Go back even further than that. Pioneering sailors on expeditions like Columbus's were signing up for what could easily be one-way trip - catalogue the list of trips, correlate with shipwrecks. Consider that Columbus went through 9 different ships over his 4 voyages; some went down in storms, others like the Santa Maria simply ran aground because the navigation for the areas was unknown. Columbus left behind a few "settlements" simply because he couldn't fit all the crewmen onto the remaining ships.
Settlement has historically been a "just about everyone in the first few waves makes a one-way trip" proposition. This is no different.
Looked at Mediaportal a while back. It lacked the built-in routines to handle overscan correction (my TV has a VGA input that only handles "surrounded by 1 inch of black" or "zoomed in way too far" modes).
The overscan correction of XBMC, now that it's become stable, makes it my playback option of choice for the HTPC for now.
The current port of XBMC (Linux/Windows) is actually very pleasant. My current living room frontend is a winxp box (slightly old tv tuner that has absolutely shit Linux support, sadly) and I use XBMC quite happily with it.
If I could get the PS3 running XBMC, I'd likely move the PC out of the room. The PC does take a bit of space, and is a little loud, especially having to run it 24/7 to keep schedule for recording. But like I said, I need to record CC streams along with TV (there are times when other ambient noise, and the presence of friends with hearing issues, makes subtitling/closed captioning a godsend) and being able to switch it on and off would be great.
UPnP servers also don't let you define the language and subtitle track on the fly, which is a pain when you're a foreign film geek and have been slowly ripping your library of DVD's to your network so as not to wear down on the discs.
Provided it's been tweaked out recently and isn't buried under 3000+ edits worth of "history."
Provided you have any reason to suspect the page has been targeted (though ANY wikipedia page ought to raise that suspicion by default - even math pages have gone through crazy shit).
Provided that someone hasn't "archived off" the "discussion page" (something ass-hats with admin hats just love to do).
The problem with wikipedia is that fucking idiots with admin hats go around making the place worse every day.
And you had to go hunting in the history for that.
Precisely my point. Wikipedia's defenders claim "well it's kept in history." Great. Nobody ever reads the fucking history except for wikipedia zealots with even less social lives than their ass-hatted admins.
Now when there's a dual-boot with full hardware support so that, say, I can load it with XBMC and use it as a media center frontend... THAT will be something.
The idea of retiring my current XBMC PC is intriguing to me. One less thing hooked to the TV.
Yes, I know I could do similar with a number of upnp media servers - but those are lousy with fast-forwarding and 30-second jump, only work with certain encoding types (in particularly they barf on FLV's), and anything where I need to turn on subtitles/captioning or want to switch to an alternate audio stream, forget it.
And what you don't see in shittypedia is what any ass-hat with admin powers, an axe to grind, and no common sense decided to "blacklist" off of the page.
With Stackoverflow, you see all the listed opinions, rather than what some ass-hat with admin powers and no common sense decided should be the page content.
No. I'm not a lawyer but I imagine the argument goes something like this:
"Burden of proof" in a civil (e.g. copyright) case is "preponderance of evidence."
WinMTR previously was GPL'ed and the source was available. Part of its licensing was the licensing of the mtr code. This constitutes prima facie evidence that at some point in time, at least, there was mtr code in WinMTR.
Therefore, the burden is now on WinMTR to prove that all mtr code has been removed from WinMTR. At bare minimum, there is enough evidence to file a GPL claim and request that a judge subpoena the source code of WinMTR for analysis as evidence.
its Islam, which subjects you to regular harassment at airports, hate crimes, and in a few cases being disappeared.
Not only that but if you join up with Islam you have to worship a prophet who was a rapist and pedophile.
And don't forget you have to join up with all Islam's hatred, too:
"The declaration of faith, there is no god but Allah, requires you to love only for the sake of Allah, to hate only for the sake of Allah, to ally yourself only for the sake of Allah, to declare enmity only for the sake of Allah; it requires you to love what Allah loves and to hate what Allah hates[1] Ibn Taimiya, al-Ihtijaj bil-Qadar, p.62'
Indeed there has been an excellent example for you (muslims) in Ibrahim and those with him, when they said to their people: "Verily we are free from you.. and whatever you worship besides Allah: we rejected you, and there has started between us and you, hostility and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone Qur'an 60:4
This isn't to say there aren't good Muslims out there - but the more devout the Muslim, the less likely they are to be peaceful!
