Slashdot Mirror


User: grumbel

grumbel's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
4,256
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 4,256

  1. Re:When Games were Novel on Game Prices — a Historical Perspective · · Score: 1

    Games with the complexity of an old C64 games you can buy for the iPhone for $2, happy now?

  2. Re:been video gaming for 3 decades and i'm broke! on Game Prices — a Historical Perspective · · Score: 1

    If you can't remember the prices, maybe you should look them up (list from 1990, price in DM) instead of basing your argument on a pair of rose tinted glasses. Plenty of games in that list in the $30-$50 range, but also a few games for $70, which is kind of pretty much exactly what we have today.

  3. Re:Horse Fucking Shit on Game Prices — a Historical Perspective · · Score: 1

    1) That is complete and utter nonsense, plenty of people payed for more then $50 for games, because that is the only price at which you can buy them new on launch day.

    2) And just as the market has grown, so have the production costs. Instead of one guy taking six month for a game, you have hundred people taking three years, that costs has to go somewhere. If you don't like high budget games, you are free to buy indie stuff or iPhone games, they cost around $1-$15.

    3) Even when you ignore inflations, game prices have still stayed pretty much constant for 20 years.

  4. Re:Game prices are too high, always have been on Game Prices — a Historical Perspective · · Score: 1

    The people who set these prices care far more about profits than customers.

    Which is kind of natural, as profit is what pays their rent.

    It's a shame there wasn't a real open market in terms of retail or platform.

    Its called indie game development on the PC, has existed for at least ten years.

  5. Re:A couple of points missed by the article... on Game Prices — a Historical Perspective · · Score: 1

    Console game prices were initially higher because you had to account for the cost of manufacturing the cartridges. However today all consoles use DVDs or built-in storage of some sort so that cost is no longer justified.

    Meanwhile production costs for games have sky-rocketed, also the market has increased and a hell of a lot of other variables have changed, to many to really account. What matters is how much you as a gamer pay for a game and that price has pretty much stayed the same for 20 years or even go down (even ignoring inflation).

    The only thing that really has increased is the price for the hardware. I bought a NES for 144DM (~75EUR) and a SNES for 266DM (~130EUR), those prices weren't on launch day, but the SNES was still rather new back then. An Xbox360, five years after launch, is still pretty much twice that price and the prices for a second controller are also rather high, multiple times of what you would pay for an NES or SNES controller. Of course, the complexity of those has increased a lot, so that might at least in a small part justified.

  6. Re:This article makes me upset on Game Prices — a Historical Perspective · · Score: 1

    A 6 hour, single-player, shitfest that's only around to serve as a DLC platform for $60, or Banjo Kazooie for $80.

    There is an easy solution: Just do not buy the shitty games. If you buy the good ones instead you really won't have much issue, a Fallout 3, Oblivion, Mass Effect or Dragon Age will give you some 30+ hours of gameplay for cheap. Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 provide you tons of gameplay as well and you can probably buy both for less the $80. And even if neither of that isn't good enough, just play some old classics that you might have missed back then.

    Not everything is perfect with todays games and some trends are questionable, but at the end of the day there are still more good games around then I have time to play.

  7. Re:What about C64? on Game Prices — a Historical Perspective · · Score: 1

    Yeah, the N64 have been expensive, but C64 games were cheap in their time.

    A little, but not even remotely that much: C64 prices (prices in DM, multiply by two to get EUR)

    Prices there range from 20EUR-33EUR, not much of a difference compared to days PC prices today. A look at the Amazon.de best seller list shows me prices ranging from 15EUR-55EUR. With a game like Mass Effect 2, just nine month on the market, selling for just 16,40EUR. I find it a little hard to complain about that.

  8. Re:I miss some of those old games on Game Prices — a Historical Perspective · · Score: 1

    They missed out on the old Amigas, Spectrum and Commodore era. I remember picking games up for under £3.

    But where that the high profile games and did you buy them brand new on launch day?

    It is not exactly hard to find games for $5 or $10 these days either, but those games are of course not the Modern Warfare 2 that people buy right on the day of the release, but stuff that is a year or two old and in the bargain bin or indie stuff.

