Soundblasters used to be required. Now they are more a pain then a gain. I have often found that a really crash prone game can be saved by the simple removal of the soundblaster from my system.
The sound is a little bit better when it is in use and the game makes proper use of it so I sometimes put it back in for certain games but I am certainly not going to buy another one.
Creative get your bloody act together and write some decent drivers.
You are loosing a customer who has had every soundblaster upto and including the live.
Re:Low technology against high technology
on
Japanese Balloon Battle
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· Score: 1, Informative
Other simple reason is fire power. While the AK-47 is less accurate then the M16 the sad fact of war is that most soldiers are not really taking carefull aim during the heat of battle.
Sticking your head up, sighting along the barrel and aiming at the target then gently squeezing the trigger and adjusting as neccasry also means you spend a lot of time being a target, a non-moving target.
Look at historical movies of engagements in vietnam and you will that often the soldier just aims his gun in the general direction of the eneme and shoots. Not very accurate but a lot safer for the soldier involved and just maybe it will keep the enemey down.
The AK-47 has the advantage here. Its bullet has more of a change to travel through cover then the M16 had. Simply put an M16 soldier shooting at an AK47 soldier behind wood cover would be very likely to only hit wood. The AK47 soldier on the other hand would shoot straight through the wood and kill the M16 soldier or at least wound.
It says enough about the M16 that a lot of american troops in vietnam switched weapons when they had the change. If the soldier in the field prefer the weapon of the enemey (wich has the risk that your own side might identify you as the enemey in confused situations by the sound of your gun) then you done something badly wrong.
It might suprise you to learn this but in the real world most people in an office will not have learned to work with computers on windows. they will have been thought on terminals connected to various different OSes ranging from Unix to big mainframes.
Only kiddies think that windows is the only OS but for those of us who have been slightly longer on this planet we have grown up with other OSes and only recently been forced to move. Even when offices switched to Windows 3.1 or later 95 it often was just to launch a terminal session to the mainframe where all the work was done.
Don't be suprised to learn that in a switch to linux many of the old timers will find the transition very easy as in fact they are switching back. In the real world Windows is the new kid on the block. Linux is just another unix. Just like AIX, solaris, hp-unix etc etc.
As for the office suit. Here it is even more recent that MS became the dominent player. Plenty of places still use Wordperfect.
We called them cents and they were removed from circualtiuon ages ago (back when we still had our own currency). Cents cost more to produce then they were worth. So basically the same deal (1,2 becomes 0 3,4 becomes 5) was introduced and it did take some getting used too and I remember people in the beginning shopping so they would get the best deal (1,2,6,7). But this lasted only a short time.
Now we got the euro and the cent is back. Although it is now worth a bit more the amount of hazzle makes me wish they dropped it. The cents still take up an insane amount of space and are not really worth anything.
Then again didn't richard prior in a superman movie get rich by stealing even less?
It is one of those thing that I hate most in games. Endless logo movies that can't be disabled. Consoles are extremely evil in this regard. At least pc solo games allow you to alter them easily.
Why do they care? God knows, some power trip from having their inane company motto shown every time? Lengthing the "gameplay"?
Anyway can UO detect it? In theory yes. It scan the files that are on your pc and sends back a report, this would be expected as it would help catch out cheaters with customized data/code.
The game industry is a funny field. On the one hand it is slowly turning into a gigantic industry worth billions of dollars. On the other hand it still seems to be run by idiots, reviewed by idiots and bought by idiots. I myself am in the last group. Despite everything that is wrong with Star Wars Galaxies I still pay for it.
We are like the pretty boy send to prison who goes in to the shower and drops the soap. Don't complain about being raped when you are bend over with your ass in the air.
Doctors don't diagnose themselves, Hairdressers don't cut their own hair, bus drivers take the car to work, the people at the benefits office got jobs. Surely reporters not reading their own stories is nothing to be suprised about./me opens the morning newspaper and counts the spelling errors and dupe posts in a paid for newspaper. Neither do editors in "respectable" news outlets it seems.
There are no details so hard to guess. Maybe the machine was in the last stages of its live?
Basically a service provided by a single person for free at his own considerable cost has been withdrawn without notice but with an option to get in a mere two weeks time a backup if you ask in a simple polite way.
Mmmm, not exactly a sign of the apocalypse.
There may be a whole lot of reasons he has decided to quit. He is old enough to have been diagnosed with cancer. Maybe someone close died. Maybe he developed an ulcer who knows.
Everyone seems to have been promised a backup. So quit whining, live for 2 weeks without data nobody but you cares about and then find someone else to provide you with free hosting.
Oh and do backups. How? blogs are simple text entries. Copy and paste to a notepad file. Save-as the finished page. Nothing that couldn't be done by even the most inept user. But of course nobody does backups until it is too late. Bloggers are hardly the exception in this sadly. You do backup don't you?
