A portmanteau is a merging of multiple meanings into one word. In this case, yes, I am combining the meaning of the company name Capcom with the description of their products as distasteful, smelly fecal matter in order to describe in the shortest possible time my opinion of the company.
Let us be fair: the slithy, mimsy, disgusting products produced by Crapcom today are ample evidence that the company is populated primarily by fucktards.
The problem for gamers is that there are now only a few categories of game:
#1 - Game that plays for all of 3-4 hours. "Replay Value" added by insertion of almost-the-same-fucking-character clones so that completionists and OCD-types can "replay" the game over and over again despite its not being all that fun the first time.
#2 - Game with 100+ hours of "gameplay", most of which is either extremely fucking boring level grind or extremely fucking boring traveling around on the "Hey Link, go get the 8 pieces of shit from the corner of the earth so you can get back to the story" quest. Examples: Final Fantaturd 13, Celda.
#3 - Movie tie-in game. Properly handled with hazmat gloves.
What you DON'T find any more are games that are replayable simply because they are fun. Games like the first Super Mario Bros, where the same game can be played over and over and over. Games where you don't care that you've played it a dozen times or more, because you're not character-grinding or killing time, you're genuinely enjoying the game you're playing.
When I first read the title I thought it read "Capcom announces unplayable game", which would only have been news in that it would have been Crapcom admitting to the fact that they haven't made a good, solid, enjoyable game in over a decade.
The idea that Crapcom would actively admit to sabotaging the gamer's play experience and make it so you couldn't restart the game from scratch? Unsurprising. I hear they've poached a couple of suits from EA and Ubisoft who have the same "fuck you" approach to customer service.
Some fucked-up suit with his head up his ass came up with this scene. Some other brown-nosing sycophant said "brilliant" and told the programmers to make it happen.
When it doesn't sell well, they'll blame it on the 3DS's poor install base, or "piracy", or a dozen other things rather than admit Crapcom's been fucking up for the past decade. I could give you a list of reasons Crapcom no longer gets my money unless I rented the game to try first, but I'm pretty sure I'd exceed the character limit on posts.
just like normal people aren't clever enough to use Linux (hence it's low market share)
Uhm... try that one again. Most people don't use Linux because: - The support for it is limited to forums where you never get actual help, but instead a bunch of ass-hats who shout back "RTFM LAMZOR" and similar insults at you. If you write in to a bug report forum or a feature request to some bit of software, someone screaming "the beauty of it is its linux so you can fix it yourself so go fix it yourself and post the fix noob" is not comforting or likely to make you stick around.
- Most of the programs they are looking to run, don't run on Linux (games industry, sadly, used to be a lot better but has backslid over the years considerably).
- You don't just "switch to linux." You have to pick one of a gazillion discordant distros, or else fuck around trying out every goddamn one for six months to settle on the one you like and HOPE that it remains updated and supported thereafter. And that they don't fuck with you in the next release, like Ubuntu just did forcing this crap "Unity" interface. And that the architecture for your particular distro isn't rewritten in some bizarre-ass fucking arcane way that causes your particular hardware to break on the "standard linux driver"... presuming one even exists.
I won't say that there aren't very intelligent people using Linux - there obviously are. But it has become very obvious to me over the past 15 years that the people programming Linux, the people designing interfaces for Linux, and the people evangelizing Linux, have absolutely no goddamn fucking clue what a normal desktop user wants, needs, or what will appeal to same. I refer you to this insightful post from someone who also has spent plenty of time with Linux as well.
And that's before we get into the trouble of corporate espionage, or your customer lists being hacked out of someone's "Google Online Email" because they used the same password/username combo they use on every other system in the world and their home desktop was hacked.
Don't blame me. Blame the lawyers. And the crooks we all have to protect against.
"Over the past 30 years" you say. How many did you put ethanol in, how regularly, what model year, and what year were their fuel hoses and rubber gaskets replaced as standard maintenance?
A lot of firewall exceptions over the years. It has been absolutely representative of multiple companies that they will close an exception without notifying the owner of it. I don't even mind the sudden closure so much as the attitude that it is easier to just break my work and let me find them.
