How exactly would not releasing a product that isn't ready for release be a blunder? If only more companies would spend time fixing their software instead of throwing it at the market for the holiday rush. Releasing unfinished games is a blunder, not the other way around.
It is true, the changes in gameplay are drastic in Madden.
For example in the last two years they have drastically removed many features of the game. EA is incrementally removing things from the Madden franchise that have been there in the past, features like co-op play, and fantasy drafts. It costs a lot of money to cut out all of that code.
Madden doesn't have to get better each year at this point, most of us would settle for it NOT REGRESSING. They're not even adding new stuff, they're removing features. I'd settle for it even staying the same with new names instead of removing things like coop play, and fantasy drafts, and everything else that they ripped out of the last two versions. That is why people are angry.
To me there's a big difference in whether its a game that you're playing with one other person or with 4+ other people. A good version of Bomberman is by far one of my top choices, although you have to go back a few game systems before you actually get a version worth playing. I think the one I played on the TurboDuo, 5 player, was my favorite. It's unfortunate that the franchise has lost the best part of what made it fun over the years and instead has turned into single player adventures with a token crappy multiplayer mode. Almost anything that can be played with 4 people at the same time has the potential for fun since you're less at the mercy of the game to provide you entertainment and instead start drawing entertaining from the other people playing the game.
Warlords without a doubt. With two sets of paddle controllers you have 4 player goodness. I still have my Atari 2600 and break it out every few years for some 4 player Warlords and the multiplayer "Pong" derivatives.
You bought the card game - don't complain that the free extras don't match up to your expectations.
You're right, sort of. A huge number of people are going to buy the card game *because* they announced you'd get special items inside World of Warcraft, not because they just want a card game. The people behind it know this, and count on it. It's a tie-in, a way to try to get people to try the card game that might not have otherwise. However it would also be naive, I think, to ignore the fact that there are some people who will buy cards with no intention of ever playing the card game just to get an item inside World of Warcraft. Make all the judgments you want about the person who would do that but it's going to happen.
Somewhere out there someone read this article as a guideline and placed an order for the number of boxes of cards they need.
This is absolutely correct. People don't prefer sequels in the least, it's simply all we're giving. Companies are afraid to produce brand new content so they march out tired retreads year after year, and consumers keep the cycle going by buying them. Of course they're buying them because they have no other choices besides not buying anything, so since they sell companies make more of the same, and it continues on.
When will moderaters learn that just because words look like someone is making sense doesn't mean they're actually addressing the relevant point of the story. Or that they even read the story, as evidenced by the article STATING that the English language is ever-changing and evolving and has been for centuries. No one is trying to avoid this point, it isn't the point of the article.
Of course language changes, and there's always people who decry any change. It's the speed and vastness of these changes that are of more concern now than they would have been in the 40s, and every other time before then. Changes are now almost instantaneous. It doesn't take months, or years, for a new word, usage, slang, etc. to really take hold, it now only takes hours before such things are globally propigated. There was at least a slow progression that had an evolution of sorts. That is not longer the case. Email and instant messaging have taken any chance of language, "evolution" and turned it more into instant mutation.
We're not even talking about some bad spelling, or not being as accurate with use of tense of pronouns. We're talking about a complete and utter disregard for ANY language structure whatsoever. No more sentences, no more capitilization, puncuation, no more words as we know them if they have too many letters, shorten that down so I can one-finger-type it better on my phone keypad.
Will the world survive because people are reverting to the modern equivilent of heiroglyphics and cave drawings? I'd like to think that question wouldn't even need to be asked, never mind answered. But since the OP was kind enough to point out that we're still alive and kicking 70 years after George Orwell made his comments on language, I guess I was wrong.
No, the human race will not die off because language changes. Now that we've got that covered, it also won't die off because little black dresses fall out of fashion, green becomes a common house-paint color, or you're not able to find the newest pop song on something they used to call a, "compact disc."
Humans will happily chug along and find other ways to kill themselves regardless of whether the attack order takes thirty-seven pages of detail, or a simple message of, "FU!"
Travel in WoW had one fantastic side-effect on me. After playing WoW and then going back to try City of Villains the former "slowness" of City of Heros/Villans travel was absoutely meaningless. You can get your travel powers in CoH/CoV by level 14, and I used to feel that it had to be that low because of how slow you are on foot. After WoW I felt like I was Jesse Owens.
