because the make less money on it. The saving they make by removing those features in manufacture is way less than the amount they lose by selling you the cheap, rather than expensive PS3.
As with the 360, the reason the cheap model exists is so they can advertise a lower price and pull consumers in - once you're hooked the want you to buy the expensive one. Same thing as in car adverts the new blah blah from £x (but if you want one that looks like the one in the advert you'll need to stump up more).
It costs them more to keep the supply chain fed with two products rather than one and it pisses off the consumer (I had a hard time last year tracking down a premium 360, whilst core systems were dripping off the shelves).
but that's it. The main problem with it is the lack of citations on facts. Now I understand why they're not included, I couldn't be bothered when I added information to it, so I can't expect other people to.
Actually re-reading the story I don't think the administration is being harsh, or wikipedia is being 'bad' - I think the students writing the papers were just offensively lazy and stupid. By all means read wikipedia, but only use information linked by citation to a reputable source - and then cite that source.
my current XP Pro installation is from a 'super-multi-build' boot iso I torrented, installed with an enterprise serial 'borrowed' from a large international and has been modified with an even dodgier 'covert XP to MCE' ISO.
It's happily sailed through every single WGA validation check - I really couldn't believe MS accepted the same serial that had magically moved from XP to MCE...
But anyway - reason I put XP enterprise on wasn't that I wasn't entitled to XP, I just couldn't be arsed dealing with validation (I am a hardware whore). Reason I went to MCE was I wanted to connect my machine to my 360 and seemingly MS didn't trust me to build a decent platform myself and let me buy a license/upgrade.
Just to summarize, by not letting any authorized disks near my machine, I've had absolutely no trouble at all and everything has working just swimmingly.
The annoying thing is that I want Vista. I want to buy Vista. The price in the UK is £352.49 for Ultimate on a DVD (from the first place I checked, no idea what the retail is) - that's $696...
I can buy an f'in Dell with Vista for less than that.
If anybody in MS happens to be strolling past this thread, might I suggest, you sell the retail stuff for a sum in the realms of reality? £50 for basic £100 for super-duper? I know it's not as much as you want Bill, but it's £100 more than you're going to get from me currently - and I can't be the only one. An amnesty? I'm open to suggestions..
Who's supposed to be buying the full price copies anyway? The people with a machine capable of running it nicely resent the price - the people who're going to end up with vista are the people blindly stabbing configs on the Dell site as their children are taking the mickey out of their PII
As somebody not prepared to pay the ~$700 for an official serial number, I shall be remaining on my currently working XP. But, please, please, I want to upgrade. I've defended MS in the face of the $100 point releases from Apple.. I want to love it, I truly do..
To summarize, for the first time, I've turned on MS. If I'd been bitten by WGA I'd have raised my hands installed the serial I was supposed to be using - but felt morally fine. MS had a license sale and I, the customer, was happy with my OS. I'm not paying $700 and I'm not having Vista WGA 'catching me out' - I'm staying where I am (and seeing what Apple'll do with the nice hardware Vista's bringing onto the market).
matching a hash to a hash isn't a huge CPU intensive task - and serving 32-bit isn't going to clobber your bandwidth. You can host that site anywhere and flcik your fingers at DMCA.
but that just makes it clear how much simpler it'd be just to grab the music in mp3/flc from usenet/torrent/allofmp3 in the first place (and only get one lot of lossy encoding).
Apple could quite easily add a 'convert to mp3 and lose some quality' button on iTunes. They don't - as the record labels wouldn't let them (and Apple want to keep you on their iPods). Labels are trying to tie me to DRM, Apple is trying to tie me to iTunes - it's in neither of their interests to make life any easier for me - they win, I suffer trying to play their game.
The quite ridiculous thing is if I bought that music on the shiny plastic disk, I have it at full quality to do with as I wish. Now I sit back and think about it the entire online music system seems to be a way of taxing the lazy and impulsive. That's it.
is that you can't just run the program to decrypt all your Blu-Ray(or HD-DVD) disks, you need to locate the key and use that to get the unprotected data.
This sounds like a right pain in the arse. I'm used to buying DVDs willy-nilly and just shoving films onto servers, PSPs, iPods, XBMC etc as the mood takes me. It always works, I just press a couple of buttons and away I go.
Reading these stories have made me think - I'm now even less likely to buy a HD disk than I am a standard DVD. I buy a HD disk in the shop and I've now got to worry, can I get the key for this disk? will it be for the right region? will it be the right version (you can be sure once a disk is cracked they'll shove new keys on all future pressings).
