Bill Hicks certainly had a few things to say about the crooked industry of marketing.
It's a shame that the passing of a man of such talent was not mourned by as many people as are mourning that strange and plasticized record company money-making machine that died last night.
As for games, I'd love to see the indie developers save the gaming industry because ultimately that's where it all started from.
Unfortunately, the sheeple will just go and buy what the adverts tell them to buy because they are all too mesmerized by pretty graphics and screaming brats demanding the latest games consoles and titles. Despite a global recession, many people still have far too much disposable income and therefore don't feel the need to worry too much about how they spend their money - it becomes far more important that they stay in with the in-crowd and not have little Johnny throwing a tantrum at home because everybody in his class has "Totally Derivative Game Sequel Part 5" except him.
Maybe if the recession bites deeper and people really have to start making every penny count, then we'll see a return to talented film-makers, musicians and games creators getting the rewards that they deserve because the general populace has had to become more discerning. But the fact is that at the moment, the big media companies have all of the control and power, and will just stamp on anything that stops them enjoying their vast profits for churning out crap.
With all respect to you, if it's that important to you that you need to have good presentations for your customers, then maybe you ought to think about taking a basic PC training course so you know how to become more responsible for your own PC?
There are lots of useful things that can pop up onto the screen, the Gmail and weather monitoring add-ons in Mozilla Firefox spring to mind as two examples. But it's just a case of not having them running while presenting; or if it's something caused by a system service, then a bit of know how in understanding how to turn it off for a while is the solution.
Why do these overpaid idiots have this strange idea that "social gaming", even in computer terms, is anything new?
In the late 1980s, my friends and I were playing games like "Stunt Car Racer" on Commodore Amigas connected via their serial ports and organising complex but drunken "Speedball 2" leagues after a few beers at the weekend.
Then just go forward a few years and many of us were "secretly" playing networked "Doom" in our offices.
It really annoys me that these people are so shallow in their thinking that they don't see social computer gaming as really nothing more than an extension of simple "board" games with stones and pebbles that have been played for thousands of years.
Either that, or they are just preparing to make themselves very rich by trying to convince the rest of us that it's perfectly normal to be enjoying a few games with friends while being constantly bombarded with marketing and advertising crap.
Please go do some research, folks, instead of reading the utter nonsense in the main article. Most computer games are crap but gaming with others is a great thing, provided everyone is happy to do it just to have a good time, rather than being focused on winning and cheating which just ruins the fun of everyone involved. And there are thousands upon thousands of great games out there, many of which can be had for free, that are great fun to play with a few good friends and won't constantly bombard you with adverts for iPhones or other useless gadgets.
How about channeling some of that anger energy into something more positive?
Why not use that energy to go learn a bit about Linux? Then, at least, you will allow yourself a choice, one of which will be free.
If people want to go pay for Windows 7 then good luck to them, I hope it does what they want it to and if it's anything like XP it will be a pretty good OS for most people.
But if you don't want to part with that kind of money, nobody is forcing you to do so.
So does that mean that is also a disadvantage that Microsoft provides updates to Windows just about every Thursday? And if they didn't, would you then be accusing them of being lax in security for not releasing frequent security updates?
...because I always thought Apple users got their own ***SPECIAL*** emergency number to dial rather than having to use the same one the rest of us peons do.
And as a matter of fact, one can hardly call paying £10 for a music CD that people like me have listened to regularly for more than 30 years of their lives "bad value for money".
If what you're downloading isn't worth paying for then it must be crap.
...any alien that lands on planet Earth will likely be pale-skinned, dressed in strange clothing & only grunt monosyllabically at you having been sat in front of a console screen for the past 50 years - so just practice your alien communication skills on the average British teenager...
...because if you were then I'd tell you to the STFU because it's my taxes paying for you to sit on your spotty backside for three years turning up to lectures once a week for your Media Studies degree - therefore you will do as you are told.
