It seems to me these indie developers have found that it is quite lucrative to shout "Everyone is stealing my game."
Of course, they say this and then fire up a nice sales campaign to go along with it. From what I can tell and based on the last charity event world of goo didn't do too bad for a game that was pirated to hell and back. This more or less feels like a free advertising campaign and with a nice price sale to match.
Here is the kicker... regardless of the reasons there will always be piracy in the environment. Continually questioning whether or not these people will have purchased your game is entirely a practice in insanity. The questions that need to be asked are how can you increase your customers base to those who will pay.
My from my vantage this is the simplicity that I can offer.
DRM is a hassle and it doesn't work. You can choose to shit on the customers who buy your things or not. It's kinda like an omelet I had this morning. I didn't want mozzarella and I said specifically I wanted it to be replaced with pepper jack cheese. The lady came back eventually and said we have a policy regarding substitutions, but I could have my preferred cheese for a 1.50. I'm willing to pay more for exactly what it is I want, but the chances of me returning are now getting slimmer. (sic, this better be a damn good omelet). The omelet shows up and pretty much immediately it was not what I asked for. Now, I'm a bit annoyed and my waitress is no where in sight. Eventually I eat my other things and take the shitty fucking omelet I didn't want. I didn't like it and I'm not going back there. At least they removed the 1.50 charge and I saved myself some extra cash by tipping a whole dollar.
The moral of the story is... treat your customers how they want to be treated and they will return. If you feel you can make some sacrifices along the way and keep profits fairly good then you have made a "wise" business decision. (sic, you shit on your customers and they ate it up).
Obviously, this is something that cannot be implemented in a draconian fashion and as a business it requires a certain amount of agile response.
Ala, Marty McFly who believes the Doc to be shot dead. Returning to the future it is revealed that Doc Brown knew he was to be slain and took precautions. He preserved Marty's view of the "present/future," but was able to continue existing.
This is a bit light on the requirements, but there wasn't exactly a defined need.
So generally speaking you should form some criteria.
Number of inputs, frequency spectrum, what comparative features do you need.
Next, if you are willing to purchase something used and have it tuned/repaired there can be considerable savings. Up one level from this is a direct refurbishing company that guarantees a functional and re-tuned unit.
Now, we all enjoy new and shiny toys, but the trick is being honest with yourself.If it's going to be used for hobby grade activities then don't fall into the trap of wanting the same things you might use at the office. While I would like some of the severs I actually have at work I would not spend the several thousand it would take to actually purchase one of them.
That said I would generally avoid ebay because most refurb shops will sale you the same thing on their site without the wait.
I like where they stated, ", Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures.""
Who the fuck is woopra?
There are two standing issues I have with this statement which make it a non-issue.
I come to slashdot for the technical discussion on the matter and there is a good deal of user generated content. This is exactly why meme's have developed regarding TFA. It is considered roughly the norm to read the user content above the link posted because slashdot users cannot be bothered with such mundane details. Yet we can still slashdot an unprepared website.
Another common issue revolves around the class of user. Taco once had a bitchfest that stated we were a hard group to monitor. There are a large number of individuals who don't have crapware installed and take steps to not publically disclose every facet of their web viewing history.
So we don't read the articles and we are a hard group to judge.
Still... again... who the fuck is woopra.
By no means is this a defense of kdawson or soulskill.
HDTV's with built in tuners will only output surround sound when the built in tuner is the source of the video. Otherwise, that wonderful specification states that analog outputs should be down mixed to stereo.
Basically, the optical out is only good for determining sync when using an external receiver. Modern sets actually do so much post processing they cause a good deal of video delay and if you do not route your audio through the set it will not be synced.
Part of the 1.4 spec is to create a return audio path so that the post processed video and audio are in sync. For now if you are using external speakers and anything other then the television as an output source you need a bit of a fancy receiver.
If an individual writes code that is difficult to read or has seriously obscure logic issues it is not a language specific problem.
Yes, you can force a structure within the interpreter, but that doesn't make a good programmer.