Travel should be easy, and it should be fast when the things you're travelling by are simply not important when you don't need them to be.
If they're not available, getting another programmer who doesn't have to ask the slashdot crowd how to develop stable software should be the first step. Oh yeah, there's a stable group if I ever saw one.
Ok.
I thought the first two new movies sucked horribly and had no hope that Return of the Sith would be any good.
I'm going to stay as completely spoiler free as possible.
I was lucky enough to go to a screening this past weekend, and it is good. It is very good. It's not perfect, but the turning of Anakin to Darth Vader was handled *mostly* very well. There's a nice slow build, one thing upon another upon another, and it's done believably. There's still a point where it makes too big of a jump for me, which is the disappointing part. It was as if Lucas saw what he needed to do finally, but ran out of time to do it and so had to jump-start a bit in the middle. That's the biggest reason I don't take more umbrage with it, he had the idea right, and most if it was done almost perfectly. If he had actually started it more in the second movie it might have salvaged that one (well, probably not.)
It is definitely all out action, many duels between many different characters. I also think the opening sequence was one of the most awesome looking things I've seen on the screen in a long time. I do have one problem with the opening scroll text before that, and that's just the first word of it. It felt out of place compared to the opening scroll texts of the others, and I think it could have been omitted to much better effect.
Almost everything about this movie is done differently, and better, than the first two. It isn't perfect, but if all three had been like this I wouldn't have complained (much) at all.
I actually attended one of Dee-Ann's training courses recently on Linux. The course material was fine, but she did point out that it was prepared by someone else. The one thing I didn't like was the fact that she didn't provide any detail on the subjects outside of what was in the training material. Anyone can read along each bullet point in a slide to the class, part of teaching should be providing some context as for why you're touching on a particular topic.
Most infuriating to me was that when someone did ask a question the answer from Dee-Ann was invariably, "That's in the man or info page." Sure it might be, but if that's your teaching style what is the point of having an instructor at all? Especially when one of the labs is, "Configure and build a new kernel." with absolutely no information about what kernel configuration options a system needs. There wasn't a single person in the class who was able to get a fully booting kernel, and the responses were (paraphrased), "You didn't select the right configuration options." but no suggestion as to where to look, and, "See it's hard to do, so you shouldn't try to install your own custom kernel. Just use what the vendor installs."
A teacher? By profession, sure. I did not feel there was a depth of information being taught however. Just someone repeating bullet points that someone else prepared.
Actually a lot of people had close to 100% success buying Pepsi bottles with winning caps. Since you could see the bottom of the cap through the bottle you could ensure yourself a free tune every time. I buy a soda for lunch in the cafeteria at work some days so it was easy for me to just switch to Pepsi for a few. I got 6 free songs, but really don't like Pepsi as much so I didn't keep at it.
I know other people have though, there are pictures out there with people showing off dozens of winning caps.
"Ghost doesn't make disk images, it only copies files into that monolithic.gho."
Is this the case with Ghost these days? I know when I used Ghost years ago it had both options, either copy the files it saw on a disk to an image file, or copy the entire disk to an image without caring what the filesystem was. I used to have to do exactly that before Ghost supported NTFS natively, and you could also tell it whether or not you wanted to do that with something it did support, like FAT.
It would be strange to me if that functionality was removed, but I'm sure it's entirely possible.
Blizzard doesn't typically delay a game in order to release demos, but they do something that many other companies do not do. They delay a game until it's finished.
The question posed in this topic is completely wrong, companies aren't going to wait for a demo, they don't even wait until a game is finished before they sell it. That's what needs to be changed. The hell with a demo, how about not shipping a game full of known bugs with the intention (or not) to keep patching afterwards? If companies would put out quality games people would buy based on brand recognition (like Blizzard's sales) and they wouldn't have to rely on demos to sway gamers.
How about at least a mention of the original RTS, from the Sega Genesis. Created back in 1989 a little game called Herzog Zwei was created, and it single-handedly implemented most of the things that are a staple of RTS games today. Different units, buying upgrades, getting more resources through capturing bases, and most importantly destroying your opponent. It had air, land and sea units, and was incredibly fun. It was really THE game that created the genre.
That's true today, but being able to play PlayStation games on the PS2 today is completely irrelevant. It was a big deal when the PS2 was released. It was a huge marketing win, it allowed Sony to generate a feel good attitude to consumers that they'd be able to play games from the incredibly large PS library at the time. People are always worried about buying a new system, what games will be any good? Will it be worth the big money that a new system always had been? The PS2 helped ease those worries a little by maintaining backwards compatability. Did it *really* matter? I think it mattered most from a marketing point of view, but that's damn important if you're going to succeed.