And before you start crying about "waah waah but xtianity but judaism but but"... I'm an Atheist so fuck that too.
In the words of Farnsworth: "I pray to all-powerful Atheismo..."
Why single out 4chan? At least they're doing something.
The second line right there is your problem. When the "something" that is being done is counterproductive, you are not helping.
No matter how justified we are in our principles and should do something, most of us really do have something to lose.
OK, side note first: would you people PLEASE learn to fucking spell already? Thank you.
As to the "something to lose"? Very good point. By comparative amount, the risk-to-reward ratio for protesters in the "golden age" of the "civil rights era" was far greater. The right to vote, the right to an equal seat at the table, being fought for by people who were already poor in terms of material wealth. If they went to jail, well, they went to jail. They had a network to ensure their families were taken care of, and they had a network to ensure they could get back on their feet when they left jail.
Compare to today. Look at the lives ruined by corrupt prosecutor Johnny Sutton in Texas who would rather go after border agents rather than a known drug smuggler and salesman who got shot while illegally in the country, running from arrest, and pointing a gun back at the border patrol. These guys had their lives completely ruined for doing what they were trained to do in the line of duty, because of corruption in the US government and a prosecutor and corrupt Bush administration that wanted to play favorites to the drug cartels from Mexico...
The Libertarian party is alive and well. Actual libertarian-focused groups like the EFF do just fine, too.
The problem you've got is that the Libertarian platform got co-opted by the other "big two" parties in such a way that Libertarians can't find a focus to get their foot in the door. Either they focus on social issues and get lumped in with the extremist wing of the Democrat party, or they focus on a number of law and tax issues and get lumped in with the extremist wing of the Republicans.
It'd be far better if we abolished the "direct election" of the US Senate and re-instituted state legislature appointment or even better, turned the Senate into a parliamentary body where the smaller parties (green, libertarian, etc) could actually get a minority voice with real representation present for debate. But that won't happen because the republicrats and demicans (who the fuck can tell them apart most days anyways while they betray their constituents?) don't want to give up their institutional stranglehold on the election process.
The difference between the US's "democracy" and the Chinese "democracy" isn't as great as we think these days. The Chinese get to vote in elections with only one candidate, US citizens get to vote in elections where both candidates are the two faces of the same fucking coin. The illusion of "choice" is about all we get.
Nonsense. Ammo is freely available, and the Swiss regularly OPENLY carry their issued firearms to practice ranges.
In addition, they are each issued a pack of "emergency ammunition" to be kept in the home. They can also buy ammunition at the ranges tax-free for practicing. Technically it's supposed to be all used up at the range, but there's nobody keeping count to enforce that.
Once Intel solved their heat problem and stopped adding latency layers, and thus began beating the pants off of AMD in benchmarks,
At what price point? The $900-per-processor range?
I've been extremely happy as an AMD customer. And every time I run price-for-performance, AMD comes out king even today. They haven't won the "fuck it I'm a millionaire money is no object" speed crown in a while, but I can get a much faster AMD CPU for the same price in the $100-200 range every time.
The bigger joke is, pretty soon this DRM-crap will be in just about every new processor. So it'll only be people with older CPU's (read: anything not 1-2 years new) that lack.
Sort of the way that people with Windows Vista or Win7 get fucked for video quality hooking a laptop or HTPC up to a TV or projector that happens to have a VGA input rather than DVI or HDMI.
Welcome to "the future", where DRM is fucking everywhere and your rights as a consumer mean precisely Jack and Shit. And if you wonder how we got there, look no further than the two-party system where both sides are bought out by the same businesses.
Obligatory Jack "Technophobe" Valenti quote about boston strangler and VCR here, perhaps?
Or would the old "buggy whip manufacturers vs modern automobile" bit be more appropriate?