Funny. I find this more often from telecomm types. They'll take ports or phones off the network if they are listed as "inactive" without a check-in with the department.
The general process at one big company I was at was that some tools group would get something cool written, where it would then get absorbed by IT. Development on that would grind to a halt and some other tools group would eventually come up with the next solution. At least they had the good sense to semi-recognize that initial development almost had to happen outside IT.
Funny. For our "tools" guys outside of IT it's always been a "someone has an idea, develops a tool, but it's buggy. They get bored, move on to their next toy, and never fix the bugs. A year later someone comes and demands that IT fix the bugs."
Management doesn't even understand how well their own IT department enforces security
Management barely understands technology well enough to plug the correct end of a flash drive into a USB port. Generally, "management decisions" come down to who buys them a lunch with hookers. Since internal IT doesn't get the budget for that and is constantly expected to provide "free services" all over the company, outsourcing is the next step.
IT may have rules and procedures in place for good reasons, but all too often those rules are followed in a passive aggressive manner to put IT in control of business, instead of the other way around.
You say that now. Then the Department Manager of your department, or the VP of Asshattery, gets caught doing various illegal things from his work desktop and IT gets word from on high to either (a) "cooperate fully" with a police investigation, (b) figure out how to hide it so it doesn't get to a police investigation, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b) that may or may not be legal.
Departments should be stating business cases and needs and IT should be helping figure out how they can help accomplish these. Frequently, this is not how it works.
Everywhere I have worked, the process has gone line this: - Department states business case. Part of the time, business case involves a complete lack of understanding of how the technology currently owned/operated by the company works. Part of the time, business case involves unrealistic assumptions like "it'll only take a couple days to move us from our current server environment to a completely different architecture." Part of the time, business case is actually reasonable.
- IT then figures out (a) what needs to be done to make it happen, (b) whether it can be done in a time-effective manner given the existing IT workload and available staff, (c) what it will cost to temp or outsource it if not. Sometimes there is also (d), whether the new toy the fuckwit VP du jour has purchased on company funds even does what he thinks it will do and how the FUCK to integrate it into the existing network.
The stories from developers fighting with IT are endless and all of them are countered by the same basic fear card and the general statement that users are idiots.
That's because for every story like yours, there are a dozen or more fuckwits like this or morons like this that the IT department has to contend with.
There is a general arrogance that we are on "their" systems and not that they are managing "our" systems.
And what you fail to consider is that "they" are caught between you, the user, and the weight of the company heads screaming the usual, contradictory priorities:
#1 Priority - "Just make everything work." #1 Priority - "Keep everything safe." #1 Priority - "Give the users what they want." #1 Priority - "Protect the network from rogue users doing bad things." #1 Priority - "Make the VP's latest toy cell phone plug in to everything."
Nothing that comes from "on high" for IT is ever not a "#1 Priority." IT is one of the most thankless tasks in existence. If everything is running well, people forget they exist. If something breaks or has to be taken offline for maintenance, someone is inevitably screaming bloody hell. Then they have to deal with mobile devices, 18 gazillion models of phone that everyone wants to hook in to company email, traveling flash drives that are a danger vector for worms coming in and corporate espionage going out...
Try putting yourself in their shoes once in a while. IT aren't the bad guys. They're stuck in a terrible position, under PHB's that make your department's PHB look like an utter genius by comparison, and your PHB is the guy who once took a week sick off of work after accidentally supergluing his hand to the family cat.
No, it's the cost of replacing fuel lines intended for proper gas with "Ethanol-ready" lines. And even the "Ethanol-ready" ones don't hold up as well as the old ones did with proper gas.
Here's what Ethanol can do to fuel lines over time: Image.
Where I currently live we've regularly had gas stations caught selling gas that was 12-13% Ethanol coming from disreputable refineries. It happens all over the country.
I'm sorry, but you're making one of the most common mistakes in anecdotal data analysis: attributing whatever symptoms you experience to the phenomenon that you just became aware of.
A series of very similar failures, in >50% of the vehicles of friends and family, within 2 months after the only significant change was the gas formulation. Other vehicles that didn't have "failures" but required tune-ups and adjustment far sooner than the standard manufacturer's schedule (which had previously been very reliable) within the next year.