    Overall game prices really haven't changed much at all, new Amiga/PC titles always used to be a cheaper then console stuff, in the 40EUR range, while consoles always where in the 50-60EUR range and that goes back to at least the times of the NES. In some cases game prices even have gone down, SNES stuff used to be 50EUR for first party and 65EUR or even 75EUR for third party stuff, that continued to the N64, on Gamecube they went down to 50-60EUR and now on Wii most games start at 40-45EUR. And of course we have super easy access to used games with eBay and Amazon these days and even just six month after release most game sell for half as much as they did on launch.

  9. Re:Reality check on Can We Travel To That Exciting New Exoplanet? · · Score: 1

    Considering that the fastest space vehicles ever created took 3 months to travel a mere 8 light *minutes* (somewhere around one-16000th the speed of light), the assumption that we will ever reach even a significant fraction of the speed of light with a vehicle created anytime in the conceivable future is a bit of an overstretch to say the *least*

    That's hardly a fair comparison, as those crafts where never ever build for an interstellar journey. If you would go interstellar travel you almost certainly wouldn't start with your average chemical space rocket, but something nuclear or fusion based that could go a hell of a lot faster (assuming the anti-matter stuff is to much sci-fi to be practical). Project Longshot for example should be able to reach Alpha Centaury B in around 100 years and thats some 4.4 light years away and build with current day technology, so a trip to Gliese 581g should be around the 500 year mark. That is of course still a long time, but not something that should be impossible to handle, just really expensive and complicated.

  10. Re:Do this with your GUI on Take This GUI and Shove It · · Score: 1

    You don't because you don't need to. You just drag&drop the files you searched for into whatever app you want them to process with and yes, that can even be a shell script if needed and yes, you can bind that shell script easily to a right-click menu item.

    Also its not like getting the output of find or ls in CSV is easy or getting computer readable output from command line tools in general. Half the tools don't really care about computer readable output and just give you line based output separated with spaces or tabs, which easily breaks once you have a filename that uses a newline or another special character. And while -print0 helps for find, many other don't support it and for multiple fields it wouldn't work anyway.

  11. Re:Do this with your GUI on Take This GUI and Shove It · · Score: 1

    That's trivial with Windows98. Go to the directory, hit F3, search for files matching "*.pdf" and containing "xyz[date]". Sort the list of files you get by clicking the date column and you are done. Now of course in more recent Windows they have crippled the search dialog, so things are a little more complicated now, but I think all the options are still available.

    Now of course there are more complicated cases where that won't work, but you really can get far more done with a GUI then some CLI freaks want you to believe.

  12. Re:GUIs make documentation hard on Take This GUI and Shove It · · Score: 1

    In my experience, GUIs tend to display less information (probably to not "confuse" users). But from the basic ability to provide useful information, I don't see why one should have an advantage over the other.

    GUIs are build for interaction, CLIs often aren't, thus you get (or at least should get) a nice alert box when something goes wrong on a GUI, while on a CLI you might even now that something went bad unless you dig through /var/log/.

    In the end however it really isn't much about CLI vs GUI, but about good interfaces and automation. No matter how good the GUI, without a way to automate it, it is still crippled. A CLI on the other side might be way more complicated then is appropriate for the given task and a CLI isn't by itself a guarantee for easy automation, as many CLI interfaces are rather lacking and for example fail at simple things such as reading a list of files as input (unusual characters in a filename might throw them off).

  13. Re:Bad GUI and no CLI: way too common on Take This GUI and Shove It · · Score: 1

    Providing a great GUI for complex routers or Linux admin is hard. Of course there has to be a CLI, that's how pros get the job done. But a great GUI is one that teaches a new user to eventually graduate to using CLI.

    The problem with CLI stuff is that most of the time they are not build to solve a problem the user has, but to provide a low level interface to the implementation, meaning common tasks can be extremely complicated and spread over many apps and config files (30sec of clicking in the webgui of a home router can turn into days of trial&error and howto reading on the CLI). Applications that give you access to the low level details and provide a high level interface are extremely really rare. What makes the situation especially complicated is that you can't generally mix low level configuration with high level configuration, if you want to change some low level detail you often have to give up all the high level configuration and switch completly to a low level stuff.