Plenty of companies still make money selling games. Plenty of people still make money creating them. And then there are companies that seem to think coasting on old successes and re-releasing the same old tired game for umpteen platforms is their "model."
For that matter, plenty of bands manage to make money playing music - the Dave Matthews Band, like them or hate them, make money because they focus primarily on touring and working for a living. Of course, they became known in the days before radio consolidation made it so that the only thing heard on the radio is the top-40 paid-for Payola scam crap we see today (I'm in the 3rd largest radio market in the country and we have FIVE TOTAL FORMATS, six if you count right-wing bile-spewing talk radio; the other five are "classic rock top 40, drugs and sex woohoo", "rap top 40, let's shoot cops", "hip-hop top 40, let's pimp hos", "country top 40, play it backwards and your truck starts working and your wife and dog come back to you", and "How many times did that racist asshat just say gringo? what the fuck is this that sounds like a combination of a mariachi band, yoko ono, and a cat having its intestines pulled out through its mouth?").
There was a case of someone winning a jackpot a while back and the casino claiming the jackpot was a "software error" after the fact. Denver Post Article. As the article shows, such "errors" are relatively common.
And of course, the casinos always reserve the right to claim someone is "cheating" or simply "winning too much", or "card counting", and pull all sorts of nasty tricks.
Also remember: in a gambling town, the cops and judges aren't paid by the local government. They're paid by the casinos. Period.
Ok, and for your final question, what caused the Civil War?
Well, actually there were several political and economic factors that--
Uh, Apu?
Yeah?
Just say "slavery".
And that, in a nutshell, is how we screw up. We oversimplify and rewrite history at a whim, till the chance of the next generation understanding what was really going on is virtually nil.
You get kooks intent on attacking Christianity who insist that Hitler and the Nazis were "christianity" run amok, when in fact, they were demonstratably more an occult-focused group who simply appropriated symbols from wherever they felt like. You get kooks who idolize as "peace symbols" people like Che Guevara, a violent, bloodthirsty maniac who ordered and participated in quite a few bloodbaths. You get people who fail to recognize when they're being played for suckers by the front groups that pop up left and right with cutesy-sounding names.
There are still hordes of left-wing fucktards who convince themselves that Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky gave a crap for anything other than installing themselves into power, just as there are still hordes of right-wing fucktards who think that completely barren, anarchy-based laissez-faire capitalism is a good idea. Sadly at the moment, that second one seems to be this "Tea Party" wing of the Republicans, but they thankfully don't look like they'll last all that long before they either get one hell of a reality check or get chucked into the wastebin of history when their policies fuck up even worse than the past two years of almost total Democrat control already have.
The problem is that there are games where there are unified calls - nigh unanimous - and STILL the developers aren't f'ing paying attention.
One clear example: Lionhead Studios. One thing on almost every forum I've seen is a massive call to fix the "houses constantly breaking down" problem, either by implementing a global or per-city "repair all houses" function. Yet, Lionhead are content to just ignore this.
Of course, Lionhead are probably not the best example, since they obviously didn't playtest a number of things in their game anyways. I regularly "fell through" the world geometry in a couple of zones, and spellcasting was basically a joke: the only useful spells/combos in the game are Fireball, Fireball/Forcepush, and Vortex/IceStorm.
Of course, I was in a small beta playtest for an MMO back in the day. I wrote up entire, multiple-page analyses of why certain classes were getting ignored by the player base - essentially, boiling it down to the fact that (a) certain abilities in the games just did not work as advertised (or in some cases, at all) and (b) certain abilities were just mind-bogglingly boring. Did the developers pay any attention? Not as near as I could tell. The fix for the mind-bogglingly boring ones would have been relatively easy, a palette swap and trading of one or two attacks for something with a tad more flavor (it was a "pet class" that was supposed to summon elemental pets... yeah right, all it did was summon little sand-colored turd golems). The fix for the broken stuff was to actually fix the bugs - but that didn't happen till 8 months after the game's release.
I could name the game or developer, but I'm betting a number of people can already guess who it was even from that small bit of info.
Another pain in the ass: ATi doesn't enable GPU-based scaling (for overscan correction) on VGA connections, only DVI and HDMI.