Ethanol has its own disadvantages compared to MTBE, but overall it's clearly a net positive.
Only if you're a mechanic, farmer, or factory producing the replacement parts.
Effects seen (firsthand on the part of my rather large family, over a dozen aunts and uncles plus grandparents, parents, siblings, and cousins) within the 6 months after WhiskeyGas (Gas + Ethanol, brought to you by the same tech that brings you Jack Daniels) was forced upon the people of Milwaukee, WI:
- Failed fuel pumps - Failed/corroded fuel lines; alcohol does a number on any rubberized hose. - Failed fuel injectors (as the detritus of corroded fuel lines moves through the system) - Reduced gas mileage - Increased knock (WhiskeyGas does not produce the same power as normal gas, causing the engine's timing to periodically go outside recommended bounds) - My dad's best friend, who owns an auto repair shop, stocked up on fuel pumps and lines when the change was announced but not yet put in place. Within a month after the change he had enough business from people needing lines replaced, fuel pumps fixed, and timing adjusted that he had to hire another assistant and started to see wait times of 5-7 business days in his schedule.
Sure, these are "all anecdotes", but I've a large enough family to find the sample size fairly representative of the population at large.
Also, Ethanol is a pretty lousy-ass substitute for MTBE. It causes gas to "go stale" twice as fast as previous blends, it's impossible to transport WhiskeyGas by pipeline over meaningful distances due to water affinity (ergo, even more wasted fuel hauling the crap around by tanker truck), and even over short distances, Ethanol constantly corrodes the pipes and causes leaks unless patched/repaired/replaced on an insanely short schedule.
Government of the corporations, bought by the corporations, fuck the people. Current agenda: Koch brothers buying out governors everywhere. Scott Walker is open for busine^h^h^h^h^h^bribery.
Actually, that's not the whole story there. The ideal experience level for a new hire these days is 3 years of experience. That's because studies have shown that technical types make their big rookie mistakes in their first 3 years. That makes it extremely difficult for a new college grad too break into the market (I got past that particular hump many years ago, but it still definitely exists).
Not just that - if you don't get hired immediately out of the gate, good luck ever getting hired. The one thing worse than not having that 3 years experience is having 0 years' experience and being a couple years out of college.
We lost an entire generation to the Enron/MCI/etc mess that Bush and the Republicans caused. On paper, they have engineering degrees, but almost all of them went into other career paths and are now lost to the engineering sector because no HR-droid will ever hire them.
AT&T still became a monopoly by bullying the crap out of every other carrier and driving the competition out of business through means that have since been made illegal (such as selling service below-cost until the competition couldn't last, then price-gouging once they had a monopoly in a locality).
That and the fact that it had bright, vibrant scenery and level design with interestingly designed weapons, as opposed to Quake which could pretty much be distilled down to only 4 gun variations in levels that are nothing but muddy-brown sludge.
Oddly, Daikatana - once you got past the first few levels (let's face it, they fucked up royally releasing the first few levels as the demo, and reaction to the demo should have been their indication to take them back to formula before release) - was a reasonably fun game to play. I loved some of the later levels and weaponry.
The larger problem was, Daikatana was released Way The Fuck Too Late. If they'd gotten it out even 6 months earlier, it might have been regarded differently, but by the time it was out the door people were looking at the Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament graphics engines and calling it "dated" graphically.
Slashdot Mirror
Development costs,distribution.advertising, are fixed. How are they going to compete?
Maybe they should stop making crap games and make things people will actually want to play?
Assuming you are being trollish about my word choice, I suggest you go autofellanicate yourself, you simple-minded bufforon.
A portmanteau is a merging of multiple meanings into one word. In this case, yes, I am combining the meaning of the company name Capcom with the description of their products as distasteful, smelly fecal matter in order to describe in the shortest possible time my opinion of the company.
Let us be fair: the slithy, mimsy, disgusting products produced by Crapcom today are ample evidence that the company is populated primarily by fucktards.
The problem for gamers is that there are now only a few categories of game:
#1 - Game that plays for all of 3-4 hours. "Replay Value" added by insertion of almost-the-same-fucking-character clones so that completionists and OCD-types can "replay" the game over and over again despite its not being all that fun the first time.