When I actually do write perl I follow a set of best practices and modern techniques. There is a good deal of older cruft and mechanisms in place for implementing certain methods. However, the rule of thumb for me is if it looks strange it's probably wrong.
I also have a further advantage in that the material I write is also generally peer reviewed. This will generally expose any further issues or poor semantics that I may have introduced.
I feel the belief that you need a rigidly structured development language is a poor replacement for foresight and ability.
I had a hotel toss me out for some issues. We had a bit of a disagreement regarding noise and my suggestion was to move either my room or my neighbor. Well they wanted to be smug about the whole thing and that is fine. However, you don't get to keep my money and throw me out.
Douche-bag night manager decided he would be really clever and charge my card regardless. I noticed the charge a few days later and called up my credit card provider. Turns out they had several instances already just like mine. They said they would reverse the issue and told me to have a nice day.
Literally it was a minute call to initiate a reverse. The hotel itself wasn't exactly cheap either and I suspect senior douchiness had pulled this scammed many times.
You killed the man you thought to be your grand father, but it turns out you are from an illicit relationship. Your grand mother quickly remarries and the man assumed all the roles the other fellow would have done.
That version of the grand father post selection paradox can go soap opera silly really fast. It would get really strange if everyone you kept killing in your family tree resulted in discovering that each generation was conceived in a series of illicit relationships. Take that days of our lives!
While I work I actually do have several pages of things open. In fact, I could easily group several things and still have a section for screwing around.
I liked the ability to save groups of those tabs and then re-pop them back open later. I do that now with the "save and quit," but this would ultimately be a more fine grained approach.
Thinking back now... I actually close out a lot of things constantly to simply get back to a clean slate. If I could close one group and re-open it later that wouldn't be too bad.
Now they had a fairly good idea and they completely whacked it out. The damn thing analyzes what you are reading and finds advertisements for you. Which also means the capability to track what you are doing is inherit.
I shit you not... this is a feature... watch the video.
I should also note that I had substantial issues upgrading my AM2 system. I purchased a new quad core Intel proc. I had substantial issues lining up the pins and when the dremel failed to produce favorable results I went to see the local computer shop.
They were completely horrified and helped educate me on some changes in the world. Eventually, they sent me home with a brand new 200 watt power supply and serial mouse.
When that failed to work I decided to go to radio shack (the shack!) and see if they could get me on the right track.
They were completely horrified at both the previous shop and the things I had done. Eventually, they too sent me home with a brand new cell phone and a subscription to subscription to satellite tv service. They said to ask the sat installer for assistance when he comes out next week.
My last rig was an AM2 system and it's a bit simplified to say that you need to only upgrade the processor.
The only time in my life in which I have purposefully upgraded the processes was when I used the planned obsolesce due to budget algorithm. This algorithm works on the basis of monetary limitations which directly limit the capabilities of the equipment available. ie, I could not afford the shiniest of the shiny.
The general philosophy was to build a new system with something borrowed, something stolen and then some things new. Using the planned obsolesce algorithm I would under spec the processor to something very affordable.
This meant I was on a purpose set upgrade cycle of 4-6 months. It was hoped that during this time I could accomplish two things. My wallet would grow over time and through sheer of will I would force market prices to fall. Invariably, within 4 - 6 months prices would dramatically shift and I could upgrade my rig to it's full potential.
Since those dark times my build strategy has changed and I usually just build the rig as I wish. This means that generally upgrading the processor will not yield that much performance. Even worse is that purchasing a new processor that has greater support for faster memory and newer board designs means I would under utilize it's capabilities. In essence, it's a bit wasteful to purchase just a processor because there is more under the hood then simply cycles.
There are other areas to eek out performance or substantially increase beyond the proc. There are bus speeds, memory speeds and even faster IO ports. To the extent that one waits to upgrade the divide usually widens proportionally. Sometimes they even make a fancy new DMA channel and slap on a new name.
So yes, while I could have upgraded my AM2 system to an AM3 there were substantial improvements in the design. Most notably in my case were memory speeds had doubled from my installed module. There were several other improvements, but let us just say things had improved.
Even dismissing core overhead and other details you did not mention there are still some wildly important facts to remember.
