Not yet anyway, unless you count customer's cheapness and laziness and a legit reason for thier monopoly. There isn't a God damned thing that 80% or 90% percent of the things people out there do that they can't do on a Mac. They're just too cheap and lazy to get one.
And if Microsoft does have a monopoly, I say so the fuck what? You people gave it to them when you let them side on the whole trial thing (you people being 99% of America). You don't like it? Tough. You sold yourselve for the $499 dollar PC, and Microsoft was buying. Now that the transaction's over, it's too late for a refund.
I guess I'm bitter because it's getting harder and harder to sell people a decent computer (at least in America) because all people care about is getting it cheap, and they never once stop to think of the consequences of all those dirt cheap computers and all that free tech support. As a technician I'm getting screwed hard by these people. They don't want to buy a good computer from me and then pay me for my time when it breaks and I service it (or buy a service contract so they don't have to pay whenever something breaks). They want their cheap Dell with it's 24 hour free support that just tells you to call Microsoft. Then they fume and moan and bitch, buy a Gateway and get the same crap from a different company. Well, fuck those people. I say they'll get what they deserve in the long run, it's just too bad I'm going down with them....
If I transmitt my copyrighted works over my ISP's network, do they have a right to keep that data on file if it just went through their server's cache? I know, it's a moot point. They'll be exceptions for this sort of thing and it doesn't have any practical meaning (aside from the occasional sys admin skimming data), but it's fun to annoy bueracrats with this kinda question:).
lots of companies monitor traffic on the standard ports and block web sites, but most lazy sys admins won't lock things down tight enough that you can't just ssh into your home box and do what ever you want, unmonitored no less:).
I was looking forward to GB and GBC games _finally_ droping in price a bit (you'll still plunk down $30 bucks for a MegaMan game at a lot of places). When I bought my GBA, I was looking forward to lots of cheap, $5 dollar games. These days I'm lucky to find something for $15....
what ever else you have to say about Starwars, it's not a marketing vehicle.
Proof #1: When the first movie hit they gave out cardboard 'early bird' action figure stands because the real figures weren't ready. The real figures weren't ready because nobody had really planned/intended merchandise.
Proof #2: All of Ep2. What marketing department in it's right mind would let that slip. Ignoring the quality of the movie (which is subjective), you can't ignore one simple fact: It wasn't a children's movie! That's fine, but EPI _was_. I don't give a rat's behind about Lucas' vision at that point, I just know he wasn't a very good director anymore. He can't even keep the tone of an immediate sequal simular. Everything else I could forgive (even Natile Portman's soul searingly bad acting), but not this.
it's up to Microsoft to fix it. You're drasically underestimate the value of punting your tough support calls to Microsoft. Remember, people are simple, stupid creatures, and will usually blame the last person/thing in a chain of events. For most users, Microsoft is the final destination, and so they soak up all the hatred/blame.
when their's Ebay? I'm serious. I just bought 30 CDs for ~$100 dollars (expensive japanese CDs no less). At 10 songs average (give or take) that's ~300 songs or ~.33 cents a song. Beats the hell out of iTunes. Yeah, you can't get everything one ebay, but you can't get everything on iTunes either. And I've got liner art, lyrics, and high quality pressed CDs that aren't nearly as susceptible to bit rot.
I guess it's nice getting _exactly_ the song you want, but still, I just don't get the appeal of iTunes. Unless the content providers start craming it down our throats by phasing out CDs (yeah, they probably will), I can't see it as being more than a passing fad after the novelty wears off.
does what you want. You use a hosts file (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, and no, I don't know why the fsck it's there either) to redirect IPs to the loopback addy (search around google, there's lots of good hosts files if you trust the poeple making them:) ). Combine that with a program like spywareblaster that registers Windows Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) for known spyware. If your program's GUID is already registered, it won't install. Those two things + firefox + thunderbird + patches has kept even my Mom spyware free.
I'm serious. My favorite 'SoA were dicks' story was how Working designs was selling memory cards (they got tired of people with cheap, faulty cards calling their support line bitching about lost saves) and Sega calls 'em up and says: "hey, you're not licensed to do that, stop". So Working Designs (which, you will remember, was a pretty important 3rd party dev.) says" "that's fine, how do we get licensed?". To which Sega more or less replied: "You don't".