Reason it's a pain in the ass? My HTPC uses VGA, because my TV has one VGA and one HDMI port and the PS3 got the HDMI port.
I'll be quite happy when we get true linux for the PS3 with a CFW to properly enable it - then I can slap in a 750GB drive into it, drop in MythTV, and pack the old HTPC off to another room for service as longer term storage while the PS3 acts as the local Myth frontend in the living room.
Couldn't do it before, because "OtherOS" was a fucking joke.
You just hit the major reasons I loved Fallout: New Vegas more than Fallout 3, though.
Despite what the (inane) article has to say - Fallout: New Vegas has bugs, but they aren't that much worse than those in FO3. The underlying Gamebryo engine's the problem, not the coding from Obsidian.
However, FO3 gives you a wasteland to wander around in in which your character's actions are compartmentalized. Make friends with this guy, kill that guy, it all happens in a vacuum.
New Vegas, on the other hand, has the factions. Go around shooting one faction enough, you make enemies of another. Your actions actually have an effect on how quests can be completed; your choices, even as simple as which town you visit first or whether or not you jump the jerk from Caesar's Legion wearing the wolf pelt hat when you first catch him monologuing, have consequences.
Of course, this means you can't do *all* the quests on a single playthrough. And a lot of simpleminded gamers would downrate the game just for that.
I loved this little gem: Oh, and while we're on this point, don't let another developer use your engine. Ever.
Given that so many companies out there make engines for a living, and the games come out just fine? This has to be some kind of a stupid joke comment.
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Go back even further than that. Pioneering sailors on expeditions like Columbus's were signing up for what could easily be one-way trip - catalogue the list of trips, correlate with shipwrecks. Consider that Columbus went through 9 different ships over his 4 voyages; some went down in storms, others like the Santa Maria simply ran aground because the navigation for the areas was unknown. Columbus left behind a few "settlements" simply because he couldn't fit all the crewmen onto the remaining ships.
Settlement has historically been a "just about everyone in the first few waves makes a one-way trip" proposition. This is no different.
Looked at Mediaportal a while back. It lacked the built-in routines to handle overscan correction (my TV has a VGA input that only handles "surrounded by 1 inch of black" or "zoomed in way too far" modes).
The overscan correction of XBMC, now that it's become stable, makes it my playback option of choice for the HTPC for now.
The current port of XBMC (Linux/Windows) is actually very pleasant. My current living room frontend is a winxp box (slightly old tv tuner that has absolutely shit Linux support, sadly) and I use XBMC quite happily with it.
If I could get the PS3 running XBMC, I'd likely move the PC out of the room. The PC does take a bit of space, and is a little loud, especially having to run it 24/7 to keep schedule for recording. But like I said, I need to record CC streams along with TV (there are times when other ambient noise, and the presence of friends with hearing issues, makes subtitling/closed captioning a godsend) and being able to switch it on and off would be great.
UPnP servers also don't let you define the language and subtitle track on the fly, which is a pain when you're a foreign film geek and have been slowly ripping your library of DVD's to your network so as not to wear down on the discs.
No it's not. At least until there's a port-able, AsbestOS dual-boot loader.
This only works if you never updated your PS3 past 3.21 firmware and you have to set up another box on your network to netboot it.
Provided it's been tweaked out recently and isn't buried under 3000+ edits worth of "history."
Provided you have any reason to suspect the page has been targeted (though ANY wikipedia page ought to raise that suspicion by default - even math pages have gone through crazy shit).
Provided that someone hasn't "archived off" the "discussion page" (something ass-hats with admin hats just love to do).
The problem with wikipedia is that fucking idiots with admin hats go around making the place worse every day.
And you had to go hunting in the history for that.
Precisely my point. Wikipedia's defenders claim "well it's kept in history." Great. Nobody ever reads the fucking history except for wikipedia zealots with even less social lives than their ass-hatted admins.
Yeah.
Now when there's a dual-boot with full hardware support so that, say, I can load it with XBMC and use it as a media center frontend... THAT will be something.
The idea of retiring my current XBMC PC is intriguing to me. One less thing hooked to the TV.