The web is a wonderfull things in wich countless bits of information are there to be found. Except it is getting harder and harder to find them. I can easily mentally filter out the fake link sites from google results. Porn is easy too. Shopping sites I learned to regonize and avoid as well. But blogs are harder because there are so many of them and the sentences shown by google actually seem to relate to the subject I am searching for.
Personal pages with no content of intrest to anyone have been around since the early days of the web. However they existed in their own little corner and were rarely found by search engines. Blogs because of the incestious linking to each other are found and are just another chunk of noise getting in the way.
Not that I hate blogs. It is just, ugh. I thought I found the information I wanted and instead I am on some whiners site. What a waste of time and bandwidth.
Now if only google could filter out blogs. Then all the personal sites would go back to their own little corner of the net and I wouldn't know anything about them. Of course if this is done then a lot of bloggers would whine because they would miss the accidental visits and see that in reality nobody wants to read about their thoughts. You gotta be intrestting to have something intrestting to say and most people simply are not.
A translation has become illegal. This has been discusses many times already on various manga forums and the law has recently been changed to even make translations illegal. No exceptions.
Of course the japanese themselves don't really seem to care yet and the american companies seem even to judge the success of scanlations as to wich series they should license but that doesn't mean that someone somewhere couldn't start a prosecution.
The only bright spot is that the law on translation of original works has no exceptions wich mean that absolutly noone is excempted and cannot do a translation without the copyright owner. The snag? News stations doing those translations of Al Queda tapes and similar. I am pretty damn sure Al Queda did not give CNN written permission to do a translation. Or for the matter the US goverment (remember no exceptions). If this will hold up in court is another matter but there is such a things as equality in the justice system. If they prosecute a manga fan for violating copyright with a translation they must prosecute everyone else who does as well.
For now scanlations exists because the copyright owners don't care.
I only know one thing. That the 2 java programs I use, freenet and azureus, are horrible monsters, nice ideas but badly implemented.
Compared to similar applications written in real languages (meaning any language that is not java) they are crash prone, give idiotic debug statements, suck up memory and easily get the "too many open files" error on linux.
I guess this is like "Windows nowadays is very stable" bit. You can show all the benchmarks and tests but I will let my daily experience be the judge and use reports such as this as the toilet paper it is.
To be fair, freenet does work on linux and windows as does Azureus. This is for me the only selling point.
Perhaps java is faster then C++, it is hard for me too judge. But until Java developers start writing better programs, Sun makes sure Java is really cross platform, and games (the ultimated performance applications) start being written in java I will file this with all the other reports on how java will take over the world and is the best, fastest, easiest.
In order to use the data they have to prove that it is true. Advertisers know all too well about falsified audience figures.
They are not going to be too impressed with marketing data like this. If people can be proven to be lying about one thing in a survey then all the other data is suspect as well.
Compare it with banners ads sold on number of shows, clicks AND sales. The first are insanely high but also easily faked. Clicks are slightly more reliable but any advertiser is really intrestted in the number of sales generated.
So if your site can sell 1 billion views that is barely worth anything. If it can produce 100.000 clicks that might get you a few bucks. But generate 1000 sales and you are golden.
Either make your site pay only or make it free. Putting up the registration has to be the worst. They admit that 20% of the email addresses is false. However this is easy to check. Checking the rest of the data is not so easy. So in effect it is totally useless.
No sane advertiser will pay for a spot based on research data where such an easily checked piece of data is already proven to be false 1 out of 5 times. Income, job, interest are then likely to have a far higher error rate.
I do know that newspapers have to make money and that giving their content away for free does not make too much sense. But this doesn't make sense either.
If they want to get info let them start with basic geographic data. Don't show someone with a european IP ads for america only products. Surely that shouldn't be that hard?
Oh come on this technology has been around for years now. I seen countless "tech" programs visiting research centers and the presenter being trained to do something just by thinking. Move a cursor, click an onscreen button. Even play some extremely primitive games. the methods varied greatly, from simple diodes placed on the head to putting it into one of giant body scanners to implants.
I know americans think the rest of the world means alaska but this is nothing new. We are all just waiting for someone to turn it into a working product.
I recently started the game after being to afraid of being disappointed. Kinda the same reason I still haven't seen episode 2.
Anyway the bugs he mentions are a minor thing. Simply warping when you dismount a vehicle is a minor nuisance. A though enemy you just managed to get down to almost zero health warping 100 meters away in the middle of another bunch of critters can be seen as a challenge. The recent bug that stopped people from getting money from group missions except the mission owner could be seen as a test case of how nice players are. (result they are all assholes. I shared the money out and a grand total of 2 other players).