Only modern games have been designed to take advantage of multi-processor systems. There is also a scaling factor which needs to be considered on an engine by engine basis.
I believe valve only recently made updates to the hl2 engine which optimize for greater then four core systems. While you could vary well purchase a dual proc host and fit it with 4 or 6 core processors the engine may not be able to scale on greater then 2 to 4 threads.
At one point the multi-core support wasn't so hot and I had to disable it on my dual core system. Again, this is an application by application basis and not all experiences will be equal. Certainly, in the future we can assume most newer systems will utilize the hardware better, but it is no guarantee for today.
7mbit is now available in most places and 12 in others. However, it is Qwest DSL and they love node interleaving so the latency is awful. (Not as bad as wireless providers, but orders of the magnitude slower then cable).
Now, get into Comcast territory and the bandwidth is significantly better.
Just going to be painful to re-enter all that data if they can't use the original binary blob.
Long time ago I had a programming segment regarding binary blobs. Basically, unknown data structures within a binary. Provided they used no encryption it should be relatively painless to extract the data. It was trivial then and now I'm way better.
That is the only reason I'm thinking about getting it.
I want to make Milo afraid.... very afraid.
However, it's likely a series of gimmicks and/or vaporware. This is Microsoft ware referring to after all. Any product that looks like it might be substantially interesting does not generally exist. This isn't trolling when you consider the historical significance.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me these indie developers have found that it is quite lucrative to shout "Everyone is stealing my game."
Of course, they say this and then fire up a nice sales campaign to go along with it. From what I can tell and based on the last charity event world of goo didn't do too bad for a game that was pirated to hell and back. This more or less feels like a free advertising campaign and with a nice price sale to match.
Here is the kicker... regardless of the reasons there will always be piracy in the environment. Continually questioning whether or not these people will have purchased your game is entirely a practice in insanity. The questions that need to be asked are how can you increase your customers base to those who will pay.
My from my vantage this is the simplicity that I can offer.
DRM is a hassle and it doesn't work. You can choose to shit on the customers who buy your things or not. It's kinda like an omelet I had this morning. I didn't want mozzarella and I said specifically I wanted it to be replaced with pepper jack cheese. The lady came back eventually and said we have a policy regarding substitutions, but I could have my preferred cheese for a 1.50. I'm willing to pay more for exactly what it is I want, but the chances of me returning are now getting slimmer. (sic, this better be a damn good omelet). The omelet shows up and pretty much immediately it was not what I asked for. Now, I'm a bit annoyed and my waitress is no where in sight. Eventually I eat my other things and take the shitty fucking omelet I didn't want. I didn't like it and I'm not going back there. At least they removed the 1.50 charge and I saved myself some extra cash by tipping a whole dollar.
The moral of the story is... treat your customers how they want to be treated and they will return. If you feel you can make some sacrifices along the way and keep profits fairly good then you have made a "wise" business decision. (sic, you shit on your customers and they ate it up).
Obviously, this is something that cannot be implemented in a draconian fashion and as a business it requires a certain amount of agile response.
Would you prefer one large LCD display?
http://www.alphacool.com/popup_image.php/pID/668/imgID/0
Sure all you can display is random profanity and trash talk. Well, you could display other things, but I'm not sure why you would want to.
Better add another monitor so you can compute while you compute and not worry about a second monitor or x session.
http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?C=1257&ID=1481
Ala, Marty McFly who believes the Doc to be shot dead. Returning to the future it is revealed that Doc Brown knew he was to be slain and took precautions. He preserved Marty's view of the "present/future," but was able to continue existing.
I hope you are correct.
The current 3D technology gives me nasty headaches.
I suppose I'll have to stop watching movies at some point if you are incorrect.
This is a bit light on the requirements, but there wasn't exactly a defined need.
So generally speaking you should form some criteria.
Number of inputs, frequency spectrum, what comparative features do you need.
Next, if you are willing to purchase something used and have it tuned/repaired there can be considerable savings. Up one level from this is a direct refurbishing company that guarantees a functional and re-tuned unit.