    The most practical solution in most cases is to simply have a high level configuration that is scriptable via some means. Many routers for example allow you to export the configuration as text file, but what they export is still a high level configuration, not raw iptables scripts, as that would be really hard to read back in and present via a GUI.

  14. Re:The bigger question is: on Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads? · · Score: 1

    The problem is that bit torrent only works well if lots of people are seeding, which generally means that lots of people have downloaded recently.

    When it comes to Linux distributions and such you always have, at least theoretically, a ton of computers that could do the seeding, namely all the computers that are now running the regular http mirror server anyway. It wouldn't hurt to have them run bittorrent in addition so that you could easily and robustly download from multiple servers at once.

    I haven't looked at bittorrent lately, so maybe things changed in the meantime, but the last time I looked the problem was that bittorrent was only really good for static data, so a DVD iso that gets updated every six month is fine, but a huge repository that changes daily doesn't quite work with the bittorrent workflow. I don't think there is a way to simply export a whole directly, that you can update at will, the way you can do with HTTP or FTP.

    Also there is Metalink, which goes beyond just Bittorrent and allows the combination of many different download services, sadly, I haven't really seen it used in the wild much at all.

  15. Re:We are not running out, we are being stupid on There Is No Plan B, the Ugly Transition To IPv6 · · Score: 1

    There are less IPv4 addresses than people on the planet, so even if you have 100% perfect allocation everywhere you *WILL* run out of IPv4 addresses in the not so distant future. That aside you also often want multiple addresses, as that is the only way to properly run multiple services from a single machine without vhosts hacks, non-standard ports and other hackery.

    Also what we need for IPv6 is not time, we already had plenty of that, but simply people doing it (mainly looking at ISPs here who don't give you an IPv6). The problems that IPv6 might cause aren't going away when we continue to twiddle our thumbs for the coming few years, the only way to make them go away is doing the switch and then fixing what pops up.

  16. Re:When is /. going to get an IPv6 address? on There Is No Plan B, the Ugly Transition To IPv6 · · Score: 1

    So the argument of mixed AA/AAAA records not working properly of users is luckily losing its credibility, it seems.

    Depends, on standard configuration it doesn't seem to be a big issue, as by far most users will just fallback to IPv4 and ignore IPv6. On the other side each time I tried to setup a 6to4 IPv6 tunnel I ended up with half the IPv6 sites not being reachable. So while things should be fine for most part for IPv4/IPv6 dual stack, I am wondering how the situation will change if IPv6 is actually provided by your ISP and devices no longer just fallback to IPv4.

  17. Re:When is /. going to get an IPv6 address? on There Is No Plan B, the Ugly Transition To IPv6 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Running IPv6 on a webserver means cutting of a chunk of your users with broken IPv6 setups. That is why you see a lot of http:://ipv6.google.com style sites, but hardly anybody having a AAAA record on their main domain.

  18. Re:The USB lockdown screwed me over on PS3 Hacked Using Official Controller · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You know it's only the unlicensed third party controllers that don't work right? Regardless of Sony's intentions over the usb patch, why would anyone expect unlicensed hardware to work forever?

    Why would you expect to require a license for a device that supports standard USB HID devices? You could (and still can, at least the two I tested) plug in any PC USB gamepad or joystick into your PS3 and it will work just fine (button and axis mapping might however be a bit mixed up).

  19. Re:What the fuck Sony? I cant use a USB device now on PS3 Hacked Using Official Controller · · Score: 1

    They didn't remove USB support, all the USB device I tested still work just fine with 3.50. Not sure what exactly they are blocking, but it is definitvly not every regular USB device.

  20. Re:I'll miss them on Blockbuster Files For Bankruptcy · · Score: 1

    Having 100000 times the choice is worth very little when the user interface interface doesn't actually allow you to browse them. The Internet is really good at search, but at browsing it actually just plain out sucks, in a lot of cases it is even completly impossible.