Worse are the braindead interface and game delay choices. There is an old joke that lists the step required on a number of OS's to change the IP. All the unixes have a online command, windows has dozen points to click through.
SWG is a thousand times worse. In the game you can own pets/droids/vehicles. These you can call from a datapad (popup window) by clicking on them, holding the mouse then selecting "generate/call" from the option menu that springs up with a few second delay.
Just double clicking on the opens a popup with the details.
Why is this so bad? Well apart from the fact that the most common act is to call not examine the details in the examine window are also displayed next to the item. So now you get two screen telling exactly the same thing.
This also makes it impossible to put the vehicle/pet/droid on the toolbar for easy calling.
Worse perhaps is the 15 second delay. If you are a master Creature handler you can have 3 critters and 1 droid to assist you in battle. But calling them will take you 4 slow selection procedures and a total of 60 secs waiting (can't call more then one at the time and combat interrupts the calling). So most master CH just use one big pet and not smart tactics with 3 smaller.
The game is filled with these kind of stupid interface design choices and delay tactics.
But worst offense of the game is this. It just isn't star wars. Apart from the stormtroopers everything seems to be made/designed by someone who saw a poster once and just doesn't get it.
The cities look crap, no-one would layout a city like that but there is also the simple absence of something like roads. Cities just sit in the middle of nowhere.
The terrain seems to have been designed by someone who never been outside. It is bumpy as hell wich serves no purpose except to add processor load and make for some very dizzying running around. Dathomir is the worst. It is hard to describe but imagine walking around in a fps with 200 meter tall 90% hills about 3 meters wide.
None of this is helped by a graphics engine wich sucks. On launch the game was applauded for the scenery. It looks nice, just don't expect a framerate above 2 unless you drop everything down wich means you are playing in a landscape that would have been considered outofdate 4 years ago.
Still there is something there and people keep playing in the hope that sony will one day fix it. For now it is clear why SWG is one of the less popular mmorpgs out there.
Playing anything but a zabrak (darth maul) or human will mean you are useless in Player vs Player. Wich means you can't go overt (rebel or imp) wich means a large part of the game is locked off.
Why? Because humans and zabrak have bonusses in battle the zabrak some excelletent resists. Other species have bonusses as well but none that are usefull in combat.
Wookies are the worst of them all since they didn't have armour. Recently they got some but it looks awfull and the effectivnes is a joke compared to what humans can wear.
My main char was a wookie named mojow on europe-infinity. Although a Terra Kassi master (unarmed combat) and owning most critters in PvP I sucked because the enemy had armour full armour with 80% resist, mine was 50%. That makes a whole lot of difference. Even if we are other wise perfectly matched I will loose. I just now deleted the wookie and used the old funds to equip my new zabrak female with top notch equipment. The difference is insane. Were before I was strugging now with a novice char in top armour I am just standing there getting XP like mad.
SWG has terrible balance issius and the sony seems totally unable to solve them. Why do I keep playing it? Well at times, in a good group on a good hunt it can be a fun game. It never is Star Wars but it can be fun. Just that somebody at sony needs to learn real fast how to make a game. In many ways it reminds of Quake by ID. Nice engine. Now can please someone from valve turn it into a game?
Cause over here you can't move at times with all the people restocking the shelves constantly. And it is not exactly rare to see something sold out either.
Windows on the other hand really doesn't sell that well. Why would it? Most people only upgrade windows with their hardware. A fact bitterly regretted by MS. Remember that is what they blamed the whole slow uptake of XP on in the first place.
Windows 95 -> 98 was slightly different because 95 was a total piece of shit so people were glad to upgrade.
But 98 or 2000 are "good" enough for most people and the upgrade to XP comes when they buy a new PC, wich happens less in a down economy, or is pirated by "kiddies" who want to run the latest.
Ask yourselve this question, what really is the reason to upgrade to the latest software for the average home user except a faint hope that the next version will be less bugged? What has really changed that is of any use?
The remove-battery-for-game-switching was a mistake
You are joking right? Alright lets try a different consumer article since I doubt you ever play games. Imagine that to change the video cassete you had to first remove the power suppy from your vcr. Imagine that to change channels on your tv you first had to unplug it. Imagine that to install a piece of software you had to reboot.
Getting the picture? It is not so much a mistake as a sign that the designers just didn't have a clue.
It is not like it is simple to remove the battery, it involves removing several very easy to loose components before you can play a different game. Not something you would want to do while in a moving train.
So if this very simple thing was so totally and completly mishandled why would they have done anything else right?
Why people hate them for this blunder? Because they insulted the gamers. They thought we were stupid enough to buy this piece of crap. I consider that reason enough for a very deep hatred and never ever to consider buying a game console from nokia.
I am just a unix man who gets dragged into windows to often.