I don't think I can be arsed with all this really.. much easier just to download un-encrypted and know it'll work on everything I own, forever. FFS I'd pay more for the pirate version than the legit one given the chance.
My next prediction is the appearance of a site that'll serve keys. You put your HD disk in your machine, run a util that gets a hash from it, searches online and decrypts the disk automatically.
*scampers off to register hd-keys.com*
I own an iPod.
I own music that I bought from iTunes.
If I wanted to buy a Zune (Oi - stop sniggering at the back) I'd lose all that music, so if I want to keep on playing it, I need to add the cost of re-purchase to my Zune - this keeps people buying iPods, which keeps them buying iTunes DRM etc.
I paid for that music, it's mine - why is it wrong to want to play that on my next portable music player? Why would I not want to but the best hardware next time, rather than the latest iPod?
it's very hard to define what a point release is - seeing as nobody goes back and writes code from scratch for a new OS.
I think the easiest way to look at it is not as 'new features' but re-writing existing ones 'better'. Any developer knows how easy it is to progressively add more bells and whistles to a product, and how often you just apply patch over upgrade over patch to 'just make it work'
Personally I take a proper new release to be when the functionality of the last release is frozen, the whole product is analyzed, optimized (including rebuilding parts from the start if required) and then possibly new features are added on-top.
XP maybe fell into this category, but it was more a merge of ME and Win2000. OSX v1 definitely did as it was a completely new OS. Vista does as well (Although Apple still wins in the 'most changed' for their OS9->10 shift)
I'm not a fan of MS - I just happen to use their OS. I'm not entirely sure if there's anybody who's an 'MS fan'. MS is a big and pretty much faceless corporation that doesn't really create zealots. When you're the dominant force, you don't need zealots.
The point I was trying to make was that I'm not some fan-boy wishing to bash anybody for their mere opposition. The article was pro-Apple and anti-MS, I just wanted to state I was neither of those things, but not actively hostile to either.
A new OS from Microsoft.
In the past MS have had a habit of dressing up releases (well consumer ones) as new releases, for example Win95->Win98->WinME - but they didn't do this for business systems. I think they released 6 free service packs for NT, 4 for Windows 2000 and 2 (so far) for XP.
As MS have combined the home and office flavours of OS into a single code base, I see no reason for them not to carry on as they have with XP. You buy the OS and the Service Packs/Point releases are free.
Vista is quite definitely a new OS and the list price for it (even the upgrade) isn't cheap, but assuming both Apple and MS carry on with their current practices, Apple is going to ask you for more money before MS does (if you wish to use the latest version of their product on your machine).
Just to try to keep this a little more balanced, I have noticed that Apple doesn't really bother to provide any sort of authentification into their point releases. I don't actually know of anybody (maybe I mix in the wrong circles) that bothers buying the upgrades for OSX. Personally I'd prefer to pirate point releases, than embrace some draconian authentification system that might lock me out of my machine on a whim.
Swings and roundabouts I guess, I detest Apple's business model, but the ease of which it can be circumvented does seem the nicer of the two options.
If you currently implement something in your game that uses a DX10 only feature, it's going to hammer any
When MS announce DX10 it doesn't mean games should immediately use it and therefore we should all upgrade are GPUs, it's merely an indication of what nVidia and ATI should start putting in silicon.
They'll be the odd game that wants DX10, they'll be the off £500 GPU that supports it, but it's just a pointer for the way the industry should go.
In a couple of years time every $100 GPU will support DX10 and so the games produced will use it. People might bitch and moan, but this is the model that's managed to pull PC graphics from DOS to what we can have today.
It's like comparing locking your front door with a key or a pin-code.
Key's a physical object you can physically protect. Pin Code doesn't have to be carried which is both a benefit and a disadvantage.
It's quite interesting actually. Pretty much everybody locks their house with a physical token (a key) and accesses online services with pin/password - and consider this is secure.
If you reversed it, they'd be convinced somebody else would guess, brute-force their front door and would complain about carrying around an RSA token for every site they use (Paypal have just started to introduce tokens and I bet the take-up is pathetic)
I'm completely agree that the game itself isn't a technical masterpiece - but that's how we used to look at paintings. High art used to be photorealistic, then impressionistic, then abstract - painters (and their reviewers) no longer rank based on technical ability. Jeff Koons has an idea, somebody makes it reality and that's credited as his 'art' and has a price-tag to match.