Then there's how they were discourging fighters from being ported because they didn't want the competition for VF2. Which was just stupid. There was no competition for VF2, short of Tekken 3...
So while Sega was busy being dicks to their 3rd party devs, Sony was raking in the dough from license fees. What I really can't fathom is how Sega made this mistake. This was a company that used to run adds in VG&CE and Gamepro showing off how many 3rd party games the Genesis had. This was the company that got it's ass kicked by Nintendo because Nintendo locked in all the top 3rd parties.
Then there was a ton of infighting between SoA and SoJ over the next gen console. SoA wanted to run with a 32x+CD based system (ala the TurboDuo, yes, it was that bad an idea). Or maybe it was just a cartridge system, I can't remember. Either way they wanted to get people on an upgrade path. SoJ of course wanted Saturn.
Finnally, no rant about the Saturn would be complete without mentioning the second SH-2 that couldn't access memory while the other one did. Wanna know what made the Saturn such a bitch to program? Try hand coding Virtual Fighter 2 in assembly so you could use both processors sometime (no joke, it really is all hand coded assm. I guess that's why the UI is so basic).
What I've read online blames one Bernie Stolar for the whole mess. All I know is he's pretty universially revialed among hardcore Sega fans. You'll notice he was canned around the time of the Dreamcast (and unfortunately walked away with a Golden Parachute). Too little, to late I guess.
it was brilliant really. By discouraging people from identifying with the people who make the games and instead encouraging them to identify with the publisher (Atari, EA, etc), you make it easy to replace programmers without alienating your fanbase or risking costly employee defections. After all, John Carmack can more or less decide his working conditions, but who (besides/. gaming geeks) knows the people behind FarCry, or Painkiller, or Morrowind or Arcanum? Who would follow these people to thier next gig that wasn't a sequal?
To be fair, there's some 'bad apples' who've made a name for themselves (John Romero, Derek Smart). But there's still remarkably little credit given to the poeple making our games (Shigiru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima not withstanding, and the don't work for EA). What gaming programmers need is something like the Director's Guild to get people thinking about them as individuals and not just teams working for EA.
Burn the disk as an effigy of Greg Fischbach....
on
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· Score: 0, Troll
you dumbass. Man, you can't even troll right. to quote:
effigy
1. A crude figure or dummy representing a hated person or group.
but Urban Chaos was one of the worst games ever made, down there with Superman 64. The rest of their games looked like movie licenses, and from what I've read that's a bad market to be in (you get screwed as a game dev in order to ship on time for the movie/tv/whatever).
they hired 5 new execs and fired 100 employees. i.e. 5 new suits whos only job is to make sure everyone's working, and 100 less people to actually work...
and it's still crap. If your argument holds, i.e. that anything a business does is OK so long as it's good for shareholder value, then the stock market is inheriently evil, because it's always more profitable to abuse people than to be a good guy (nice guys don't finish last, but they don't come in first either).
This is were responsible governments step in to mitigate the evil, and where the American gov't steps in to encourage it.
widespread deaths do. The American Middle class is a direct result of casualties from WWII. Exporting American consumerism is useless. Consumerism does have it's pluses (it's keeps the masses of stupid, evil people busy buying crap instead of burning witches and whatnot), but it only works when there are labor shortages. Otherwise capitalism runs wild with globalism and you get a disturbing equalibrium of shifting capital that keeps everyone poor until the next big population crash.
households with a limited amount of space/tvs. When I was a kid, we weren't exactly rich, and the neat thing about my Gameboy was I didn't have to wait till the family TV was free to play it:).
who get put on the list by friends and family? Grandma Miffy can't say no? Put her on the do no call list so she stops wasting her Social Security checks on junk.
Besides, with most call centers in India/Indonesia/Malaysia/etc, it becomes cost effective even with only a 1% or so return. When you're paying someone 35 cents/hr. to do phone calls, you don't need a lot of business.
unless Microsoft does a 180, Longhorn is going to be OEM only. Least ways that's the rumor, and it seems pretty plausible given that they won the antitrust case.
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how much is a corrupt, rigged election worth. More than 2.6 million, I'd wager.
Not yet anyway, unless you count customer's cheapness and laziness and a legit reason for thier monopoly. There isn't a God damned thing that 80% or 90% percent of the things people out there do that they can't do on a Mac. They're just too cheap and lazy to get one.