Yes, I know I could do similar with a number of upnp media servers - but those are lousy with fast-forwarding and 30-second jump, only work with certain encoding types (in particularly they barf on FLV's), and anything where I need to turn on subtitles/captioning or want to switch to an alternate audio stream, forget it.
And what you don't see in shittypedia is what any ass-hat with admin powers, an axe to grind, and no common sense decided to "blacklist" off of the page.
Wikipedia is basically worthless.
With Stackoverflow, you see all the listed opinions, rather than what some ass-hat with admin powers and no common sense decided should be the page content.
No. I'm not a lawyer but I imagine the argument goes something like this:
"Burden of proof" in a civil (e.g. copyright) case is "preponderance of evidence."
WinMTR previously was GPL'ed and the source was available. Part of its licensing was the licensing of the mtr code. This constitutes prima facie evidence that at some point in time, at least, there was mtr code in WinMTR.
Therefore, the burden is now on WinMTR to prove that all mtr code has been removed from WinMTR. At bare minimum, there is enough evidence to file a GPL claim and request that a judge subpoena the source code of WinMTR for analysis as evidence.
"Don't just take my word for it" followed by a Wikipedia link? Really?
Yeesh. Talk about missing the point.
You could have provided directly relevant links instead:
http://www.d2ca.org/is-abandonware-legal.html
http://www.classic-pc-games.com/disclaimer.php
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/369418/decompiling-and-redistributing-abandonware
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1001232/the-abandonware-dilemma
There. Now hopefully nobody else has to have wikipedia inflicted on them.
its Islam, which subjects you to regular harassment at airports, hate crimes, and in a few cases being disappeared.
Not only that but if you join up with Islam you have to worship a prophet who was a rapist and pedophile.
And don't forget you have to join up with all Islam's hatred, too:
"The declaration of faith, there is no god but Allah, requires you to love only for the sake of Allah, to hate only for the sake of Allah, to ally yourself only for the sake of Allah, to declare enmity only for the sake of Allah; it requires you to love what Allah loves and to hate what Allah hates[1]
Ibn Taimiya, al-Ihtijaj bil-Qadar, p.62'
Indeed there has been an excellent example for you (muslims) in Ibrahim and those with him, when they said to their people: "Verily we are free from you.. and whatever you worship besides Allah: we rejected you, and there has started between us and you, hostility and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone
Qur'an 60:4
This isn't to say there aren't good Muslims out there - but the more devout the Muslim, the less likely they are to be peaceful!
And before you start crying about "waah waah but xtianity but judaism but but"... I'm an Atheist so fuck that too.
In the words of Farnsworth: "I pray to all-powerful Atheismo..."
Why single out 4chan? At least they're doing something.
The second line right there is your problem. When the "something" that is being done is counterproductive, you are not helping.
No matter how justified we are in our principles and should do something, most of us really do have something to lose.
OK, side note first: would you people PLEASE learn to fucking spell already? Thank you.
As to the "something to lose"? Very good point. By comparative amount, the risk-to-reward ratio for protesters in the "golden age" of the "civil rights era" was far greater. The right to vote, the right to an equal seat at the table, being fought for by people who were already poor in terms of material wealth. If they went to jail, well, they went to jail. They had a network to ensure their families were taken care of, and they had a network to ensure they could get back on their feet when they left jail.
Compare to today. Look at the lives ruined by corrupt prosecutor Johnny Sutton in Texas who would rather go after border agents rather than a known drug smuggler and salesman who got shot while illegally in the country, running from arrest, and pointing a gun back at the border patrol. These guys had their lives completely ruined for doing what they were trained to do in the line of duty, because of corruption in the US government and a prosecutor and corrupt Bush administration that wanted to play favorites to the drug cartels from Mexico...
Say again?
The Libertarian party is alive and well. Actual libertarian-focused groups like the EFF do just fine, too.
The problem you've got is that the Libertarian platform got co-opted by the other "big two" parties in such a way that Libertarians can't find a focus to get their foot in the door. Either they focus on social issues and get lumped in with the extremist wing of the Democrat party, or they focus on a number of law and tax issues and get lumped in with the extremist wing of the Republicans.