Literature, if you look at Irvine Welsh, it's not 'Queen's English' it's like impressionism, it's thousands of words sprayed to convey more than the actual narrative they contain.
Now I'm not for a second saying that a poorly designed or implemented game deserves play-time based upon it's provocative title and mediocre content - but even without playing it, you must agree that its existence has expanded the perceived range of the medium?
I fully realize that I've gone off on one here, but I just wanted to point out that this game has contributed more to 'games' that some random Fifa/Madded '04 game that we may enjoy at the time, but leaves us with the next yearly update.
This game has made an impact and could only have come from the Indie scene of one guy and a compiler. If this doesn't count, then I've no idea why the competition existed in the first place.
1) "To get the full benefits of Vista, especially the new look and user interface, which is called Aero, you will need a hefty new computer, or a hefty one that you purchased fairly recently. The vast majority of existing Windows PCs won't be able to use all of Vista's features without major hardware upgrades. They will be able to run only a stripped-down version, and even then may run very slowly"
Yes, it's the revolutionary fact that a more resource-intensive piece of software works better on more powerful hardware.
2) "A third version, called Ultimate, will wrap up everything in Home Premium with some additional features from the business versions of Vista. This is for power users, and it is likely to be preloaded on high-end PCs. But some regular users may need Vista Ultimate if their companies have particular network configurations that make it impossible to connect to the company network from home with Home Basic or Home Premium"
Seemingly MS have dropped an IP stack from the basic versions it would seem. WTF is he blabbering on about, I'm not starting to feel a bit punchy towards this 'Walt' fellah.
3) "Even if you buy the Home Premium or Ultimate editions, Vista will revert to the Basic features if it detects that your machine is too wimpy to run the new user interface."
Shiiiiiiit, I was really hoping Aero would run on my old P2. I mean how dare MS turn off Aero in an attempt to make the experience usable.
4) "For most users who want Vista, I strongly recommend buying a new PC with the new operating system preloaded. I wouldn't even consider trying to upgrade a computer older than 18 months"
He's working for Dell right? So far the pitch seems to be that Vista looks lovely, but don't you dare try to comprehend computers for yourself.
5)"Microsoft says that Home Basic can run on a PC with half a gigabyte of memory and that Premium and Ultimate will work on a PC with one gigabyte of memory. I strongly advise doubling those numbers"
Yes - MS have said 'it will work'. I must bow before your almighty insight that my shoving in some more RAM it'll be 'better'
6)"Microsoft says Vista is much more secure than any other operating system. But this is hard to prove, especially at the beginning of its life, when few hackers and malefactors have access to it."
Fook - seemingly I'm a hacker now. Oh no, MS sent me a link to download the f'in ISO. Poor Walt, he seems so excited at his first l33t glimpse. Please, nobody tell him Vista wasn't a bit secret, he's clearly dreaming of his Pulitzer here.
7) "But unlike the Mac version, the Vista version of this permission feature doesn't necessarily require you to type in a password, so a stranger or a child using your PC could grant permission for something you yourself might not allow"
Yes yes, it doesn't force you to set a password. Nor does it force you not to leave your uber-ninja PC sitting out in the middle of the road overnight. Not setting a password is just an option, extra options are usually considered to be good.
Oh I give up now.... htf did this make it as a story? Nothing new, no insight, no WSJ access..
Most games are sold as pure entertainment, they may have a historical theme, but usually that's just to add colour and to bring with it an implied back-story.
When somebody sits down to write a game called Columbine RPG, they're doing something different - they're provoking people. Provocation isn't good or bad though, basically just makes people think.
Now I don't know if this was the intention of the games author, but is has made people think a lot more about the content of their games. Germany bans a game for blood and we ridicule them. We spend an evening slaughtering thousands of 'space aliens' or 'WW2 germans' and we shrug it off, it doesn't register what we're doing represents. We are jaded by it all
A game like this gives us a kick up the back-side and makes people feel uncomfortable. We have to explain why we think one thing is right and the other isn't (and people seem to be having difficulty with this). This is a good thing. This is art.
Games whatever people might wish to think aren't even touching emotional depth. Oh we may all post about how we felt when Aeris died, but ffs, compare this to literature and it's nothing. The emotional peaks in games are so few, that we trumpet every single mediocre one of them. Well here's another one, just as valid, just a different type.
CDs are read from the inside out as well. A noise you can here is the CD head being moved, but that should move no more than it does for a GD-ROM.