#2 - Game with 100+ hours of "gameplay", most of which is either extremely fucking boring level grind or extremely fucking boring traveling around on the "Hey Link, go get the 8 pieces of shit from the corner of the earth so you can get back to the story" quest. Examples: Final Fantaturd 13, Celda.
#3 - Movie tie-in game. Properly handled with hazmat gloves.
What you DON'T find any more are games that are replayable simply because they are fun. Games like the first Super Mario Bros, where the same game can be played over and over and over. Games where you don't care that you've played it a dozen times or more, because you're not character-grinding or killing time, you're genuinely enjoying the game you're playing.
When I first read the title I thought it read "Capcom announces unplayable game", which would only have been news in that it would have been Crapcom admitting to the fact that they haven't made a good, solid, enjoyable game in over a decade.
The idea that Crapcom would actively admit to sabotaging the gamer's play experience and make it so you couldn't restart the game from scratch? Unsurprising. I hear they've poached a couple of suits from EA and Ubisoft who have the same "fuck you" approach to customer service.
You're too optimistic.
Some fucked-up suit with his head up his ass came up with this scene. Some other brown-nosing sycophant said "brilliant" and told the programmers to make it happen.
When it doesn't sell well, they'll blame it on the 3DS's poor install base, or "piracy", or a dozen other things rather than admit Crapcom's been fucking up for the past decade. I could give you a list of reasons Crapcom no longer gets my money unless I rented the game to try first, but I'm pretty sure I'd exceed the character limit on posts.
Didn't you hear? Borders and B&N won't exist in 10 years once EBooks and E-Readers take over.
just like normal people aren't clever enough to use Linux (hence it's low market share)
Uhm... try that one again.
Most people don't use Linux because:
- The support for it is limited to forums where you never get actual help, but instead a bunch of ass-hats who shout back "RTFM LAMZOR" and similar insults at you. If you write in to a bug report forum or a feature request to some bit of software, someone screaming "the beauty of it is its linux so you can fix it yourself so go fix it yourself and post the fix noob" is not comforting or likely to make you stick around.
- Most of the programs they are looking to run, don't run on Linux (games industry, sadly, used to be a lot better but has backslid over the years considerably).
- The "open source alternatives" to many of the programs they run, have problems with shifting crap around on them for poorly documented reasons.
- You don't just "switch to linux." You have to pick one of a gazillion discordant distros, or else fuck around trying out every goddamn one for six months to settle on the one you like and HOPE that it remains updated and supported thereafter. And that they don't fuck with you in the next release, like Ubuntu just did forcing this crap "Unity" interface. And that the architecture for your particular distro isn't rewritten in some bizarre-ass fucking arcane way that causes your particular hardware to break on the "standard linux driver"... presuming one even exists.
I won't say that there aren't very intelligent people using Linux - there obviously are. But it has become very obvious to me over the past 15 years that the people programming Linux, the people designing interfaces for Linux, and the people evangelizing Linux, have absolutely no goddamn fucking clue what a normal desktop user wants, needs, or what will appeal to same. I refer you to this insightful post from someone who also has spent plenty of time with Linux as well.
We don't use those services because it takes an act of Congress to put corporate/customer data on an external network.
Ways to fuck yourself over by putting company data (especially anything with customer personal information) on "the cloud":
*HIPAA
*FERPA
*SOX
*DPPA
*DACS
*ECPA
*EFTA
*GLB
*HRDS
*PA/PPA
Here, some reading material.
And that's before we get into the trouble of corporate espionage, or your customer lists being hacked out of someone's "Google Online Email" because they used the same password/username combo they use on every other system in the world and their home desktop was hacked.
Don't blame me. Blame the lawyers. And the crooks we all have to protect against.
"Over the past 30 years" you say. How many did you put ethanol in, how regularly, what model year, and what year were their fuel hoses and rubber gaskets replaced as standard maintenance?
A lot of firewall exceptions over the years. It has been absolutely representative of multiple companies that they will close an exception without notifying the owner of it. I don't even mind the sudden closure so much as the attitude that it is easier to just break my work and let me find them.