Music is my number one hobby and I download a hell of a lot of it on BitTorrent - but only because I consider £10 to be a perfectly reasonable price for a great album but a total rip-off for a bad one. In reality, because I listen mostly to classic rock and blues music and buy new or secondhand on line, I probably pay an average of £5-£6 for a CD.
However, with that said, I own somewhere in the region of 1500 music CDs and with that size of collection, if something I download is crap then I delete it once I've listened to it because there's no point hoarding something I won't ever listen to again.
The point of my argument is that because I listen before I buy and then buy what I've liked, then I never buy a CD I consider to be bad value for money. (For example, if I've paid £4 for a CD with only 4 good tracks on it, then I still think that's good value.) Therefore, I keep buying them and, in actual fact, I won't ever pay for a digital download because as an album (rather than track by track) fan, I believe "pick n mix" music will ultimately kill the type of music I like anyway. (Incidentally, this is the reason why a world class band like AC/DC doesn't release compilation albums and doesn't make their albums available for digital download.)
As consumers, we also need to start getting a social conscience as well.
I'm in my mid-40s but when I go back to my childhood & early teens, I can remember my parents not having the same kind of disposable income that I myself now enjoy - sure, a lot of the reason for that is because relatively I earn a much better salary now than they ever did.
But I also remember that foodstuffs and electronic goods were, again in relative terms, a lot more expensive than they are these days - for example, my parents needed to save money for several months before buying our first colour TV and if they went to a local butcher to buy a good joint of meat for dinner on Sunday, then you had the leftovers in some other meal the day after. I can't ever recall going without anything, I might add, but that was just the way things were then. Likewise, when they were kids during the days of the Second World War, things were harder still.
I'm no tree-hugging Green hippie (I accept natural climate change but not man-made Global Warming) but even from an economic perspective, we have to accept that if we want jobs and locally-sourced products, then we have to also accept that we need to pay more for them because they will cost more to produce.
I agree that as consumers we should not put up with excessive taxation from governments but likewise we should not accept the lack of social conscience in corporations - I'm a Brit over here in the UK but even I know, for example, how the rise of McDonald's and the fast food industry in the US has entirely decimated US agriculture.
As consumers we need to stop losing our minds and stop being so materialistic - spend our money more on life's essentials and concern ourselves less with gadgets we probably don't need.
How about you jump down off that pedestal of yours and enjoy a piece of music just because of how it makes you feel good, rather than just carrying it around as some kind of political fashion statement?
It may come as a shock to you but many of those albums the OP has listed happen to be popular *because* a lot of people consider them to be good albums - and whilst I personally own many of those albums in that list, I also happen to listen to a lot of more obscure and, yes, even independent music. But the fact is, I only care about music quality, I couldn't give a toss if it's marketed by Sony or an indy label.
Call it a simplistic viewpoint but employing people in a country puts money back into that country whereas selling products or services in that country takes money out of it.
Therefore subtract the former from the latter and heavily tax the difference - thus making outsourcing far more expensive.
And no, not just because it's Microsoft, make it apply to everyone.
I'm sure it's the same in the USA and other parts of Europe, but here in the UK whole communities have been decimated because coal mines or industrial parks have shut down due to cheaper coal imports or jobs going overseas - corporations have got far too powerful and need to be forced to have a social conscience.
If you can manage to get hold of the Prima Game Guide for MOO2, you'll read in there that the AI does cheat, dependant on what level you're playing at.
However, that's the case for many games and MOO2 has (for me anyway) now only been surpassed by Galactic Civilizations II for space 4X gaming.
"Drop to the terminal", you've already lost most users.
"You need to download the latest virus checker update, install Spybot S&D to detect malware & set defrag to run regularly." That would also lose most Windows users.
Linux isn't yet simple, especially when people are used to doing things in Windows or even Mac (a bit), those two platforms work surprisingly alike for installing software (double click!), for finding software (go to some website, download it), etc.
In most cases on common Linux distros, you don't need to go and update drivers regularly - you can also use a single update application to go and grab what applications that you need. Plus you can run an package installation by double-clicking it in the Window manager, if that is how the package has been provided to you.