The different noise you hear when putting in a CD-R is normally the drive trying to continually re-focus the laser on the disk to read it (laser is tuned to GD, not CDR).
You could usually get around this by burning your disks slower, using a CD with a different dye, tweaking the Pots (or a combination of all).
and Novell ends up with the power to block or license the technique of DRM to anybody it sees fit
Why exactly are we convinced that Novell will just bury the technique and shield us from DRM forever?
Novell is a publicly owned company and has a duty (legally) to earn money for their shareholders. I cannot see of a situation where they'd make more by sitting on it, than they would by licensing it - If I was a shareholder in a company that got this patent, I'd want them to make me money.
Whatever their intentions are going into this , unless they produce a cast-iron legally binding document promising otherwise, this just means that all DRM will have another kick-back to Novell on it.
as our brains provide very fuzzy solutions to problems and tend to just think about what we have to do, rather than handling all eventualities.
I talk to a customer and come away with an idea of what they want to do.
I write a High Level Design - and it makes sense and everybody is happy. I've basically just written down how we think.
The tricky part starts when you break it down to the low level. The questions start to come up:
What happens if that's that?
How do we stop X
If we have Y & Z htf do we calculate blah (without locking the db for a week)
Now when you think you've got the low level you then still forget stuff, implement a feature in a less than idea way blah blah.
Then the spec changes and you through band-aids all over the code.
Oh I could babble on for hours about this.
Another way of looking at it is to think of Chess. The objective is simple - to win with check-mate. The rules are simple - this piece can do this, this one can do this. The problem comes with the bit you have to fill in in the middle. The all but infinite permutations are there, so there is rarely ever a 'right' answer at any point. Some options are obviously better than others, but at most points you can never definitely say that was the absolutely best option. Pulling customers back into it, if you suddenly find a piece 20 moves back's just been fiddled with, you're screwed.
Just one last mention of customers, they often get a harsh deal from developers. Developers only see a small part of what customers actually 'do' - but tend to walk away assuming they know everything. Most bugs seem to arise when assumptions are made by the developer.
IPTV is starting to ramp up as more networks switch/unbundle up to IPTV. All those IPTV customers need to buy set-top boxes and hook these up to their router somehow. A 360 with a wifi dongle isn't excessively expensive, take off the cost of the STB that it's replacing, take off a bit for the numbers the networks will shift, take off the undoubtedly good reduction MS will give to get their box into MILLIONS of living rooms.
Few people have mentioned that 20Gig isn't enough got PVR. Well it isn't and Zephyr will fix that a bit. However anybody who has connected their 360 to a MCE machine will know it just works as a thin client - my TV tuner is in the PC, my HD is in the PC, but I can record, pause blah blah from the 360. No reason the same technique couldn't be used here - either stream IPTV from your PC to the 360 for display, archive off to the PC as needed or just pipe the paused/recorded content to a handy MCE/Vista machine on the network.
First of all Apple refused to sign any OEM deals at all - if you want Apple hardware it comes with OSX installed. Try ordering it with XP instead, or without an OS as all (and the $50 rebate Dell will actually give you).
Secondly, Apple authorized resellers have evil restrictions on what they can/can't sell. I had a chat to my local one a bit ago at a time of iPod shortage. Apple really didn't want him to sell PC stuff, and those that fell out of favour (for whatever reason) suddenly found they were last on the allocation list for limited supply stock.
Apple have simultaneously treated their indie sellers like shit, causing a number of them to close, whilst simultaneously rolling out their own boutiques. Apple now do the hardware, the software and the retailing via their site and shops - htf can you then turn round and say Apple doesn't have a monopoly?
it just happens to be the case.
Your electronics are assembled in China as the labour costs are lower there. In the few cases where labour intensive, low pay areas where work has to be done onsite in the US (or your Western Country of choice), food growing, harvesting, preparation, construction, domestic etc etc, you get a high proportion of illegal labour to keep the costs down.
It's not a valid argument, it's just a truth and a result of market pressures (risk of financial loss due to illegal being found is less than the financial gain from employing an illegal).
In the EU we have a strange effect due to the expansion to the East, where highly skilled people are coming into the UK to do low paid work (i.e. Polish lawyer mixing cocktails in your local bar). Now this makes me feel a bit uncomfortable as well - but everybody seems to be happy with the situation (well apart from our local right-wing parties and the unskilled unemployed).
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because the make less money on it. The saving they make by removing those features in manufacture is way less than the amount they lose by selling you the cheap, rather than expensive PS3.