It'd be far better if we abolished the "direct election" of the US Senate and re-instituted state legislature appointment or even better, turned the Senate into a parliamentary body where the smaller parties (green, libertarian, etc) could actually get a minority voice with real representation present for debate. But that won't happen because the republicrats and demicans (who the fuck can tell them apart most days anyways while they betray their constituents?) don't want to give up their institutional stranglehold on the election process.
The difference between the US's "democracy" and the Chinese "democracy" isn't as great as we think these days. The Chinese get to vote in elections with only one candidate, US citizens get to vote in elections where both candidates are the two faces of the same fucking coin. The illusion of "choice" is about all we get.
Nonsense. Ammo is freely available, and the Swiss regularly OPENLY carry their issued firearms to practice ranges.
In addition, they are each issued a pack of "emergency ammunition" to be kept in the home. They can also buy ammunition at the ranges tax-free for practicing. Technically it's supposed to be all used up at the range, but there's nobody keeping count to enforce that.
Now stop being an idiot.
Switzerland has one gun per individual, issued by the government. But they also have compulsory military service and required firearms training.
See a difference from a country where "gun rights" morphed into "every two-bit thug can get a pistol and hold up a convenience store"?
sets of the bastardized, chopped up, mutilated corpses of the original three films, and the three prequels
There, fixed that for ya.
And somehow my .sig feels oh-so-appropriate today...
Once Intel solved their heat problem and stopped adding latency layers, and thus began beating the pants off of AMD in benchmarks,
At what price point? The $900-per-processor range?
I've been extremely happy as an AMD customer. And every time I run price-for-performance, AMD comes out king even today. They haven't won the "fuck it I'm a millionaire money is no object" speed crown in a while, but I can get a much faster AMD CPU for the same price in the $100-200 range every time.
The bigger joke is, pretty soon this DRM-crap will be in just about every new processor. So it'll only be people with older CPU's (read: anything not 1-2 years new) that lack.
Sort of the way that people with Windows Vista or Win7 get fucked for video quality hooking a laptop or HTPC up to a TV or projector that happens to have a VGA input rather than DVI or HDMI.
Welcome to "the future", where DRM is fucking everywhere and your rights as a consumer mean precisely Jack and Shit. And if you wonder how we got there, look no further than the two-party system where both sides are bought out by the same businesses.
Obligatory Jack "Technophobe" Valenti quote about boston strangler and VCR here, perhaps?
Or would the old "buggy whip manufacturers vs modern automobile" bit be more appropriate?
Plenty of companies still make money selling games. Plenty of people still make money creating them. And then there are companies that seem to think coasting on old successes and re-releasing the same old tired game for umpteen platforms is their "model."
For that matter, plenty of bands manage to make money playing music - the Dave Matthews Band, like them or hate them, make money because they focus primarily on touring and working for a living. Of course, they became known in the days before radio consolidation made it so that the only thing heard on the radio is the top-40 paid-for Payola scam crap we see today (I'm in the 3rd largest radio market in the country and we have FIVE TOTAL FORMATS, six if you count right-wing bile-spewing talk radio; the other five are "classic rock top 40, drugs and sex woohoo", "rap top 40, let's shoot cops", "hip-hop top 40, let's pimp hos", "country top 40, play it backwards and your truck starts working and your wife and dog come back to you", and "How many times did that racist asshat just say gringo? what the fuck is this that sounds like a combination of a mariachi band, yoko ono, and a cat having its intestines pulled out through its mouth?").
Not far off the mark, really.
There was a case of someone winning a jackpot a while back and the casino claiming the jackpot was a "software error" after the fact. Denver Post Article. As the article shows, such "errors" are relatively common.
And of course, the casinos always reserve the right to claim someone is "cheating" or simply "winning too much", or "card counting", and pull all sorts of nasty tricks.
Also remember: in a gambling town, the cops and judges aren't paid by the local government. They're paid by the casinos. Period.
Obligatory Simpsons reference:
Ok, and for your final question, what caused the Civil War?
Well, actually there were several political and economic factors that--
Uh, Apu?
Yeah?
Just say "slavery".
