQ and the forums and spent two or three hours on it. Here's a link to the thread on your forums with the list of many people who had the same problem:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=617610
I gave up and purchased a physical copy.
I think Steam is great for Valve Games and has worked well with older games. I would love to keep using it, but will need Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces removed and refunded.
Thanks.
Steam: 11/09/07 Hello XXXXXX, I see many mentions of Vista in that Forum post. If you installed Steam when UAC was enabled, there is a reasonable likelihood that UAC prevent a few keys from being properly generated. Assuming that you have already attempted to disable UAC to fix the issue, please try re-installing Steam with UAC disabled. Please use the latest Steam installer:
http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=getsteamnow&cc=US
You may prevent all of your game files from being lost by moving the Steamapps folder out of the steam directory before uninstalling and putting it back after re-installing.
If the issue persists, please right-click on the game and go to Properties > Local Content > Verify Game Cache, and try again.
Finally, the the following suggestion is usually used for a specifie error message, but I would be very interested to know if this affects the issue you are experiencing:
Vista Home Users
Go to: Start > Run and type in: cmd
type in the following:
net localgroup Administrators
Restart your computer.
Vista Business & Ultimate Users
Right-click on Computer and select Manage.
Go to: Groups > Administrators > Add to group > Add > Advanced > Find Now > Local Service and click OK.
Restart your computer.
Me: 11/09/07 I already tried several things before to get it to work, including messing about with UAC, finding the key, and verifying the local game files, etc... I'm sorry, but as I said I purchased a physical copy a week ago and I'm not interested in using Steam for COF:OF at this point.
Here are my choices:
1) Get a refund, continue to use Steam to purchase Valve products and other games after reading the steampowered forum to ensure other people are successful using them. Share my experience with other gamers.
2) Do a chargeback, at which point I am assuming my Steam account will be disabled from what I've read online. Share my experience with other gamers.
As I also said, I would very much like to continue using Steam. I haven't yet chosen whether to buy Orange Box. At this point Valve's response will be a deciding factor.
Thanks,
Steam: 11/13/07:Hello,
As requested, we have processed a refund to your account.
Your confirmation number is: XXXXX
Your bank or credit card issuer will return the funds to your account - please allow 3-5 business days for the funds to be posted.
Please note in the future that Steam purchases, per the Steam Subscriber Agreement, are not refunda
But still, nice PR move.
Without reading anything... to THANK YOU PROFUSELY for posting that there would be spoilers and not revealing them in the headline.
I'm not questioning the accuracy of the BBC at all. If I had to list three sources I trusted, the BBC would be on there and off-hand I can't think of the other two.