As with the 360, the reason the cheap model exists is so they can advertise a lower price and pull consumers in - once you're hooked the want you to buy the expensive one. Same thing as in car adverts the new blah blah from £x (but if you want one that looks like the one in the advert you'll need to stump up more).
It costs them more to keep the supply chain fed with two products rather than one and it pisses off the consumer (I had a hard time last year tracking down a premium 360, whilst core systems were dripping off the shelves).
but that's it. The main problem with it is the lack of citations on facts. Now I understand why they're not included, I couldn't be bothered when I added information to it, so I can't expect other people to.
Actually re-reading the story I don't think the administration is being harsh, or wikipedia is being 'bad' - I think the students writing the papers were just offensively lazy and stupid. By all means read wikipedia, but only use information linked by citation to a reputable source - and then cite that source.
my current XP Pro installation is from a 'super-multi-build' boot iso I torrented, installed with an enterprise serial 'borrowed' from a large international and has been modified with an even dodgier 'covert XP to MCE' ISO.
It's happily sailed through every single WGA validation check - I really couldn't believe MS accepted the same serial that had magically moved from XP to MCE...
But anyway - reason I put XP enterprise on wasn't that I wasn't entitled to XP, I just couldn't be arsed dealing with validation (I am a hardware whore). Reason I went to MCE was I wanted to connect my machine to my 360 and seemingly MS didn't trust me to build a decent platform myself and let me buy a license/upgrade.
Just to summarize, by not letting any authorized disks near my machine, I've had absolutely no trouble at all and everything has working just swimmingly.
The annoying thing is that I want Vista. I want to buy Vista. The price in the UK is £352.49 for Ultimate on a DVD (from the first place I checked, no idea what the retail is) - that's $696...
I can buy an f'in Dell with Vista for less than that.
If anybody in MS happens to be strolling past this thread, might I suggest, you sell the retail stuff for a sum in the realms of reality? £50 for basic £100 for super-duper? I know it's not as much as you want Bill, but it's £100 more than you're going to get from me currently - and I can't be the only one. An amnesty? I'm open to suggestions..
Who's supposed to be buying the full price copies anyway? The people with a machine capable of running it nicely resent the price - the people who're going to end up with vista are the people blindly stabbing configs on the Dell site as their children are taking the mickey out of their PII
As somebody not prepared to pay the ~$700 for an official serial number, I shall be remaining on my currently working XP. But, please, please, I want to upgrade. I've defended MS in the face of the $100 point releases from Apple.. I want to love it, I truly do..
To summarize, for the first time, I've turned on MS. If I'd been bitten by WGA I'd have raised my hands installed the serial I was supposed to be using - but felt morally fine. MS had a license sale and I, the customer, was happy with my OS. I'm not paying $700 and I'm not having Vista WGA 'catching me out' - I'm staying where I am (and seeing what Apple'll do with the nice hardware Vista's bringing onto the market).
matching a hash to a hash isn't a huge CPU intensive task - and serving 32-bit isn't going to clobber your bandwidth. You can host that site anywhere and flcik your fingers at DMCA.
Ah well, best of luck to him.
but that just makes it clear how much simpler it'd be just to grab the music in mp3/flc from usenet/torrent/allofmp3 in the first place (and only get one lot of lossy encoding).
Apple could quite easily add a 'convert to mp3 and lose some quality' button on iTunes. They don't - as the record labels wouldn't let them (and Apple want to keep you on their iPods). Labels are trying to tie me to DRM, Apple is trying to tie me to iTunes - it's in neither of their interests to make life any easier for me - they win, I suffer trying to play their game.
The quite ridiculous thing is if I bought that music on the shiny plastic disk, I have it at full quality to do with as I wish. Now I sit back and think about it the entire online music system seems to be a way of taxing the lazy and impulsive. That's it.
is that you can't just run the program to decrypt all your Blu-Ray(or HD-DVD) disks, you need to locate the key and use that to get the unprotected data.
This sounds like a right pain in the arse. I'm used to buying DVDs willy-nilly and just shoving films onto servers, PSPs, iPods, XBMC etc as the mood takes me. It always works, I just press a couple of buttons and away I go.
Reading these stories have made me think - I'm now even less likely to buy a HD disk than I am a standard DVD. I buy a HD disk in the shop and I've now got to worry, can I get the key for this disk? will it be for the right region? will it be the right version (you can be sure once a disk is cracked they'll shove new keys on all future pressings).