Now, we all enjoy new and shiny toys, but the trick is being honest with yourself.If it's going to be used for hobby grade activities then don't fall into the trap of wanting the same things you might use at the office. While I would like some of the severs I actually have at work I would not spend the several thousand it would take to actually purchase one of them.
That said I would generally avoid ebay because most refurb shops will sale you the same thing on their site without the wait.
I like where they stated, ", Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures.""
Who the fuck is woopra?
There are two standing issues I have with this statement which make it a non-issue.
I come to slashdot for the technical discussion on the matter and there is a good deal of user generated content. This is exactly why meme's have developed regarding TFA. It is considered roughly the norm to read the user content above the link posted because slashdot users cannot be bothered with such mundane details. Yet we can still slashdot an unprepared website.
Another common issue revolves around the class of user. Taco once had a bitchfest that stated we were a hard group to monitor. There are a large number of individuals who don't have crapware installed and take steps to not publically disclose every facet of their web viewing history.
So we don't read the articles and we are a hard group to judge.
Still... again... who the fuck is woopra.
By no means is this a defense of kdawson or soulskill.
Then exactly how would they sale online streaming events for 395 and equally expensive conference tickets?
So you are saying I shouldn't worry about it then.
I was going to see what I could do to help man kind, but you convinced me it would be a meaningless gesture.
The samsung is not alone.
HDTV's with built in tuners will only output surround sound when the built in tuner is the source of the video. Otherwise, that wonderful specification states that analog outputs should be down mixed to stereo.
Basically, the optical out is only good for determining sync when using an external receiver. Modern sets actually do so much post processing they cause a good deal of video delay and if you do not route your audio through the set it will not be synced.
Part of the 1.4 spec is to create a return audio path so that the post processed video and audio are in sync. For now if you are using external speakers and anything other then the television as an output source you need a bit of a fancy receiver.
If an individual writes code that is difficult to read or has seriously obscure logic issues it is not a language specific problem.
Yes, you can force a structure within the interpreter, but that doesn't make a good programmer.
When I actually do write perl I follow a set of best practices and modern techniques. There is a good deal of older cruft and mechanisms in place for implementing certain methods. However, the rule of thumb for me is if it looks strange it's probably wrong.
I also have a further advantage in that the material I write is also generally peer reviewed. This will generally expose any further issues or poor semantics that I may have introduced.
I feel the belief that you need a rigidly structured development language is a poor replacement for foresight and ability.
That is a bit too many steps in my case.
I had a hotel toss me out for some issues. We had a bit of a disagreement regarding noise and my suggestion was to move either my room or my neighbor. Well they wanted to be smug about the whole thing and that is fine. However, you don't get to keep my money and throw me out.
Douche-bag night manager decided he would be really clever and charge my card regardless. I noticed the charge a few days later and called up my credit card provider. Turns out they had several instances already just like mine. They said they would reverse the issue and told me to have a nice day.
Literally it was a minute call to initiate a reverse. The hotel itself wasn't exactly cheap either and I suspect senior douchiness had pulled this scammed many times.
The post selection method would be...
You killed the man you thought to be your grand father, but it turns out you are from an illicit relationship. Your grand mother quickly remarries and the man assumed all the roles the other fellow would have done.
That version of the grand father post selection paradox can go soap opera silly really fast. It would get really strange if everyone you kept killing in your family tree resulted in discovering that each generation was conceived in a series of illicit relationships. Take that days of our lives!
I believe you need to write a book.
While I work I actually do have several pages of things open. In fact, I could easily group several things and still have a section for screwing around.
I liked the ability to save groups of those tabs and then re-pop them back open later. I do that now with the "save and quit," but this would ultimately be a more fine grained approach.
Thinking back now... I actually close out a lot of things constantly to simply get back to a clean slate. If I could close one group and re-open it later that wouldn't be too bad.
Now they had a fairly good idea and they completely whacked it out. The damn thing analyzes what you are reading and finds advertisements for you. Which also means the capability to track what you are doing is inherit.
I shit you not... this is a feature... watch the video.
I should also note that I had substantial issues upgrading my AM2 system. I purchased a new quad core Intel proc. I had substantial issues lining up the pins and when the dremel failed to produce favorable results I went to see the local computer shop.