And if Microsoft does have a monopoly, I say so the fuck what? You people gave it to them when you let them side on the whole trial thing (you people being 99% of America). You don't like it? Tough. You sold yourselve for the $499 dollar PC, and Microsoft was buying. Now that the transaction's over, it's too late for a refund.
I guess I'm bitter because it's getting harder and harder to sell people a decent computer (at least in America) because all people care about is getting it cheap, and they never once stop to think of the consequences of all those dirt cheap computers and all that free tech support. As a technician I'm getting screwed hard by these people. They don't want to buy a good computer from me and then pay me for my time when it breaks and I service it (or buy a service contract so they don't have to pay whenever something breaks). They want their cheap Dell with it's 24 hour free support that just tells you to call Microsoft. Then they fume and moan and bitch, buy a Gateway and get the same crap from a different company. Well, fuck those people. I say they'll get what they deserve in the long run, it's just too bad I'm going down with them....
If I transmitt my copyrighted works over my ISP's network, do they have a right to keep that data on file if it just went through their server's cache? I know, it's a moot point. They'll be exceptions for this sort of thing and it doesn't have any practical meaning (aside from the occasional sys admin skimming data), but it's fun to annoy bueracrats with this kinda question :).
lots of companies monitor traffic on the standard ports and block web sites, but most lazy sys admins won't lock things down tight enough that you can't just ssh into your home box and do what ever you want, unmonitored no less :).
I was looking forward to GB and GBC games _finally_ droping in price a bit (you'll still plunk down $30 bucks for a MegaMan game at a lot of places). When I bought my GBA, I was looking forward to lots of cheap, $5 dollar games. These days I'm lucky to find something for $15....
what ever else you have to say about Starwars, it's not a marketing vehicle.
Proof #1: When the first movie hit they gave out cardboard 'early bird' action figure stands because the real figures weren't ready. The real figures weren't ready because nobody had really planned/intended merchandise.
Proof #2: All of Ep2. What marketing department in it's right mind would let that slip. Ignoring the quality of the movie (which is subjective), you can't ignore one simple fact: It wasn't a children's movie! That's fine, but EPI _was_. I don't give a rat's behind about Lucas' vision at that point, I just know he wasn't a very good director anymore. He can't even keep the tone of an immediate sequal simular. Everything else I could forgive (even Natile Portman's soul searingly bad acting), but not this.
it's up to Microsoft to fix it. You're drasically underestimate the value of punting your tough support calls to Microsoft. Remember, people are simple, stupid creatures, and will usually blame the last person/thing in a chain of events. For most users, Microsoft is the final destination, and so they soak up all the hatred/blame.
when their's Ebay? I'm serious. I just bought 30 CDs for ~$100 dollars (expensive japanese CDs no less). At 10 songs average (give or take) that's ~300 songs or ~.33 cents a song. Beats the hell out of iTunes. Yeah, you can't get everything one ebay, but you can't get everything on iTunes either. And I've got liner art, lyrics, and high quality pressed CDs that aren't nearly as susceptible to bit rot.
I guess it's nice getting _exactly_ the song you want, but still, I just don't get the appeal of iTunes. Unless the content providers start craming it down our throats by phasing out CDs (yeah, they probably will), I can't see it as being more than a passing fad after the novelty wears off.
does what you want. You use a hosts file (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, and no, I don't know why the fsck it's there either) to redirect IPs to the loopback addy (search around google, there's lots of good hosts files if you trust the poeple making them :) ). Combine that with a program like spywareblaster that registers Windows Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) for known spyware. If your program's GUID is already registered, it won't install. Those two things + firefox + thunderbird + patches has kept even my Mom spyware free.
What, this far into a Starwars thread and nobody's made a "Han shoots first" crack? Come 'on /., I'm disappointed.
there's cash money to be made selling virtual stuff.
I'm serious. My favorite 'SoA were dicks' story was how Working designs was selling memory cards (they got tired of people with cheap, faulty cards calling their support line bitching about lost saves) and Sega calls 'em up and says: "hey, you're not licensed to do that, stop". So Working Designs (which, you will remember, was a pretty important 3rd party dev.) says" "that's fine, how do we get licensed?". To which Sega more or less replied: "You don't".