I don't think I can be arsed with all this really.. much easier just to download un-encrypted and know it'll work on everything I own, forever. FFS I'd pay more for the pirate version than the legit one given the chance.
My next prediction is the appearance of a site that'll serve keys. You put your HD disk in your machine, run a util that gets a hash from it, searches online and decrypts the disk automatically.
*scampers off to register hd-keys.com*
I own an iPod.
I own music that I bought from iTunes.
If I wanted to buy a Zune (Oi - stop sniggering at the back) I'd lose all that music, so if I want to keep on playing it, I need to add the cost of re-purchase to my Zune - this keeps people buying iPods, which keeps them buying iTunes DRM etc.
I paid for that music, it's mine - why is it wrong to want to play that on my next portable music player? Why would I not want to but the best hardware next time, rather than the latest iPod?
it's very hard to define what a point release is - seeing as nobody goes back and writes code from scratch for a new OS.
I think the easiest way to look at it is not as 'new features' but re-writing existing ones 'better'. Any developer knows how easy it is to progressively add more bells and whistles to a product, and how often you just apply patch over upgrade over patch to 'just make it work'
Personally I take a proper new release to be when the functionality of the last release is frozen, the whole product is analyzed, optimized (including rebuilding parts from the start if required) and then possibly new features are added on-top.
XP maybe fell into this category, but it was more a merge of ME and Win2000. OSX v1 definitely did as it was a completely new OS. Vista does as well (Although Apple still wins in the 'most changed' for their OS9->10 shift)
I'm not a fan of MS - I just happen to use their OS. I'm not entirely sure if there's anybody who's an 'MS fan'. MS is a big and pretty much faceless corporation that doesn't really create zealots. When you're the dominant force, you don't need zealots.
The point I was trying to make was that I'm not some fan-boy wishing to bash anybody for their mere opposition. The article was pro-Apple and anti-MS, I just wanted to state I was neither of those things, but not actively hostile to either.
A new OS from Microsoft.
In the past MS have had a habit of dressing up releases (well consumer ones) as new releases, for example Win95->Win98->WinME - but they didn't do this for business systems. I think they released 6 free service packs for NT, 4 for Windows 2000 and 2 (so far) for XP.
As MS have combined the home and office flavours of OS into a single code base, I see no reason for them not to carry on as they have with XP. You buy the OS and the Service Packs/Point releases are free. Vista is quite definitely a new OS and the list price for it (even the upgrade) isn't cheap, but assuming both Apple and MS carry on with their current practices, Apple is going to ask you for more money before MS does (if you wish to use the latest version of their product on your machine).
Just to try to keep this a little more balanced, I have noticed that Apple doesn't really bother to provide any sort of authentification into their point releases. I don't actually know of anybody (maybe I mix in the wrong circles) that bothers buying the upgrades for OSX. Personally I'd prefer to pirate point releases, than embrace some draconian authentification system that might lock me out of my machine on a whim.
Swings and roundabouts I guess, I detest Apple's business model, but the ease of which it can be circumvented does seem the nicer of the two options.
That's last month's story.
If you currently implement something in your game that uses a DX10 only feature, it's going to hammer any When MS announce DX10 it doesn't mean games should immediately use it and therefore we should all upgrade are GPUs, it's merely an indication of what nVidia and ATI should start putting in silicon.
They'll be the odd game that wants DX10, they'll be the off £500 GPU that supports it, but it's just a pointer for the way the industry should go.
In a couple of years time every $100 GPU will support DX10 and so the games produced will use it. People might bitch and moan, but this is the model that's managed to pull PC graphics from DOS to what we can have today.
You didn't look at, or ask for the law to be changed before this happened, so quit whining when it was implemented.
It's like comparing locking your front door with a key or a pin-code.
Key's a physical object you can physically protect. Pin Code doesn't have to be carried which is both a benefit and a disadvantage.
It's quite interesting actually. Pretty much everybody locks their house with a physical token (a key) and accesses online services with pin/password - and consider this is secure.
If you reversed it, they'd be convinced somebody else would guess, brute-force their front door and would complain about carrying around an RSA token for every site they use (Paypal have just started to introduce tokens and I bet the take-up is pathetic)
I'm completely agree that the game itself isn't a technical masterpiece - but that's how we used to look at paintings. High art used to be photorealistic, then impressionistic, then abstract - painters (and their reviewers) no longer rank based on technical ability. Jeff Koons has an idea, somebody makes it reality and that's credited as his 'art' and has a price-tag to match.