You might live in a world of properly setup windows but I do not.
I live in a world of properly setup unix and nowadays linux machines who is dragged screaming and kicking into the windows world. (and why is that the unix department has more accounts, less hardware and few people yet it is the windows department who always needs our help?)
So I get to explain to PHB's why I am not coming into work on a weekend to patch my machines during the lastest worm outbreak. (A. it is a windows worm not a unix worm B. I can patch from home during the unix scares wich do happen and just as often as windows worms)
I know that windows has gotten better but the scars remain. And MS better do a whole lot more work before it convinces me.
Oh and comparing 95 to XP is not a good example. I had no end of trouble with XP and that is on a pure gaming station. 2k3 does better it might actually be usuable (not really since it doesn't have good mouse hover detection What is that? explorer two panes right? Good hover detection would make the pane scroll over wich you hold the mouse when you move the mouse wheel, simple thing that Windows just doesn't do). XP just gave me more scars.
I also still have the feeling that IIS requires more hardware per hit then Apache does. This is ofcourse purely subjective as it depends greatly on the type of site.
Still knowing all this I can't help coming down like a ton of bricks on an IIS runner. Not fair but who says I am fair? You are dealing with bitter unix people who have to deal with windows admins unlike you who don't know their job and yet at constant threat of losing our job to them.
I got tired of it as well. So a quick search and YES like a lot of current games most of the "control" files are just plain text files with a bit of pseudo code.
Nothing a scripter can't handle.
So up the "relief" on going to the toilet. (now improves all the stats and a lot more). Reduced hunger and toilet growth during work (they don't have lunchbreaks or toilets at work in germany?) and reduced the total number of points needed for stages in the relationship.
Money I had increased before the first game. I liked the messing around in the sims. Money worries I don't need a game for. So I flew through the game in a bit over an hour.
Apart from the nudity you didn't miss much. As said there are more explicit games out there.
As for who plays it. Well difficult to say. I am into anime and I have noticed that most of the guy anime actually has a lot of romance stuff in it. Plenty of panty shots of course but usually they grow from teenboy to slightly more caring adult. Learning to think of her feelings type stuff. (and a lot guys do watch or read the stuff aimed at 11 yr old japanese girls).
As for what women play. The sims relationships are even less realistic and that is an absolute hit with women. So who knows.
Not sure if this is much better. Surely the right wing extremist might have a thing or two to say about it. Oh well in the mean time. Hmmmm Olsen Twins.
Lets examine KOTOR. If you were really evil you would become a Darth Vader right? But who would come to Vader for help? So no more missions. Who would trade with Vader or for that matter why would Vader pay? No more saving up for that cool weapon (already a problem in kotor since the best weapon is a saber wich you get for free). You would also constantly have to worry about all those below you since the Sith have a rather promotional system. This could be fun but very hard to code. AI has a difficult enough time to walk a straight line. Let alone determine your weakest moment and strike. (in short if it worked anytime youre knocked out is end of game as one in your party will use that moment to promote him/herself)
Something like it exists in Star Wars Galaxies. There are perks for joining either side openly but the downside is you can now openly be attacked by the other side. So plenty of TKA (unarmed very though fighers) imperials and rebels but no doctors.
A good game with "evil" and "good" choices would not just make story choices but would make it really reflect in the game. A good character gets less money and loot (as he will ask for less or even wave a reward) but can sell it normal shops. An evil character gets more loot but has to sell it in places where he is not known or use a fence who as in real life offers far less.
A good character gets helped by the city militia, an evil character stands a good change of being arrested. A good character can't deal with shady characters (like buying stolen or illegal goods) an evil character can.
KOTOR did this really badly. It also didn't really reflect how hard it would be to be a true "good" jedi. One act of evil after all should be enough to make you a dark jedi. The most obvious was the trial of the murderer in the fish place. Very obvious dark and light choices yet no dark or light points awarded.
But your GTA comment tells it all, you want to act like a criminal without being treated like one. What next a formula 1 game without that whole nasty having to compete thing? A shooter where the enemy doesn't shoot back? A business simulation without money? A flightsim without crashes perhaps?
To me games like GTA would actually start to be fun if they included far more of the real effects of being a criminal. Where no one with an ounce of survival instinct would think of shooting at a cop. Dumb criminals do that. Smart ones know that 1 yr in the slammer is better then being known as a copkiller. You might not make it to jail.
Basically what the article is saying that Oh every game can be played by kids so every game should be suitable for kids. Scary stuff. Imagine they made the news that way (turns on dutch tv, oh never mind they already did)
Anyway. GTA has an age restriction. Anyone under that age playing it is a criminal. No need to worry if the game will influence them the mere fact of them playing it makes them criminals. Lock them up and throw away the key.