Then there's how they were discourging fighters from being ported because they didn't want the competition for VF2. Which was just stupid. There was no competition for VF2, short of Tekken 3...
So while Sega was busy being dicks to their 3rd party devs, Sony was raking in the dough from license fees. What I really can't fathom is how Sega made this mistake. This was a company that used to run adds in VG&CE and Gamepro showing off how many 3rd party games the Genesis had. This was the company that got it's ass kicked by Nintendo because Nintendo locked in all the top 3rd parties.
Then there was a ton of infighting between SoA and SoJ over the next gen console. SoA wanted to run with a 32x+CD based system (ala the TurboDuo, yes, it was that bad an idea). Or maybe it was just a cartridge system, I can't remember. Either way they wanted to get people on an upgrade path. SoJ of course wanted Saturn.
Finnally, no rant about the Saturn would be complete without mentioning the second SH-2 that couldn't access memory while the other one did. Wanna know what made the Saturn such a bitch to program? Try hand coding Virtual Fighter 2 in assembly so you could use both processors sometime (no joke, it really is all hand coded assm. I guess that's why the UI is so basic).
What I've read online blames one Bernie Stolar for the whole mess. All I know is he's pretty universially revialed among hardcore Sega fans. You'll notice he was canned around the time of the Dreamcast (and unfortunately walked away with a Golden Parachute). Too little, to late I guess.
it was brilliant really. By discouraging people from identifying with the people who make the games and instead encouraging them to identify with the publisher (Atari, EA, etc), you make it easy to replace programmers without alienating your fanbase or risking costly employee defections. After all, John Carmack can more or less decide his working conditions, but who (besides /. gaming geeks) knows the people behind FarCry, or Painkiller, or Morrowind or Arcanum? Who would follow these people to thier next gig that wasn't a sequal?
To be fair, there's some 'bad apples' who've made a name for themselves (John Romero, Derek Smart). But there's still remarkably little credit given to the poeple making our games (Shigiru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima not withstanding, and the don't work for EA). What gaming programmers need is something like the Director's Guild to get people thinking about them as individuals and not just teams working for EA.
you dumbass. Man, you can't even troll right. to quote:
effigy
1. A crude figure or dummy representing a hated person or group.
2. A likeness or image, especially of a person.
Use your imagination for the rest.
but Urban Chaos was one of the worst games ever made, down there with Superman 64. The rest of their games looked like movie licenses, and from what I've read that's a bad market to be in (you get screwed as a game dev in order to ship on time for the movie/tv/whatever).
they hired 5 new execs and fired 100 employees. i.e. 5 new suits whos only job is to make sure everyone's working, and 100 less people to actually work...
And a still wiser man has better things to do than correct grammer on /. .
but as a wise man once said when asked why he didn't leave, I say back:
"because I don't want to be a victim of it's foreign policy".
and it's still crap. If your argument holds, i.e. that anything a business does is OK so long as it's good for shareholder value, then the stock market is inheriently evil, because it's always more profitable to abuse people than to be a good guy (nice guys don't finish last, but they don't come in first either).
This is were responsible governments step in to mitigate the evil, and where the American gov't steps in to encourage it.
widespread deaths do. The American Middle class is a direct result of casualties from WWII. Exporting American consumerism is useless. Consumerism does have it's pluses (it's keeps the masses of stupid, evil people busy buying crap instead of burning witches and whatnot), but it only works when there are labor shortages. Otherwise capitalism runs wild with globalism and you get a disturbing equalibrium of shifting capital that keeps everyone poor until the next big population crash.
households with a limited amount of space/tvs. When I was a kid, we weren't exactly rich, and the neat thing about my Gameboy was I didn't have to wait till the family TV was free to play it :).
it was worth the effort :).
who get put on the list by friends and family? Grandma Miffy can't say no? Put her on the do no call list so she stops wasting her Social Security checks on junk.
Besides, with most call centers in India/Indonesia/Malaysia/etc, it becomes cost effective even with only a 1% or so return. When you're paying someone 35 cents/hr. to do phone calls, you don't need a lot of business.
there are actually only 8 non violent games left in the industry, so one had to be listed twice. They where hoping nobody would notice...
unless Microsoft does a 180, Longhorn is going to be OEM only. Least ways that's the rumor, and it seems pretty plausible given that they won the antitrust case.