Literature, if you look at Irvine Welsh, it's not 'Queen's English' it's like impressionism, it's thousands of words sprayed to convey more than the actual narrative they contain.
Now I'm not for a second saying that a poorly designed or implemented game deserves play-time based upon it's provocative title and mediocre content - but even without playing it, you must agree that its existence has expanded the perceived range of the medium?
I fully realize that I've gone off on one here, but I just wanted to point out that this game has contributed more to 'games' that some random Fifa/Madded '04 game that we may enjoy at the time, but leaves us with the next yearly update.
This game has made an impact and could only have come from the Indie scene of one guy and a compiler. If this doesn't count, then I've no idea why the competition existed in the first place.
1) "To get the full benefits of Vista, especially the new look and user interface, which is called Aero, you will need a hefty new computer, or a hefty one that you purchased fairly recently. The vast majority of existing Windows PCs won't be able to use all of Vista's features without major hardware upgrades. They will be able to run only a stripped-down version, and even then may run very slowly"
Yes, it's the revolutionary fact that a more resource-intensive piece of software works better on more powerful hardware.
2) "A third version, called Ultimate, will wrap up everything in Home Premium with some additional features from the business versions of Vista. This is for power users, and it is likely to be preloaded on high-end PCs. But some regular users may need Vista Ultimate if their companies have particular network configurations that make it impossible to connect to the company network from home with Home Basic or Home Premium"
Seemingly MS have dropped an IP stack from the basic versions it would seem. WTF is he blabbering on about, I'm not starting to feel a bit punchy towards this 'Walt' fellah.
3) "Even if you buy the Home Premium or Ultimate editions, Vista will revert to the Basic features if it detects that your machine is too wimpy to run the new user interface."
Shiiiiiiit, I was really hoping Aero would run on my old P2. I mean how dare MS turn off Aero in an attempt to make the experience usable.
4) "For most users who want Vista, I strongly recommend buying a new PC with the new operating system preloaded. I wouldn't even consider trying to upgrade a computer older than 18 months"
He's working for Dell right? So far the pitch seems to be that Vista looks lovely, but don't you dare try to comprehend computers for yourself.
5)"Microsoft says that Home Basic can run on a PC with half a gigabyte of memory and that Premium and Ultimate will work on a PC with one gigabyte of memory. I strongly advise doubling those numbers"
Yes - MS have said 'it will work'. I must bow before your almighty insight that my shoving in some more RAM it'll be 'better'
6)"Microsoft says Vista is much more secure than any other operating system. But this is hard to prove, especially at the beginning of its life, when few hackers and malefactors have access to it."
Fook - seemingly I'm a hacker now. Oh no, MS sent me a link to download the f'in ISO. Poor Walt, he seems so excited at his first l33t glimpse. Please, nobody tell him Vista wasn't a bit secret, he's clearly dreaming of his Pulitzer here.
7) "But unlike the Mac version, the Vista version of this permission feature doesn't necessarily require you to type in a password, so a stranger or a child using your PC could grant permission for something you yourself might not allow"
Yes yes, it doesn't force you to set a password. Nor does it force you not to leave your uber-ninja PC sitting out in the middle of the road overnight. Not setting a password is just an option, extra options are usually considered to be good.
Oh I give up now.... htf did this make it as a story? Nothing new, no insight, no WSJ access..
Most games are sold as pure entertainment, they may have a historical theme, but usually that's just to add colour and to bring with it an implied back-story.
When somebody sits down to write a game called Columbine RPG, they're doing something different - they're provoking people. Provocation isn't good or bad though, basically just makes people think.
Now I don't know if this was the intention of the games author, but is has made people think a lot more about the content of their games. Germany bans a game for blood and we ridicule them. We spend an evening slaughtering thousands of 'space aliens' or 'WW2 germans' and we shrug it off, it doesn't register what we're doing represents. We are jaded by it all
A game like this gives us a kick up the back-side and makes people feel uncomfortable. We have to explain why we think one thing is right and the other isn't (and people seem to be having difficulty with this). This is a good thing. This is art.
Games whatever people might wish to think aren't even touching emotional depth. Oh we may all post about how we felt when Aeris died, but ffs, compare this to literature and it's nothing. The emotional peaks in games are so few, that we trumpet every single mediocre one of them. Well here's another one, just as valid, just a different type.
CDs are read from the inside out as well. A noise you can here is the CD head being moved, but that should move no more than it does for a GD-ROM.