Funny. I find this more often from telecomm types. They'll take ports or phones off the network if they are listed as "inactive" without a check-in with the department.
The general process at one big company I was at was that some tools group would get something cool written, where it would then get absorbed by IT. Development on that would grind to a halt and some other tools group would eventually come up with the next solution. At least they had the good sense to semi-recognize that initial development almost had to happen outside IT.
Funny. For our "tools" guys outside of IT it's always been a "someone has an idea, develops a tool, but it's buggy. They get bored, move on to their next toy, and never fix the bugs. A year later someone comes and demands that IT fix the bugs."
Management doesn't even understand how well their own IT department enforces security
Management barely understands technology well enough to plug the correct end of a flash drive into a USB port. Generally, "management decisions" come down to who buys them a lunch with hookers. Since internal IT doesn't get the budget for that and is constantly expected to provide "free services" all over the company, outsourcing is the next step.
IT may have rules and procedures in place for good reasons, but all too often those rules are followed in a passive aggressive manner to put IT in control of business, instead of the other way around.
You say that now. Then the Department Manager of your department, or the VP of Asshattery, gets caught doing various illegal things from his work desktop and IT gets word from on high to either (a) "cooperate fully" with a police investigation, (b) figure out how to hide it so it doesn't get to a police investigation, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b) that may or may not be legal.
Departments should be stating business cases and needs and IT should be helping figure out how they can help accomplish these. Frequently, this is not how it works.
Everywhere I have worked, the process has gone line this:
- Department states business case. Part of the time, business case involves a complete lack of understanding of how the technology currently owned/operated by the company works. Part of the time, business case involves unrealistic assumptions like "it'll only take a couple days to move us from our current server environment to a completely different architecture." Part of the time, business case is actually reasonable.
- IT then figures out (a) what needs to be done to make it happen, (b) whether it can be done in a time-effective manner given the existing IT workload and available staff, (c) what it will cost to temp or outsource it if not. Sometimes there is also (d), whether the new toy the fuckwit VP du jour has purchased on company funds even does what he thinks it will do and how the FUCK to integrate it into the existing network.
The stories from developers fighting with IT are endless and all of them are countered by the same basic fear card and the general statement that users are idiots.
That's because for every story like yours, there are a dozen or more fuckwits like this or morons like this that the IT department has to contend with.
There is a general arrogance that we are on "their" systems and not that they are managing "our" systems.
And what you fail to consider is that "they" are caught between you, the user, and the weight of the company heads screaming the usual, contradictory priorities:
#1 Priority - "Just make everything work."
#1 Priority - "Keep everything safe."
#1 Priority - "Give the users what they want."
#1 Priority - "Protect the network from rogue users doing bad things."
#1 Priority - "Make the VP's latest toy cell phone plug in to everything."
Nothing that comes from "on high" for IT is ever not a "#1 Priority." IT is one of the most thankless tasks in existence. If everything is running well, people forget they exist. If something breaks or has to be taken offline for maintenance, someone is inevitably screaming bloody hell. Then they have to deal with mobile devices, 18 gazillion models of phone that everyone wants to hook in to company email, traveling flash drives that are a danger vector for worms coming in and corporate espionage going out...
Try putting yourself in their shoes once in a while. IT aren't the bad guys. They're stuck in a terrible position, under PHB's that make your department's PHB look like an utter genius by comparison, and your PHB is the guy who once took a week sick off of work after accidentally supergluing his hand to the family cat.
No, it's the cost of replacing fuel lines intended for proper gas with "Ethanol-ready" lines. And even the "Ethanol-ready" ones don't hold up as well as the old ones did with proper gas.
Here's what Ethanol can do to fuel lines over time:
Image.
You mean like this?
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/BF822DDBEC29C0DC852577BB005BAC0F
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/05/10/ethanol-mess-with-your-engine-you-may-be-on-your-own/
Where I currently live we've regularly had gas stations caught selling gas that was 12-13% Ethanol coming from disreputable refineries. It happens all over the country.
And causes problems.
I'm sorry, but you're making one of the most common mistakes in anecdotal data analysis: attributing whatever symptoms you experience to the phenomenon that you just became aware of.