They were completely horrified and helped educate me on some changes in the world. Eventually, they sent me home with a brand new 200 watt power supply and serial mouse.
When that failed to work I decided to go to radio shack (the shack!) and see if they could get me on the right track.
They were completely horrified at both the previous shop and the things I had done. Eventually, they too sent me home with a brand new cell phone and a subscription to subscription to satellite tv service. They said to ask the sat installer for assistance when he comes out next week.
My last rig was an AM2 system and it's a bit simplified to say that you need to only upgrade the processor.
The only time in my life in which I have purposefully upgraded the processes was when I used the planned obsolesce due to budget algorithm. This algorithm works on the basis of monetary limitations which directly limit the capabilities of the equipment available. ie, I could not afford the shiniest of the shiny.
The general philosophy was to build a new system with something borrowed, something stolen and then some things new. Using the planned obsolesce algorithm I would under spec the processor to something very affordable.
This meant I was on a purpose set upgrade cycle of 4-6 months. It was hoped that during this time I could accomplish two things. My wallet would grow over time and through sheer of will I would force market prices to fall. Invariably, within 4 - 6 months prices would dramatically shift and I could upgrade my rig to it's full potential.
Since those dark times my build strategy has changed and I usually just build the rig as I wish. This means that generally upgrading the processor will not yield that much performance. Even worse is that purchasing a new processor that has greater support for faster memory and newer board designs means I would under utilize it's capabilities. In essence, it's a bit wasteful to purchase just a processor because there is more under the hood then simply cycles.
There are other areas to eek out performance or substantially increase beyond the proc. There are bus speeds, memory speeds and even faster IO ports. To the extent that one waits to upgrade the divide usually widens proportionally. Sometimes they even make a fancy new DMA channel and slap on a new name.
So yes, while I could have upgraded my AM2 system to an AM3 there were substantial improvements in the design. Most notably in my case were memory speeds had doubled from my installed module. There were several other improvements, but let us just say things had improved.
My big beef is that most software doesn't cache map data.
Thus when I hit a tunnel or run through the city I can no longer receive updates and or proper directions.
It's really rather irking.
I'm not really sure mine would last hours if I left it in GPS mode either. It's quite the drain.
Pfft, I don't even read.
Not if you hit it with a bat first or use a lid.
Even dismissing core overhead and other details you did not mention there are still some wildly important facts to remember.
Only modern games have been designed to take advantage of multi-processor systems. There is also a scaling factor which needs to be considered on an engine by engine basis.
I believe valve only recently made updates to the hl2 engine which optimize for greater then four core systems. While you could vary well purchase a dual proc host and fit it with 4 or 6 core processors the engine may not be able to scale on greater then 2 to 4 threads.
At one point the multi-core support wasn't so hot and I had to disable it on my dual core system. Again, this is an application by application basis and not all experiences will be equal. Certainly, in the future we can assume most newer systems will utilize the hardware better, but it is no guarantee for today.
7mbit is now available in most places and 12 in others. However, it is Qwest DSL and they love node interleaving so the latency is awful. (Not as bad as wireless providers, but orders of the magnitude slower then cable).
Now, get into Comcast territory and the bandwidth is significantly better.
Bad idea.
It's a bad idea for the same reason they don't want to host a a dos executable anymore.
Even if some strange reason the text could not be retrieved from a binary blob (which is not likely) the application still works today.
A single command line wild card search would re-dump the text which could be parsed and stored in a simple database.
Definitely an easy re-write.
Just going to be painful to re-enter all that data if they can't use the original binary blob.
Long time ago I had a programming segment regarding binary blobs. Basically, unknown data structures within a binary. Provided they used no encryption it should be relatively painless to extract the data. It was trivial then and now I'm way better.
That is the only reason I'm thinking about getting it.
I want to make Milo afraid.... very afraid.
However, it's likely a series of gimmicks and/or vaporware. This is Microsoft ware referring to after all. Any product that looks like it might be substantially interesting does not generally exist. This isn't trolling when you consider the historical significance.