Now today I don't think it's as important as it was then. There are more people buying console systems than there were four or five years ago. There are more people willing to buy multiple console systems as well. Today I don't think it's as much as a selling point to maintain that compatability as it was when you have so many people with a GameCube, Xbox, and PS2 all next to the TV. People have demonstrated that they are willing to spend the money on what they think is newer/faster/better, the best thing to do would be to take advantage of that fact.
I can't agree more about the Gamecube controller. It's fine for RPG type games, but any sort of action game has my hands crying for relief. It's the sole deciding factor for me now as to what system I buy a game for if it's available for multiple.
I bought SC2 for the GC, and I thought it was ok. Then I played it on both the PS2 and the XBox and I couldn't go back to playing on the GC, the controller was just unusable.
From now on I'll only buy a Gamecube game if it's a GC exclusive, If it's available for the XBox or PS2 I'm giving my hands some relief. If it's something a little less action oriented I may consider it, but I just don't see it happening. The controller is a major part of my decision making now.
It's easy to say people hated EverQuest Online Adventures, but loved Phantasy Star Online. They're very different types of games. Sure they're both RPG type online games, but that's about where the similarities end. There are still a lot of people playing both, enough people are playing EQ:OA to justify an expansion just released in November.
I do like PSO, but I do NOT like the fact that I have to shell out a monthly fee on top of the XBox Live fee in order to play it. If more games start doing that I see a definite problem for the XBox's online gaming survival. I don't mind paying one price to play (presumably) all of the XBox Live capable games online, but if I have to start paying a second fee to individual games I simply won't do it.
I think it would *especially* be easier to implement outside of the tech sector where you do have a lot of people who are not used to the typewriter interface, even today.
A huge number of people have no idea what they're doing with a computer in their jobs, they simply are trained to press buttons and click a mouse in a certain set of steps in order to do what they need to do in order to get their paycheck. Really most office workers aren't much different than Pavlov's dogs.
On the other hand those people are going to be easier to train to use a completely new interface seeing as they don't know the underlaying reasons WHY they do what they do today.
Obviously the people who have grown up with what we have today will take longer to get used to anything new, but people have managed to learn how to use new input interfaces (mouse, touchpad, "nipple"), graphical user interfaces, etc. I'm not so sure about how useful something like this will be in reality, it has a great gee whiz factor, but if it works well people can adapt.
I'm not so sure that "most" people have been using Trillian, or any other multi-network IM client. Sure, a lot of people on Slashdot do, but every average person I know that uses any IM networks use the native clients, and in most cases use multiple.
Although there are many good reasons to use a single client that does all of them, there's also reasons not to. I'm absolutely not going to suggest to non-technical people I know that they try out Trillian because they'll be calling ME when these things happen and they can't connect to Yahoo one day, and AIM the next.
Given that the current comics that get published aren't worth whatever percentage of the page they get, I'd be more than willing to take a risk at it. I'm betting newspapers will as well, it's cutting out 3-4 syndication fees to pay only one, and that one has an instant fan base. Sure it could suck, it could tank, but I don't see how any newspaper is going to think they'd be any worse off if it happened.
What's to be compatible about? It's a new game, a new character, there's nothing to carry forward from previous editions.
There wouldn't be much point to the game if you could somehow carry forward the Pokemon you had built up to high levels in a previous game and just walk through.
I had to leave the San Jose area a year ago because living there with my $70k job was putting me more in debt, month by month. I'm not the only one, there was a mass exodus of people leaving the Silicon Valley. The cost of living is simply absolutely absurd. I completely agree with you that $2000 is far too much to pay for a 2 bedroom apartment, but two years ago you were LUCKY to find a 2 bedroom for only $2000. It's simply the way it was, and if you didn't like it you had no choice but to go elsewhere. Food was more expensive ($20+ for a single pizza delivery? I get 2 large pizzas delivered now for $12!), gas was more expensive, everything was more expensive.
And it wasn't that it would be hard to find a house in that price range, such things didn't exist unless you were willing to commute an hour and a half each way. If you can make it from Dublin to San Francisco in less time than that during normal business commute time, you've got some magic going on.