The different noise you hear when putting in a CD-R is normally the drive trying to continually re-focus the laser on the disk to read it (laser is tuned to GD, not CDR).
You could usually get around this by burning your disks slower, using a CD with a different dye, tweaking the Pots (or a combination of all).
For some reason I got Suse and Redhat mixed up
*smacks head into desk*
and Novell ends up with the power to block or license the technique of DRM to anybody it sees fit
Why exactly are we convinced that Novell will just bury the technique and shield us from DRM forever?
Novell is a publicly owned company and has a duty (legally) to earn money for their shareholders. I cannot see of a situation where they'd make more by sitting on it, than they would by licensing it - If I was a shareholder in a company that got this patent, I'd want them to make me money.
Whatever their intentions are going into this , unless they produce a cast-iron legally binding document promising otherwise, this just means that all DRM will have another kick-back to Novell on it.
as our brains provide very fuzzy solutions to problems and tend to just think about what we have to do, rather than handling all eventualities.
I talk to a customer and come away with an idea of what they want to do.
I write a High Level Design - and it makes sense and everybody is happy. I've basically just written down how we think.
The tricky part starts when you break it down to the low level. The questions start to come up:
What happens if that's that?
How do we stop X
If we have Y & Z htf do we calculate blah (without locking the db for a week)
Now when you think you've got the low level you then still forget stuff, implement a feature in a less than idea way blah blah.
Then the spec changes and you through band-aids all over the code.
Oh I could babble on for hours about this.
Another way of looking at it is to think of Chess. The objective is simple - to win with check-mate. The rules are simple - this piece can do this, this one can do this. The problem comes with the bit you have to fill in in the middle. The all but infinite permutations are there, so there is rarely ever a 'right' answer at any point. Some options are obviously better than others, but at most points you can never definitely say that was the absolutely best option. Pulling customers back into it, if you suddenly find a piece 20 moves back's just been fiddled with, you're screwed.
Just one last mention of customers, they often get a harsh deal from developers. Developers only see a small part of what customers actually 'do' - but tend to walk away assuming they know everything. Most bugs seem to arise when assumptions are made by the developer.
IPTV is starting to ramp up as more networks switch/unbundle up to IPTV. All those IPTV customers need to buy set-top boxes and hook these up to their router somehow. A 360 with a wifi dongle isn't excessively expensive, take off the cost of the STB that it's replacing, take off a bit for the numbers the networks will shift, take off the undoubtedly good reduction MS will give to get their box into MILLIONS of living rooms.
Few people have mentioned that 20Gig isn't enough got PVR. Well it isn't and Zephyr will fix that a bit. However anybody who has connected their 360 to a MCE machine will know it just works as a thin client - my TV tuner is in the PC, my HD is in the PC, but I can record, pause blah blah from the 360. No reason the same technique couldn't be used here - either stream IPTV from your PC to the 360 for display, archive off to the PC as needed or just pipe the paused/recorded content to a handy MCE/Vista machine on the network.
First of all Apple refused to sign any OEM deals at all - if you want Apple hardware it comes with OSX installed. Try ordering it with XP instead, or without an OS as all (and the $50 rebate Dell will actually give you).
Secondly, Apple authorized resellers have evil restrictions on what they can/can't sell. I had a chat to my local one a bit ago at a time of iPod shortage. Apple really didn't want him to sell PC stuff, and those that fell out of favour (for whatever reason) suddenly found they were last on the allocation list for limited supply stock.
Apple have simultaneously treated their indie sellers like shit, causing a number of them to close, whilst simultaneously rolling out their own boutiques. Apple now do the hardware, the software and the retailing via their site and shops - htf can you then turn round and say Apple doesn't have a monopoly?
it just happens to be the case.
Your electronics are assembled in China as the labour costs are lower there. In the few cases where labour intensive, low pay areas where work has to be done onsite in the US (or your Western Country of choice), food growing, harvesting, preparation, construction, domestic etc etc, you get a high proportion of illegal labour to keep the costs down.
It's not a valid argument, it's just a truth and a result of market pressures (risk of financial loss due to illegal being found is less than the financial gain from employing an illegal).
In the EU we have a strange effect due to the expansion to the East, where highly skilled people are coming into the UK to do low paid work (i.e. Polish lawyer mixing cocktails in your local bar). Now this makes me feel a bit uncomfortable as well - but everybody seems to be happy with the situation (well apart from our local right-wing parties and the unskilled unemployed).