Windows has taken years to get a cohesive (and still not quite there yet) and unified GUI.
Have a look at some of the software you run in Windows - where are user settings configured? Under "Edit->Preferences" or "Options"? Why are many core system configuration changes obfuscated in lots of different locations in XP?
Even with distros that work out of the box from OEMs, people are returning them.
I'd like to see real evidence of that statement because I don't believe it to be the case. Besides which, if you've bought any computer and/or OS without doing some research first, then who's fault is it?
Given the treatment of non-Linux users by Linux users (berating, combative, defensive, angry, etc), there's good reason why it never catches on, and it's because the userbase for Linux are a bunch of assholes.
Please don't generalise. I use mostly Linux but I also use (and like) Windows XP. Neither OS on its own can do all I need a computer to do but using both, I have all the bases covered. I've written and presented Linux training courses at work and every Windows user I've presented it to goes out impressed with what Linux can do - some even dual boot it with their Windows installations as a result and they frequently call me for Linux help - they are NEVER turned away.
Incidentally, neither are my family and friends who also call me for help fixing a Windows problem either.
Personally, I don't care about this mythical battle between Windows and Linux on the desktop - to me they're just tools to get a job done or sometimes to entertain me.
1. If the Mac "has great market share", why has Apple sacked 16,000 of its Apple Store workers recently?
2. Apple owners are constantly reminding us how great the Mac UI is. That implies that it is different to Windows (I personally don't know because I've never found a reason to use a Mac in 30 years of working and hobbying with computers) yet in Linux, not only do you have many different UIs to choose from, but it's possible to make them look very much like Windows. That would suggest that a Windows user would have an easier time migrating to a Windows-like Linux than a Mac.
3. You over-generalise with your statement about "more stable than Windows". In actuality, you have to understand Windows shortcomings to know how to administer it properly - but as soon as you know how to do that, Windows XP is very stable. That is from the mouth of someone who uses mostly Linux, by the way, and understands that *EVERY* OS needs some administration time to keep it running smoothly.
I'm certainly not going to diss any level designer that puts in hard work to create levels for free for the rest of us to enjoy but L4D captures the classic zombie movie perfectly with the four misfit characters you're given already, I'm not sure TF2 characters would work - though I'm prepared to be proved wrong.
Personally, I'd like to see a mod where the four characters are thrown back to the Victorian era or 1920s (with relatively accurate historic weaponry and clothing) and thrown into a Lovecraftian world of mad cultists, Hounds of Tindalos, Shantaks and many other loathesome, slurping beasties from the dark mind of HPL.
Funnily enough, I was playing Blood the other day and was just thinking how cool it would be to have an updated version of this game.
Why do you need a sequel? There's thousands of fan-made maps out there you can go out and play, after all.
A sequel might well turn out to be a really good game also but with all the updated graphics and suchlike, it wouldn't be the *same* as original ROTT - in the same way the DNF wouldn't have been the *same* as Duke3D.
Just like you can give a smartass answer because it's not you it happened to, you'd probably be able to give a smartass answer as to why it wasn't your fault if it had been you.
I've never used the site (I don't even play flight sims) but I feel sorry for the guys because they've actually done something that is in the spirit of what the Internet should be - namely useful (at least to some people) and even better, FREE!
Yes, I'll have myself a good chuckle if Microsoft, Sony or [INSERT FACELESS CORPORATION HERE] get hacked but not these guys who are just hobbyists.
I'm a well-paid security consultant and five years ago my home server got hacked because I rather stupidly forgot to turn an FTP server off - it happens to the *BEST* of us and the only thing to do is learn from the experience. But it doesn't help when a patronisingly smug individual like you makes retarded comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Hicks certainly had a few things to say about the crooked industry of marketing.
It's a shame that the passing of a man of such talent was not mourned by as many people as are mourning that strange and plasticized record company money-making machine that died last night.
As for games, I'd love to see the indie developers save the gaming industry because ultimately that's where it all started from.