The Silicon Valley area was absurdly overpriced, and I can only hope it is starting to come back to reality.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly would not releasing a product that isn't ready for release be a blunder? If only more companies would spend time fixing their software instead of throwing it at the market for the holiday rush. Releasing unfinished games is a blunder, not the other way around.
It is true, the changes in gameplay are drastic in Madden.
For example in the last two years they have drastically removed many features of the game. EA is incrementally removing things from the Madden franchise that have been there in the past, features like co-op play, and fantasy drafts. It costs a lot of money to cut out all of that code.
Madden doesn't have to get better each year at this point, most of us would settle for it NOT REGRESSING. They're not even adding new stuff, they're removing features. I'd settle for it even staying the same with new names instead of removing things like coop play, and fantasy drafts, and everything else that they ripped out of the last two versions. That is why people are angry.
To me there's a big difference in whether its a game that you're playing with one other person or with 4+ other people. A good version of Bomberman is by far one of my top choices, although you have to go back a few game systems before you actually get a version worth playing. I think the one I played on the TurboDuo, 5 player, was my favorite. It's unfortunate that the franchise has lost the best part of what made it fun over the years and instead has turned into single player adventures with a token crappy multiplayer mode. Almost anything that can be played with 4 people at the same time has the potential for fun since you're less at the mercy of the game to provide you entertainment and instead start drawing entertaining from the other people playing the game.
Warlords without a doubt. With two sets of paddle controllers you have 4 player goodness. I still have my Atari 2600 and break it out every few years for some 4 player Warlords and the multiplayer "Pong" derivatives.
You're right, sort of. A huge number of people are going to buy the card game *because* they announced you'd get special items inside World of Warcraft, not because they just want a card game. The people behind it know this, and count on it. It's a tie-in, a way to try to get people to try the card game that might not have otherwise. However it would also be naive, I think, to ignore the fact that there are some people who will buy cards with no intention of ever playing the card game just to get an item inside World of Warcraft. Make all the judgments you want about the person who would do that but it's going to happen.
Somewhere out there someone read this article as a guideline and placed an order for the number of boxes of cards they need.
This is absolutely correct. People don't prefer sequels in the least, it's simply all we're giving. Companies are afraid to produce brand new content so they march out tired retreads year after year, and consumers keep the cycle going by buying them. Of course they're buying them because they have no other choices besides not buying anything, so since they sell companies make more of the same, and it continues on.
When will moderaters learn that just because words look like someone is making sense doesn't mean they're actually addressing the relevant point of the story. Or that they even read the story, as evidenced by the article STATING that the English language is ever-changing and evolving and has been for centuries. No one is trying to avoid this point, it isn't the point of the article.
Of course language changes, and there's always people who decry any change. It's the speed and vastness of these changes that are of more concern now than they would have been in the 40s, and every other time before then. Changes are now almost instantaneous. It doesn't take months, or years, for a new word, usage, slang, etc. to really take hold, it now only takes hours before such things are globally propigated. There was at least a slow progression that had an evolution of sorts. That is not longer the case. Email and instant messaging have taken any chance of language, "evolution" and turned it more into instant mutation.
We're not even talking about some bad spelling, or not being as accurate with use of tense of pronouns. We're talking about a complete and utter disregard for ANY language structure whatsoever. No more sentences, no more capitilization, puncuation, no more words as we know them if they have too many letters, shorten that down so I can one-finger-type it better on my phone keypad.
Will the world survive because people are reverting to the modern equivilent of heiroglyphics and cave drawings? I'd like to think that question wouldn't even need to be asked, never mind answered. But since the OP was kind enough to point out that we're still alive and kicking 70 years after George Orwell made his comments on language, I guess I was wrong.
No, the human race will not die off because language changes. Now that we've got that covered, it also won't die off because little black dresses fall out of fashion, green becomes a common house-paint color, or you're not able to find the newest pop song on something they used to call a, "compact disc."
Humans will happily chug along and find other ways to kill themselves regardless of whether the attack order takes thirty-seven pages of detail, or a simple message of, "FU!"
Travel in WoW had one fantastic side-effect on me. After playing WoW and then going back to try City of Villains the former "slowness" of City of Heros/Villans travel was absoutely meaningless. You can get your travel powers in CoH/CoV by level 14, and I used to feel that it had to be that low because of how slow you are on foot. After WoW I felt like I was Jesse Owens.