  21. Re:Note to Richard on Stallman Crashes Talk, Fights 'War On Sharing' · · Score: 1

    The latest version (23) does have antialiased fonts

    For me under Ubuntu the anti-aliased fonts render extremely slow, i.e. so slow that scrolling becomes close to unusable when the CPU happens to be busy, say when you are compiling in the background. Not sure if there is something wrong with the font I use, the setup or whatever, but it is kind of bothersome that in 2010 a text editor fails at rendering text.

    Anyway, that bug aside, Emacs really could need a rewrite. Emacs did have had a lot of good ideas back when it was written some decades ago and many of those still hold up, but in other areas it just shows its age far to clearly (everything "GUI" is a joke, no real multithreading, no good Intellisense alternative, bad defaults everywhere, ASCII art where real graphics should be used, etc.).

  22. Re:Oh please on Mega Man Designer Explains Japan's Waning Video Game Influence · · Score: 1

    Star Control 2: Closest thing I can think of out now is Eve Online, which is totally not the same thing. Multiplayer is not always better, 3D is not always better, and Eve is completely lacking that adventure/epic story element.

    Mass Effect comes pretty close, the mineral collection takes a backseat for most of the game, but the adventure/epic story is right there.

    Now if only they could add space combat to Mass Effect, that would be like dream come true :)

  23. Re:Oh please on Mega Man Designer Explains Japan's Waning Video Game Influence · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't hold my breath. The Wii has been around for four years and developer have managed to do pretty much exactly nothing interesting with it.

    The PS3 Move is interesting in that it actually offers real 1:1 mapping, which the Wiimote, even with Motion Plus, couldn't do, but they forgot to include an analogstick. So with the Move you either have games in which you can walk and have one arm or games in which you can't walk and have two arms. Might not be an issue for casual titles, but in an action adventure I would prefer to control my sword, shield and my feet.

    Kinect goes one step further then Move and they forgot not only the analog sticks, but also the buttons. Making it hard to imagine anything interesting being done with the thing. Sure, Dance Central looks alright, but I have yet to see anything that would hint at the usefulness of Kinect for games as a whole. The best ways to use it in regular games are probably custom animations in multiplayer games and head tracking stuff.

    Can you imagine a future version of Square Enix's Final Fantasy series taking full advantage of the PS3 Move controller?

    No. Because both Move and Kinect don't come with the system, so it is very doubtful that any developer will invest any serious amount of money into a Move game. Sure you might be able to navigate the menu with a PS3 cursor, but that doesn't really improve the game itself.

    We might see more interesting uses with motion control in the next generation of consoles, when it probably will come as default controller with all three consoles and has technically matured, but for this generation I suspect it will stay a niche toy (niche here refers to the number of games using the motion control, not units sold).

  24. Re:Every game is a FPS? on Mega Man Designer Explains Japan's Waning Video Game Influence · · Score: 1

    Notice something about that list?

    Most of them are sequels?

    Anyway, I think the issues with todays games are two fold. One is perception and gaming press. There might be a ton of interesting indie and niche titles around, but you simply never hear about them. Every now and then a Braid or Limbo gets hyped in the mainstream press, but the rest is hardly even mentioned. The other issue is simply that games today just didn't quite hold up with past expectations. Graphics have improved a lot for sure, but the dialog tree that you click through in a Dragon Age is pretty much the same as 20 years ago, same for the object interaction and item collection. Basically your interaction with the game world is still extremely restricted and sometimes even has made steps backward, in a XCOM:UFO or Syndicate Wars I could basically level whole buildings, yet in a lot of modern games the level structure is indestructible (luckily there are a handful of exceptions).

  25. Re:But wait on Linux Kernel Exploit Busily Rooting 64-Bit Machines · · Score: 1

    Your web browser runs as a local user. If there is a flaw in your web browser (and all of them have had plenty), then they can use that flaw, just by looking at a web site, to gain root access to your machine using this vulnerability.

    If you are talking about web browser, you are likely running them on your desktop, not your server. And on your desktop gaining access to your user account is already so damn close to the worst case, that gaining root access in addition hardly makes much of a difference.

    Gaining root is really only a big issue when it comes to multiuser machines.