Really what more can be done apart from age restrictions. Parenting? Wahahaaah. That would involve making sure parents know what that is. But if you got kids having kids and them wanting to be best buddies with their kids then parenting (stopping the child from doing stuff that is harmfull to them) is not going to happen.
Personally I don't like games like GTA because they are so goddamn unrealistic. Real criminals would be spending most of their money bribing everyone else to keep quiet while facing the real risk of each and every day either being bumped off by someone who thinks you are a threat or being arrested and spending the rest of your live in jail.
And they work perfectly. The 3.5 inch one and the 2.5 inch I got out of a laptop. In fact the 2.5 inch has now been running 2 yrs constantly with no loss of data.
There was sadly one series of IBM drives wich was insanely bad and IBM handled that insanely badly.
They lost their HD business through it and I hope they learned from it. No doubt they have but sometime in the future they will make another blunder like that.
Not that it matters. There are several car companies out there who made cars that KILLED people and they are still in business. If people can forgive being killed then surely merely losing your data can be forgiven as well?
Just that it is easier to supply all the services your customer wants when you have do everything yourselve. Lot easier to sell a server when you build the entire thing. Sure you can be intergrator of third party stuff but that usually means you end up as a puppet/slave to your suppliers. Much much easier to do it yourselve and be your own master AND keep all the money.
In fact if you think about it the most evil pairing of all time, wintel, occured when IBM outsourced something it could have done in house. If they are smart they learned from this:)
So I agree with you except the "want to be in the service industry" They ARE in the service industry. All their other stuff just helps them to be better in it.
They might have to learn another lesson first though. One they haven't learned from the wintel fiasco.
Cheap boxes don't make much profit but they get your name out there. There used to be a time your PC was called an IBM-compatible. Now I get people calling their PC a dell or windows pc.
It is a subtle piece of marketing but where do you think a small business that grew big enough with dells and windows is going to look first for their first big server?
Big companies already know where to find IBM but what about the small companies becoming the big ones?
Slashdot Mirror
The sound is a little bit better when it is in use and the game makes proper use of it so I sometimes put it back in for certain games but I am certainly not going to buy another one.
Creative get your bloody act together and write some decent drivers.
You are loosing a customer who has had every soundblaster upto and including the live.
Sticking your head up, sighting along the barrel and aiming at the target then gently squeezing the trigger and adjusting as neccasry also means you spend a lot of time being a target, a non-moving target.
Look at historical movies of engagements in vietnam and you will that often the soldier just aims his gun in the general direction of the eneme and shoots. Not very accurate but a lot safer for the soldier involved and just maybe it will keep the enemey down.
The AK-47 has the advantage here. Its bullet has more of a change to travel through cover then the M16 had. Simply put an M16 soldier shooting at an AK47 soldier behind wood cover would be very likely to only hit wood. The AK47 soldier on the other hand would shoot straight through the wood and kill the M16 soldier or at least wound.
It says enough about the M16 that a lot of american troops in vietnam switched weapons when they had the change. If the soldier in the field prefer the weapon of the enemey (wich has the risk that your own side might identify you as the enemey in confused situations by the sound of your gun) then you done something badly wrong.
Only kiddies think that windows is the only OS but for those of us who have been slightly longer on this planet we have grown up with other OSes and only recently been forced to move. Even when offices switched to Windows 3.1 or later 95 it often was just to launch a terminal session to the mainframe where all the work was done.
Don't be suprised to learn that in a switch to linux many of the old timers will find the transition very easy as in fact they are switching back. In the real world Windows is the new kid on the block. Linux is just another unix. Just like AIX, solaris, hp-unix etc etc.
As for the office suit. Here it is even more recent that MS became the dominent player. Plenty of places still use Wordperfect.
Check some of the latest games, for sometime they switched from mp3 to ogg for their soundfiles.
Now we got the euro and the cent is back. Although it is now worth a bit more the amount of hazzle makes me wish they dropped it. The cents still take up an insane amount of space and are not really worth anything.
Then again didn't richard prior in a superman movie get rich by stealing even less?
Why do they care? God knows, some power trip from having their inane company motto shown every time? Lengthing the "gameplay"?
Anyway can UO detect it? In theory yes. It scan the files that are on your pc and sends back a report, this would be expected as it would help catch out cheaters with customized data/code.
The game industry is a funny field. On the one hand it is slowly turning into a gigantic industry worth billions of dollars. On the other hand it still seems to be run by idiots, reviewed by idiots and bought by idiots. I myself am in the last group. Despite everything that is wrong with Star Wars Galaxies I still pay for it.
We are like the pretty boy send to prison who goes in to the shower and drops the soap. Don't complain about being raped when you are bend over with your ass in the air.