Unfortunately, the sheeple will just go and buy what the adverts tell them to buy because they are all too mesmerized by pretty graphics and screaming brats demanding the latest games consoles and titles. Despite a global recession, many people still have far too much disposable income and therefore don't feel the need to worry too much about how they spend their money - it becomes far more important that they stay in with the in-crowd and not have little Johnny throwing a tantrum at home because everybody in his class has "Totally Derivative Game Sequel Part 5" except him.
Maybe if the recession bites deeper and people really have to start making every penny count, then we'll see a return to talented film-makers, musicians and games creators getting the rewards that they deserve because the general populace has had to become more discerning. But the fact is that at the moment, the big media companies have all of the control and power, and will just stamp on anything that stops them enjoying their vast profits for churning out crap.
With all respect to you, if it's that important to you that you need to have good presentations for your customers, then maybe you ought to think about taking a basic PC training course so you know how to become more responsible for your own PC?
There are lots of useful things that can pop up onto the screen, the Gmail and weather monitoring add-ons in Mozilla Firefox spring to mind as two examples. But it's just a case of not having them running while presenting; or if it's something caused by a system service, then a bit of know how in understanding how to turn it off for a while is the solution.
Why do these overpaid idiots have this strange idea that "social gaming", even in computer terms, is anything new?
In the late 1980s, my friends and I were playing games like "Stunt Car Racer" on Commodore Amigas connected via their serial ports and organising complex but drunken "Speedball 2" leagues after a few beers at the weekend.
Then just go forward a few years and many of us were "secretly" playing networked "Doom" in our offices.
It really annoys me that these people are so shallow in their thinking that they don't see social computer gaming as really nothing more than an extension of simple "board" games with stones and pebbles that have been played for thousands of years.
Either that, or they are just preparing to make themselves very rich by trying to convince the rest of us that it's perfectly normal to be enjoying a few games with friends while being constantly bombarded with marketing and advertising crap.
Please go do some research, folks, instead of reading the utter nonsense in the main article. Most computer games are crap but gaming with others is a great thing, provided everyone is happy to do it just to have a good time, rather than being focused on winning and cheating which just ruins the fun of everyone involved. And there are thousands upon thousands of great games out there, many of which can be had for free, that are great fun to play with a few good friends and won't constantly bombard you with adverts for iPhones or other useless gadgets.
Don't let the door hit you in the arse on your way out.
How about channeling some of that anger energy into something more positive?
Why not use that energy to go learn a bit about Linux? Then, at least, you will allow yourself a choice, one of which will be free.
If people want to go pay for Windows 7 then good luck to them, I hope it does what they want it to and if it's anything like XP it will be a pretty good OS for most people.
But if you don't want to part with that kind of money, nobody is forcing you to do so.
Customer: Waiter, do you have kangaroo legs?
Waiter: Yes sir, we do.
Customer: Well hop off to the kitchen and get me a cheeseburger then.
So does that mean that is also a disadvantage that Microsoft provides updates to Windows just about every Thursday? And if they didn't, would you then be accusing them of being lax in security for not releasing frequent security updates?
...because I always thought Apple users got their own ***SPECIAL*** emergency number to dial rather than having to use the same one the rest of us peons do.
Well said!
And as a matter of fact, one can hardly call paying £10 for a music CD that people like me have listened to regularly for more than 30 years of their lives "bad value for money".
If what you're downloading isn't worth paying for then it must be crap.
...any alien that lands on planet Earth will likely be pale-skinned, dressed in strange clothing & only grunt monosyllabically at you having been sat in front of a console screen for the past 50 years - so just practice your alien communication skills on the average British teenager...
...because if you were then I'd tell you to the STFU because it's my taxes paying for you to sit on your spotty backside for three years turning up to lectures once a week for your Media Studies degree - therefore you will do as you are told.
Music is my number one hobby and I download a hell of a lot of it on BitTorrent - but only because I consider £10 to be a perfectly reasonable price for a great album but a total rip-off for a bad one. In reality, because I listen mostly to classic rock and blues music and buy new or secondhand on line, I probably pay an average of £5-£6 for a CD.