And that, in a nutshell, is how we screw up. We oversimplify and rewrite history at a whim, till the chance of the next generation understanding what was really going on is virtually nil.
You get kooks intent on attacking Christianity who insist that Hitler and the Nazis were "christianity" run amok, when in fact, they were demonstratably more an occult-focused group who simply appropriated symbols from wherever they felt like. You get kooks who idolize as "peace symbols" people like Che Guevara, a violent, bloodthirsty maniac who ordered and participated in quite a few bloodbaths. You get people who fail to recognize when they're being played for suckers by the front groups that pop up left and right with cutesy-sounding names.
There are still hordes of left-wing fucktards who convince themselves that Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky gave a crap for anything other than installing themselves into power, just as there are still hordes of right-wing fucktards who think that completely barren, anarchy-based laissez-faire capitalism is a good idea. Sadly at the moment, that second one seems to be this "Tea Party" wing of the Republicans, but they thankfully don't look like they'll last all that long before they either get one hell of a reality check or get chucked into the wastebin of history when their policies fuck up even worse than the past two years of almost total Democrat control already have.
The problem is that there are games where there are unified calls - nigh unanimous - and STILL the developers aren't f'ing paying attention.
One clear example: Lionhead Studios. One thing on almost every forum I've seen is a massive call to fix the "houses constantly breaking down" problem, either by implementing a global or per-city "repair all houses" function. Yet, Lionhead are content to just ignore this.
Of course, Lionhead are probably not the best example, since they obviously didn't playtest a number of things in their game anyways. I regularly "fell through" the world geometry in a couple of zones, and spellcasting was basically a joke: the only useful spells/combos in the game are Fireball, Fireball/Forcepush, and Vortex/IceStorm.
Of course, I was in a small beta playtest for an MMO back in the day. I wrote up entire, multiple-page analyses of why certain classes were getting ignored by the player base - essentially, boiling it down to the fact that (a) certain abilities in the games just did not work as advertised (or in some cases, at all) and (b) certain abilities were just mind-bogglingly boring. Did the developers pay any attention? Not as near as I could tell. The fix for the mind-bogglingly boring ones would have been relatively easy, a palette swap and trading of one or two attacks for something with a tad more flavor (it was a "pet class" that was supposed to summon elemental pets... yeah right, all it did was summon little sand-colored turd golems). The fix for the broken stuff was to actually fix the bugs - but that didn't happen till 8 months after the game's release.
I could name the game or developer, but I'm betting a number of people can already guess who it was even from that small bit of info.
Another pain in the ass: ATi doesn't enable GPU-based scaling (for overscan correction) on VGA connections, only DVI and HDMI.
Reason it's a pain in the ass? My HTPC uses VGA, because my TV has one VGA and one HDMI port and the PS3 got the HDMI port.
I'll be quite happy when we get true linux for the PS3 with a CFW to properly enable it - then I can slap in a 750GB drive into it, drop in MythTV, and pack the old HTPC off to another room for service as longer term storage while the PS3 acts as the local Myth frontend in the living room.
Couldn't do it before, because "OtherOS" was a fucking joke.
You just hit the major reasons I loved Fallout: New Vegas more than Fallout 3, though.
Despite what the (inane) article has to say - Fallout: New Vegas has bugs, but they aren't that much worse than those in FO3. The underlying Gamebryo engine's the problem, not the coding from Obsidian.
However, FO3 gives you a wasteland to wander around in in which your character's actions are compartmentalized. Make friends with this guy, kill that guy, it all happens in a vacuum.
New Vegas, on the other hand, has the factions. Go around shooting one faction enough, you make enemies of another. Your actions actually have an effect on how quests can be completed; your choices, even as simple as which town you visit first or whether or not you jump the jerk from Caesar's Legion wearing the wolf pelt hat when you first catch him monologuing, have consequences.
Of course, this means you can't do *all* the quests on a single playthrough. And a lot of simpleminded gamers would downrate the game just for that.
I loved this little gem:
Oh, and while we're on this point, don't let another developer use your engine. Ever.
Given that so many companies out there make engines for a living, and the games come out just fine? This has to be some kind of a stupid joke comment.