Doctors don't diagnose themselves, Hairdressers don't cut their own hair, bus drivers take the car to work, the people at the benefits office got jobs. Surely reporters not reading their own stories is nothing to be suprised about. /me opens the morning newspaper and counts the spelling errors and dupe posts in a paid for newspaper. Neither do editors in "respectable" news outlets it seems.
Basically a service provided by a single person for free at his own considerable cost has been withdrawn without notice but with an option to get in a mere two weeks time a backup if you ask in a simple polite way.
Mmmm, not exactly a sign of the apocalypse.
There may be a whole lot of reasons he has decided to quit. He is old enough to have been diagnosed with cancer. Maybe someone close died. Maybe he developed an ulcer who knows.
Everyone seems to have been promised a backup. So quit whining, live for 2 weeks without data nobody but you cares about and then find someone else to provide you with free hosting.
Oh and do backups. How? blogs are simple text entries. Copy and paste to a notepad file. Save-as the finished page. Nothing that couldn't be done by even the most inept user. But of course nobody does backups until it is too late. Bloggers are hardly the exception in this sadly. You do backup don't you?
Personal pages with no content of intrest to anyone have been around since the early days of the web. However they existed in their own little corner and were rarely found by search engines. Blogs because of the incestious linking to each other are found and are just another chunk of noise getting in the way.
Not that I hate blogs. It is just, ugh. I thought I found the information I wanted and instead I am on some whiners site. What a waste of time and bandwidth.
Now if only google could filter out blogs. Then all the personal sites would go back to their own little corner of the net and I wouldn't know anything about them. Of course if this is done then a lot of bloggers would whine because they would miss the accidental visits and see that in reality nobody wants to read about their thoughts. You gotta be intrestting to have something intrestting to say and most people simply are not.
Of course the japanese themselves don't really seem to care yet and the american companies seem even to judge the success of scanlations as to wich series they should license but that doesn't mean that someone somewhere couldn't start a prosecution.
The only bright spot is that the law on translation of original works has no exceptions wich mean that absolutly noone is excempted and cannot do a translation without the copyright owner. The snag? News stations doing those translations of Al Queda tapes and similar. I am pretty damn sure Al Queda did not give CNN written permission to do a translation. Or for the matter the US goverment (remember no exceptions). If this will hold up in court is another matter but there is such a things as equality in the justice system. If they prosecute a manga fan for violating copyright with a translation they must prosecute everyone else who does as well.
For now scanlations exists because the copyright owners don't care.
Compared to similar applications written in real languages (meaning any language that is not java) they are crash prone, give idiotic debug statements, suck up memory and easily get the "too many open files" error on linux.
I guess this is like "Windows nowadays is very stable" bit. You can show all the benchmarks and tests but I will let my daily experience be the judge and use reports such as this as the toilet paper it is.
To be fair, freenet does work on linux and windows as does Azureus. This is for me the only selling point.
Perhaps java is faster then C++, it is hard for me too judge. But until Java developers start writing better programs, Sun makes sure Java is really cross platform, and games (the ultimated performance applications) start being written in java I will file this with all the other reports on how java will take over the world and is the best, fastest, easiest.
They are not going to be too impressed with marketing data like this. If people can be proven to be lying about one thing in a survey then all the other data is suspect as well.
Compare it with banners ads sold on number of shows, clicks AND sales. The first are insanely high but also easily faked. Clicks are slightly more reliable but any advertiser is really intrestted in the number of sales generated.
So if your site can sell 1 billion views that is barely worth anything. If it can produce 100.000 clicks that might get you a few bucks. But generate 1000 sales and you are golden.
No sane advertiser will pay for a spot based on research data where such an easily checked piece of data is already proven to be false 1 out of 5 times. Income, job, interest are then likely to have a far higher error rate.
I do know that newspapers have to make money and that giving their content away for free does not make too much sense. But this doesn't make sense either.
If they want to get info let them start with basic geographic data. Don't show someone with a european IP ads for america only products. Surely that shouldn't be that hard?
I know americans think the rest of the world means alaska but this is nothing new. We are all just waiting for someone to turn it into a working product.
Anyway the bugs he mentions are a minor thing. Simply warping when you dismount a vehicle is a minor nuisance. A though enemy you just managed to get down to almost zero health warping 100 meters away in the middle of another bunch of critters can be seen as a challenge. The recent bug that stopped people from getting money from group missions except the mission owner could be seen as a test case of how nice players are. (result they are all assholes. I shared the money out and a grand total of 2 other players).
Worse are the braindead interface and game delay choices. There is an old joke that lists the step required on a number of OS's to change the IP. All the unixes have a online command, windows has dozen points to click through.
SWG is a thousand times worse. In the game you can own pets/droids/vehicles. These you can call from a datapad (popup window) by clicking on them, holding the mouse then selecting "generate/call" from the option menu that springs up with a few second delay.