However, with that said, I own somewhere in the region of 1500 music CDs and with that size of collection, if something I download is crap then I delete it once I've listened to it because there's no point hoarding something I won't ever listen to again.
The point of my argument is that because I listen before I buy and then buy what I've liked, then I never buy a CD I consider to be bad value for money. (For example, if I've paid £4 for a CD with only 4 good tracks on it, then I still think that's good value.) Therefore, I keep buying them and, in actual fact, I won't ever pay for a digital download because as an album (rather than track by track) fan, I believe "pick n mix" music will ultimately kill the type of music I like anyway. (Incidentally, this is the reason why a world class band like AC/DC doesn't release compilation albums and doesn't make their albums available for digital download.)
As consumers, we also need to start getting a social conscience as well.
I'm in my mid-40s but when I go back to my childhood & early teens, I can remember my parents not having the same kind of disposable income that I myself now enjoy - sure, a lot of the reason for that is because relatively I earn a much better salary now than they ever did.
But I also remember that foodstuffs and electronic goods were, again in relative terms, a lot more expensive than they are these days - for example, my parents needed to save money for several months before buying our first colour TV and if they went to a local butcher to buy a good joint of meat for dinner on Sunday, then you had the leftovers in some other meal the day after. I can't ever recall going without anything, I might add, but that was just the way things were then. Likewise, when they were kids during the days of the Second World War, things were harder still.
I'm no tree-hugging Green hippie (I accept natural climate change but not man-made Global Warming) but even from an economic perspective, we have to accept that if we want jobs and locally-sourced products, then we have to also accept that we need to pay more for them because they will cost more to produce.
I agree that as consumers we should not put up with excessive taxation from governments but likewise we should not accept the lack of social conscience in corporations - I'm a Brit over here in the UK but even I know, for example, how the rise of McDonald's and the fast food industry in the US has entirely decimated US agriculture.
As consumers we need to stop losing our minds and stop being so materialistic - spend our money more on life's essentials and concern ourselves less with gadgets we probably don't need.
How about you jump down off that pedestal of yours and enjoy a piece of music just because of how it makes you feel good, rather than just carrying it around as some kind of political fashion statement?
It may come as a shock to you but many of those albums the OP has listed happen to be popular *because* a lot of people consider them to be good albums - and whilst I personally own many of those albums in that list, I also happen to listen to a lot of more obscure and, yes, even independent music. But the fact is, I only care about music quality, I couldn't give a toss if it's marketed by Sony or an indy label.
...just tax the corporations even more.
Call it a simplistic viewpoint but employing people in a country puts money back into that country whereas selling products or services in that country takes money out of it.
Therefore subtract the former from the latter and heavily tax the difference - thus making outsourcing far more expensive.
And no, not just because it's Microsoft, make it apply to everyone.
I'm sure it's the same in the USA and other parts of Europe, but here in the UK whole communities have been decimated because coal mines or industrial parks have shut down due to cheaper coal imports or jobs going overseas - corporations have got far too powerful and need to be forced to have a social conscience.
The rest of us will enjoy using the best products in the industry while you struggle with your crap.
Is this why Apple recently shed 16,000 jobs from their Apple stores?
If you can manage to get hold of the Prima Game Guide for MOO2, you'll read in there that the AI does cheat, dependant on what level you're playing at.
However, that's the case for many games and MOO2 has (for me anyway) now only been surpassed by Galactic Civilizations II for space 4X gaming.
Subscriber Trunk Dialing?
"Micro Transaction" == "Regularly made payment" == "Rental model for all your media and games".
Never forget, Apple supports DRM, a leopard can't change its spots.
"Drop to the terminal", you've already lost most users.
"You need to download the latest virus checker update, install Spybot S&D to detect malware & set defrag to run regularly." That would also lose most Windows users.
Linux isn't yet simple, especially when people are used to doing things in Windows or even Mac (a bit), those two platforms work surprisingly alike for installing software (double click!), for finding software (go to some website, download it), etc.