Travel should be easy, and it should be fast when the things you're travelling by are simply not important when you don't need them to be.
"New Hampshire has it right, live free or die.
In the end, the free shall prevail."
or... they'll die.
If they're not available, getting another programmer who doesn't have to ask the slashdot crowd how to develop stable software should be the first step. Oh yeah, there's a stable group if I ever saw one.
Ok.
I thought the first two new movies sucked horribly and had no hope that Return of the Sith would be any good.
I'm going to stay as completely spoiler free as possible.
I was lucky enough to go to a screening this past weekend, and it is good. It is very good. It's not perfect, but the turning of Anakin to Darth Vader was handled *mostly* very well. There's a nice slow build, one thing upon another upon another, and it's done believably. There's still a point where it makes too big of a jump for me, which is the disappointing part. It was as if Lucas saw what he needed to do finally, but ran out of time to do it and so had to jump-start a bit in the middle. That's the biggest reason I don't take more umbrage with it, he had the idea right, and most if it was done almost perfectly. If he had actually started it more in the second movie it might have salvaged that one (well, probably not.)
It is definitely all out action, many duels between many different characters. I also think the opening sequence was one of the most awesome looking things I've seen on the screen in a long time. I do have one problem with the opening scroll text before that, and that's just the first word of it. It felt out of place compared to the opening scroll texts of the others, and I think it could have been omitted to much better effect.
Almost everything about this movie is done differently, and better, than the first two. It isn't perfect, but if all three had been like this I wouldn't have complained (much) at all.
I actually attended one of Dee-Ann's training courses recently on Linux. The course material was fine, but she did point out that it was prepared by someone else. The one thing I didn't like was the fact that she didn't provide any detail on the subjects outside of what was in the training material. Anyone can read along each bullet point in a slide to the class, part of teaching should be providing some context as for why you're touching on a particular topic.
Most infuriating to me was that when someone did ask a question the answer from Dee-Ann was invariably, "That's in the man or info page." Sure it might be, but if that's your teaching style what is the point of having an instructor at all? Especially when one of the labs is, "Configure and build a new kernel." with absolutely no information about what kernel configuration options a system needs. There wasn't a single person in the class who was able to get a fully booting kernel, and the responses were (paraphrased), "You didn't select the right configuration options." but no suggestion as to where to look, and, "See it's hard to do, so you shouldn't try to install your own custom kernel. Just use what the vendor installs."
A teacher? By profession, sure. I did not feel there was a depth of information being taught however. Just someone repeating bullet points that someone else prepared.
Actually a lot of people had close to 100% success buying Pepsi bottles with winning caps. Since you could see the bottom of the cap through the bottle you could ensure yourself a free tune every time. I buy a soda for lunch in the cafeteria at work some days so it was easy for me to just switch to Pepsi for a few. I got 6 free songs, but really don't like Pepsi as much so I didn't keep at it.
I know other people have though, there are pictures out there with people showing off dozens of winning caps.
"Ghost doesn't make disk images, it only copies files into that monolithic .gho."
Is this the case with Ghost these days? I know when I used Ghost years ago it had both options, either copy the files it saw on a disk to an image file, or copy the entire disk to an image without caring what the filesystem was. I used to have to do exactly that before Ghost supported NTFS natively, and you could also tell it whether or not you wanted to do that with something it did support, like FAT.
It would be strange to me if that functionality was removed, but I'm sure it's entirely possible.
Blizzard doesn't typically delay a game in order to release demos, but they do something that many other companies do not do. They delay a game until it's finished.
The question posed in this topic is completely wrong, companies aren't going to wait for a demo, they don't even wait until a game is finished before they sell it. That's what needs to be changed. The hell with a demo, how about not shipping a game full of known bugs with the intention (or not) to keep patching afterwards? If companies would put out quality games people would buy based on brand recognition (like Blizzard's sales) and they wouldn't have to rely on demos to sway gamers.
How about at least a mention of the original RTS, from the Sega Genesis. Created back in 1989 a little game called Herzog Zwei was created, and it single-handedly implemented most of the things that are a staple of RTS games today. Different units, buying upgrades, getting more resources through capturing bases, and most importantly destroying your opponent. It had air, land and sea units, and was incredibly fun. It was really THE game that created the genre.
classicgaming.com
That's true today, but being able to play PlayStation games on the PS2 today is completely irrelevant. It was a big deal when the PS2 was released. It was a huge marketing win, it allowed Sony to generate a feel good attitude to consumers that they'd be able to play games from the incredibly large PS library at the time. People are always worried about buying a new system, what games will be any good? Will it be worth the big money that a new system always had been? The PS2 helped ease those worries a little by maintaining backwards compatability. Did it *really* matter? I think it mattered most from a marketing point of view, but that's damn important if you're going to succeed.