Just double clicking on the opens a popup with the details.
Why is this so bad? Well apart from the fact that the most common act is to call not examine the details in the examine window are also displayed next to the item. So now you get two screen telling exactly the same thing.
This also makes it impossible to put the vehicle/pet/droid on the toolbar for easy calling.
Worse perhaps is the 15 second delay. If you are a master Creature handler you can have 3 critters and 1 droid to assist you in battle. But calling them will take you 4 slow selection procedures and a total of 60 secs waiting (can't call more then one at the time and combat interrupts the calling). So most master CH just use one big pet and not smart tactics with 3 smaller.
The game is filled with these kind of stupid interface design choices and delay tactics.
But worst offense of the game is this. It just isn't star wars. Apart from the stormtroopers everything seems to be made/designed by someone who saw a poster once and just doesn't get it.
The cities look crap, no-one would layout a city like that but there is also the simple absence of something like roads. Cities just sit in the middle of nowhere.
The terrain seems to have been designed by someone who never been outside. It is bumpy as hell wich serves no purpose except to add processor load and make for some very dizzying running around. Dathomir is the worst. It is hard to describe but imagine walking around in a fps with 200 meter tall 90% hills about 3 meters wide.
None of this is helped by a graphics engine wich sucks. On launch the game was applauded for the scenery. It looks nice, just don't expect a framerate above 2 unless you drop everything down wich means you are playing in a landscape that would have been considered outofdate 4 years ago.
Still there is something there and people keep playing in the hope that sony will one day fix it. For now it is clear why SWG is one of the less popular mmorpgs out there.
Why? Because humans and zabrak have bonusses in battle the zabrak some excelletent resists. Other species have bonusses as well but none that are usefull in combat.
Wookies are the worst of them all since they didn't have armour. Recently they got some but it looks awfull and the effectivnes is a joke compared to what humans can wear.
My main char was a wookie named mojow on europe-infinity. Although a Terra Kassi master (unarmed combat) and owning most critters in PvP I sucked because the enemy had armour full armour with 80% resist, mine was 50%. That makes a whole lot of difference. Even if we are other wise perfectly matched I will loose. I just now deleted the wookie and used the old funds to equip my new zabrak female with top notch equipment. The difference is insane. Were before I was strugging now with a novice char in top armour I am just standing there getting XP like mad.
SWG has terrible balance issius and the sony seems totally unable to solve them. Why do I keep playing it? Well at times, in a good group on a good hunt it can be a fun game. It never is Star Wars but it can be fun. Just that somebody at sony needs to learn real fast how to make a game. In many ways it reminds of Quake by ID. Nice engine. Now can please someone from valve turn it into a game?
Windows on the other hand really doesn't sell that well. Why would it? Most people only upgrade windows with their hardware. A fact bitterly regretted by MS. Remember that is what they blamed the whole slow uptake of XP on in the first place.
Windows 95 -> 98 was slightly different because 95 was a total piece of shit so people were glad to upgrade.
But 98 or 2000 are "good" enough for most people and the upgrade to XP comes when they buy a new PC, wich happens less in a down economy, or is pirated by "kiddies" who want to run the latest.
Ask yourselve this question, what really is the reason to upgrade to the latest software for the average home user except a faint hope that the next version will be less bugged? What has really changed that is of any use?
You are joking right? Alright lets try a different consumer article since I doubt you ever play games. Imagine that to change the video cassete you had to first remove the power suppy from your vcr. Imagine that to change channels on your tv you first had to unplug it. Imagine that to install a piece of software you had to reboot.
Getting the picture? It is not so much a mistake as a sign that the designers just didn't have a clue.
It is not like it is simple to remove the battery, it involves removing several very easy to loose components before you can play a different game. Not something you would want to do while in a moving train.
So if this very simple thing was so totally and completly mishandled why would they have done anything else right?
Why people hate them for this blunder? Because they insulted the gamers. They thought we were stupid enough to buy this piece of crap. I consider that reason enough for a very deep hatred and never ever to consider buying a game console from nokia.
You might live in a world of properly setup windows but I do not.
I live in a world of properly setup unix and nowadays linux machines who is dragged screaming and kicking into the windows world. (and why is that the unix department has more accounts, less hardware and few people yet it is the windows department who always needs our help?)
So I get to explain to PHB's why I am not coming into work on a weekend to patch my machines during the lastest worm outbreak. (A. it is a windows worm not a unix worm B. I can patch from home during the unix scares wich do happen and just as often as windows worms)
I know that windows has gotten better but the scars remain. And MS better do a whole lot more work before it convinces me.