In most cases on common Linux distros, you don't need to go and update drivers regularly - you can also use a single update application to go and grab what applications that you need. Plus you can run an package installation by double-clicking it in the Window manager, if that is how the package has been provided to you.
Windows has taken years to get a cohesive (and still not quite there yet) and unified GUI.
Have a look at some of the software you run in Windows - where are user settings configured? Under "Edit->Preferences" or "Options"? Why are many core system configuration changes obfuscated in lots of different locations in XP?
Even with distros that work out of the box from OEMs, people are returning them.
I'd like to see real evidence of that statement because I don't believe it to be the case. Besides which, if you've bought any computer and/or OS without doing some research first, then who's fault is it?
Given the treatment of non-Linux users by Linux users (berating, combative, defensive, angry, etc), there's good reason why it never catches on, and it's because the userbase for Linux are a bunch of assholes.
Please don't generalise. I use mostly Linux but I also use (and like) Windows XP. Neither OS on its own can do all I need a computer to do but using both, I have all the bases covered. I've written and presented Linux training courses at work and every Windows user I've presented it to goes out impressed with what Linux can do - some even dual boot it with their Windows installations as a result and they frequently call me for Linux help - they are NEVER turned away.
Incidentally, neither are my family and friends who also call me for help fixing a Windows problem either.
Personally, I don't care about this mythical battle between Windows and Linux on the desktop - to me they're just tools to get a job done or sometimes to entertain me.
Just a couple of questions:
1. If the Mac "has great market share", why has Apple sacked 16,000 of its Apple Store workers recently?
2. Apple owners are constantly reminding us how great the Mac UI is. That implies that it is different to Windows (I personally don't know because I've never found a reason to use a Mac in 30 years of working and hobbying with computers) yet in Linux, not only do you have many different UIs to choose from, but it's possible to make them look very much like Windows. That would suggest that a Windows user would have an easier time migrating to a Windows-like Linux than a Mac.
3. You over-generalise with your statement about "more stable than Windows". In actuality, you have to understand Windows shortcomings to know how to administer it properly - but as soon as you know how to do that, Windows XP is very stable. That is from the mouth of someone who uses mostly Linux, by the way, and understands that *EVERY* OS needs some administration time to keep it running smoothly.
I'm certainly not going to diss any level designer that puts in hard work to create levels for free for the rest of us to enjoy but L4D captures the classic zombie movie perfectly with the four misfit characters you're given already, I'm not sure TF2 characters would work - though I'm prepared to be proved wrong.
Personally, I'd like to see a mod where the four characters are thrown back to the Victorian era or 1920s (with relatively accurate historic weaponry and clothing) and thrown into a Lovecraftian world of mad cultists, Hounds of Tindalos, Shantaks and many other loathesome, slurping beasties from the dark mind of HPL.
Funnily enough, I was playing Blood the other day and was just thinking how cool it would be to have an updated version of this game.
...my experiences with any music by anyone called D.J. [Blah-de-blah] is that the blank CDR is the best option, in terms of doing your ears a favour.
Why do you need a sequel? There's thousands of fan-made maps out there you can go out and play, after all.
A sequel might well turn out to be a really good game also but with all the updated graphics and suchlike, it wouldn't be the *same* as original ROTT - in the same way the DNF wouldn't have been the *same* as Duke3D.
Just like you can give a smartass answer because it's not you it happened to, you'd probably be able to give a smartass answer as to why it wasn't your fault if it had been you.
I've never used the site (I don't even play flight sims) but I feel sorry for the guys because they've actually done something that is in the spirit of what the Internet should be - namely useful (at least to some people) and even better, FREE!
Yes, I'll have myself a good chuckle if Microsoft, Sony or [INSERT FACELESS CORPORATION HERE] get hacked but not these guys who are just hobbyists.
I'm a well-paid security consultant and five years ago my home server got hacked because I rather stupidly forgot to turn an FTP server off - it happens to the *BEST* of us and the only thing to do is learn from the experience. But it doesn't help when a patronisingly smug individual like you makes retarded comments.