A series of very similar failures, in >50% of the vehicles of friends and family, within 2 months after the only significant change was the gas formulation. Other vehicles that didn't have "failures" but required tune-ups and adjustment far sooner than the standard manufacturer's schedule (which had previously been very reliable) within the next year.
Ethanol has its own disadvantages compared to MTBE, but overall it's clearly a net positive.
Only if you're a mechanic, farmer, or factory producing the replacement parts.
Effects seen (firsthand on the part of my rather large family, over a dozen aunts and uncles plus grandparents, parents, siblings, and cousins) within the 6 months after WhiskeyGas (Gas + Ethanol, brought to you by the same tech that brings you Jack Daniels) was forced upon the people of Milwaukee, WI:
- Failed fuel pumps
- Failed/corroded fuel lines; alcohol does a number on any rubberized hose.
- Failed fuel injectors (as the detritus of corroded fuel lines moves through the system)
- Reduced gas mileage
- Increased knock (WhiskeyGas does not produce the same power as normal gas, causing the engine's timing to periodically go outside recommended bounds)
- My dad's best friend, who owns an auto repair shop, stocked up on fuel pumps and lines when the change was announced but not yet put in place. Within a month after the change he had enough business from people needing lines replaced, fuel pumps fixed, and timing adjusted that he had to hire another assistant and started to see wait times of 5-7 business days in his schedule.
Sure, these are "all anecdotes", but I've a large enough family to find the sample size fairly representative of the population at large.
Also, Ethanol is a pretty lousy-ass substitute for MTBE. It causes gas to "go stale" twice as fast as previous blends, it's impossible to transport WhiskeyGas by pipeline over meaningful distances due to water affinity (ergo, even more wasted fuel hauling the crap around by tanker truck), and even over short distances, Ethanol constantly corrodes the pipes and causes leaks unless patched/repaired/replaced on an insanely short schedule.
If no one can burn the disks, then piracy will (hopefully for them) be less rampant.
People will just figure out how to make it load games off of a USB hard drive.
Again.
Didn't Trump try to trademark "You're fired"?
Didn't Disney try to trademarn "Seal Team 6"?
Government of the corporations, bought by the corporations, fuck the people. Current agenda: Koch brothers buying out governors everywhere. Scott Walker is open for busine^h^h^h^h^h^bribery.
Actually, that's not the whole story there. The ideal experience level for a new hire these days is 3 years of experience. That's because studies have shown that technical types make their big rookie mistakes in their first 3 years. That makes it extremely difficult for a new college grad too break into the market (I got past that particular hump many years ago, but it still definitely exists).
Not just that - if you don't get hired immediately out of the gate, good luck ever getting hired. The one thing worse than not having that 3 years experience is having 0 years' experience and being a couple years out of college.
We lost an entire generation to the Enron/MCI/etc mess that Bush and the Republicans caused. On paper, they have engineering degrees, but almost all of them went into other career paths and are now lost to the engineering sector because no HR-droid will ever hire them.
"realistic lighting and shadows" on shit-colored, muddy brown/green walls and scenery is still shit-colored, muddy brown/green walls and scenery.
AT&T still became a monopoly by bullying the crap out of every other carrier and driving the competition out of business through means that have since been made illegal (such as selling service below-cost until the competition couldn't last, then price-gouging once they had a monopoly in a locality).
That and the fact that it had bright, vibrant scenery and level design with interestingly designed weapons, as opposed to Quake which could pretty much be distilled down to only 4 gun variations in levels that are nothing but muddy-brown sludge.
Oddly, Daikatana - once you got past the first few levels (let's face it, they fucked up royally releasing the first few levels as the demo, and reaction to the demo should have been their indication to take them back to formula before release) - was a reasonably fun game to play. I loved some of the later levels and weaponry.
The larger problem was, Daikatana was released Way The Fuck Too Late. If they'd gotten it out even 6 months earlier, it might have been regarded differently, but by the time it was out the door people were looking at the Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament graphics engines and calling it "dated" graphically.
The market that brought the US a company called "Standard Oil."
The same market that brought us AT&T (pre-court-ordered breakdown).
Need more?