Oh and comparing 95 to XP is not a good example. I had no end of trouble with XP and that is on a pure gaming station. 2k3 does better it might actually be usuable (not really since it doesn't have good mouse hover detection What is that? explorer two panes right? Good hover detection would make the pane scroll over wich you hold the mouse when you move the mouse wheel, simple thing that Windows just doesn't do). XP just gave me more scars.
I also still have the feeling that IIS requires more hardware per hit then Apache does. This is ofcourse purely subjective as it depends greatly on the type of site.
Still knowing all this I can't help coming down like a ton of bricks on an IIS runner. Not fair but who says I am fair? You are dealing with bitter unix people who have to deal with windows admins unlike you who don't know their job and yet at constant threat of losing our job to them.
Nothing a scripter can't handle.
So up the "relief" on going to the toilet. (now improves all the stats and a lot more). Reduced hunger and toilet growth during work (they don't have lunchbreaks or toilets at work in germany?) and reduced the total number of points needed for stages in the relationship.
Money I had increased before the first game. I liked the messing around in the sims. Money worries I don't need a game for. So I flew through the game in a bit over an hour.
Apart from the nudity you didn't miss much. As said there are more explicit games out there.
As for who plays it. Well difficult to say. I am into anime and I have noticed that most of the guy anime actually has a lot of romance stuff in it. Plenty of panty shots of course but usually they grow from teenboy to slightly more caring adult. Learning to think of her feelings type stuff. (and a lot guys do watch or read the stuff aimed at 11 yr old japanese girls).
As for what women play. The sims relationships are even less realistic and that is an absolute hit with women. So who knows.
Not sure if this is much better. Surely the right wing extremist might have a thing or two to say about it. Oh well in the mean time. Hmmmm Olsen Twins.
Something like it exists in Star Wars Galaxies. There are perks for joining either side openly but the downside is you can now openly be attacked by the other side. So plenty of TKA (unarmed very though fighers) imperials and rebels but no doctors.
A good game with "evil" and "good" choices would not just make story choices but would make it really reflect in the game. A good character gets less money and loot (as he will ask for less or even wave a reward) but can sell it normal shops. An evil character gets more loot but has to sell it in places where he is not known or use a fence who as in real life offers far less.
A good character gets helped by the city militia, an evil character stands a good change of being arrested. A good character can't deal with shady characters (like buying stolen or illegal goods) an evil character can.
KOTOR did this really badly. It also didn't really reflect how hard it would be to be a true "good" jedi. One act of evil after all should be enough to make you a dark jedi. The most obvious was the trial of the murderer in the fish place. Very obvious dark and light choices yet no dark or light points awarded.
But your GTA comment tells it all, you want to act like a criminal without being treated like one. What next a formula 1 game without that whole nasty having to compete thing? A shooter where the enemy doesn't shoot back? A business simulation without money? A flightsim without crashes perhaps?
To me games like GTA would actually start to be fun if they included far more of the real effects of being a criminal. Where no one with an ounce of survival instinct would think of shooting at a cop. Dumb criminals do that. Smart ones know that 1 yr in the slammer is better then being known as a copkiller. You might not make it to jail.
Anyway. GTA has an age restriction. Anyone under that age playing it is a criminal. No need to worry if the game will influence them the mere fact of them playing it makes them criminals. Lock them up and throw away the key.
Really what more can be done apart from age restrictions. Parenting? Wahahaaah. That would involve making sure parents know what that is. But if you got kids having kids and them wanting to be best buddies with their kids then parenting (stopping the child from doing stuff that is harmfull to them) is not going to happen.
Personally I don't like games like GTA because they are so goddamn unrealistic. Real criminals would be spending most of their money bribing everyone else to keep quiet while facing the real risk of each and every day either being bumped off by someone who thinks you are a threat or being arrested and spending the rest of your live in jail.
There was sadly one series of IBM drives wich was insanely bad and IBM handled that insanely badly.
They lost their HD business through it and I hope they learned from it. No doubt they have but sometime in the future they will make another blunder like that.
Not that it matters. There are several car companies out there who made cars that KILLED people and they are still in business. If people can forgive being killed then surely merely losing your data can be forgiven as well?
In fact if you think about it the most evil pairing of all time, wintel, occured when IBM outsourced something it could have done in house. If they are smart they learned from this :)
So I agree with you except the "want to be in the service industry" They ARE in the service industry. All their other stuff just helps them to be better in it.
They might have to learn another lesson first though. One they haven't learned from the wintel fiasco.
Cheap boxes don't make much profit but they get your name out there. There used to be a time your PC was called an IBM-compatible. Now I get people calling their PC a dell or windows pc.
It is a subtle piece of marketing but where do you think a small business that grew big enough with dells and windows is going to look first for their first big server?
Big companies already know where to find IBM but what about the small companies becoming the big ones?