Now today I don't think it's as important as it was then. There are more people buying console systems than there were four or five years ago. There are more people willing to buy multiple console systems as well. Today I don't think it's as much as a selling point to maintain that compatability as it was when you have so many people with a GameCube, Xbox, and PS2 all next to the TV. People have demonstrated that they are willing to spend the money on what they think is newer/faster/better, the best thing to do would be to take advantage of that fact.
I can't agree more about the Gamecube controller. It's fine for RPG type games, but any sort of action game has my hands crying for relief. It's the sole deciding factor for me now as to what system I buy a game for if it's available for multiple.
I bought SC2 for the GC, and I thought it was ok. Then I played it on both the PS2 and the XBox and I couldn't go back to playing on the GC, the controller was just unusable.
From now on I'll only buy a Gamecube game if it's a GC exclusive, If it's available for the XBox or PS2 I'm giving my hands some relief. If it's something a little less action oriented I may consider it, but I just don't see it happening. The controller is a major part of my decision making now.
It's easy to say people hated EverQuest Online Adventures, but loved Phantasy Star Online. They're very different types of games. Sure they're both RPG type online games, but that's about where the similarities end. There are still a lot of people playing both, enough people are playing EQ:OA to justify an expansion just released in November.
I do like PSO, but I do NOT like the fact that I have to shell out a monthly fee on top of the XBox Live fee in order to play it. If more games start doing that I see a definite problem for the XBox's online gaming survival. I don't mind paying one price to play (presumably) all of the XBox Live capable games online, but if I have to start paying a second fee to individual games I simply won't do it.
I think it would *especially* be easier to implement outside of the tech sector where you do have a lot of people who are not used to the typewriter interface, even today.
A huge number of people have no idea what they're doing with a computer in their jobs, they simply are trained to press buttons and click a mouse in a certain set of steps in order to do what they need to do in order to get their paycheck. Really most office workers aren't much different than Pavlov's dogs.
On the other hand those people are going to be easier to train to use a completely new interface seeing as they don't know the underlaying reasons WHY they do what they do today.
Obviously the people who have grown up with what we have today will take longer to get used to anything new, but people have managed to learn how to use new input interfaces (mouse, touchpad, "nipple"), graphical user interfaces, etc. I'm not so sure about how useful something like this will be in reality, it has a great gee whiz factor, but if it works well people can adapt.
Although there are many good reasons to use a single client that does all of them, there's also reasons not to. I'm absolutely not going to suggest to non-technical people I know that they try out Trillian because they'll be calling ME when these things happen and they can't connect to Yahoo one day, and AIM the next.
Given that the current comics that get published aren't worth whatever percentage of the page they get, I'd be more than willing to take a risk at it. I'm betting newspapers will as well, it's cutting out 3-4 syndication fees to pay only one, and that one has an instant fan base. Sure it could suck, it could tank, but I don't see how any newspaper is going to think they'd be any worse off if it happened.
What's to be compatible about? It's a new game, a new character, there's nothing to carry forward from previous editions.
There wouldn't be much point to the game if you could somehow carry forward the Pokemon you had built up to high levels in a previous game and just walk through.
I had to leave the San Jose area a year ago because living there with my $70k job was putting me more in debt, month by month. I'm not the only one, there was a mass exodus of people leaving the Silicon Valley. The cost of living is simply absolutely absurd. I completely agree with you that $2000 is far too much to pay for a 2 bedroom apartment, but two years ago you were LUCKY to find a 2 bedroom for only $2000. It's simply the way it was, and if you didn't like it you had no choice but to go elsewhere. Food was more expensive ($20+ for a single pizza delivery? I get 2 large pizzas delivered now for $12!), gas was more expensive, everything was more expensive. And it wasn't that it would be hard to find a house in that price range, such things didn't exist unless you were willing to commute an hour and a half each way. If you can make it from Dublin to San Francisco in less time than that during normal business commute time, you've got some magic going on. The Silicon Valley area was absurdly overpriced, and I can only hope it is starting to come back to reality.