In some US states there is a three strike rules which means that after your 2nd conviction any new conviction carries a rather serious jail sentence not proportional to the direct seriousness of the 3rd conviction.
Mind you, it is not as bad as the bleeding hearts will tell you. Whenever they come up with an example of a third time loser going away for a petty crime, they conveniently forget to mention the serious nature of the first 2 CONVICTIONS (remember, convictions are rare, it is HIGHLY unlikely a repeat offender will have committed the same number of crimes as he/she has convictions). So, a two time rapist gets sent away for stealing a loaf of bread straight out of jail... am I supposed to feel sorry for that guy now?
Anyway, drugs is considered a serious offense in the US. You can agree or disagree with this BUT the fact remains that if you are arrested for your third joint you could face a serious jail sentence. If you are prepared to risk DECADES in jail for a joint, then you are addicted.
If you want to protest the drugs laws there are other methods. But simply be arrested for the third time knowing you are going to be locked up a long time and still doing it, that is NOT a case for marijuana being "harmless".
If as drunk driver is arrested for the third time, do you also deny that this person has a drinking problem?
If a smoker is fired for secretly smoking in an explosion hazard zone at the only job he is ever likely to have, do you deny this person is a nicotine addict?
But no, a pot smoker who throws his life away is doing it because the drugs have no effect on him whatsoever.
The few I have known ALL had issues. Whether that was because of the drugs OR that their issues let them to drugs I don't know. Maybe there are some functional pot smokers but when the common image of a pot smoker is that of a schizophrenic who can only hold a subsidized shop while complaining about the state and people who pay taxes, while the prisons are populated who couldn't just say no after the 2nd jail time... I am going to keep thinking pot smokers are either addicted or so mentally defective they created the addiction in their own mind.
Show me a functional pothead and I might change my mind. Mind you, that only will convince me that like alcohol, some people can handle the occasional use.
If we can accept that someone standing out in the bitter cold for their smoke or someone who has a bottle in their desk has a problem, why is marijuana to be considered harmless?
Below some people claim that anyone who uses it knows they can stop any time... yes, because anyone who had one drink is automatically an addict OR that you can have one drink without turning into an alcoholic means alcohol can't be addictive.
Clean up the act of potheads and maybe the public perception will change.
Oh and a final note, most potheads claim to want a better world yet happily smoke a drug that is soaked in blood. Doesn't matter that you don't like the rules that lead to the drug wars, your smoke is still soaked in blood. If you think people shouldn't buy blood diamonds why do you smoke stuff obtained through so much bloodshed and human misery?
The coin has a "worth" of 1 million AUD but contains 50 million AUD of gold...
And you wonder why the economy is down the crapper. Also... 50 million worth of gold. Perhaps some better use could be found for it then a vanity piece to show just how much Australia bows before its British superiors?
I would have shaped in the form of a blade and put it in a guillotine. Some might scoff at the sharpness of such a blade but with that weight it will do the job. Just more messily, mad max style.
Everyone is talking about WP7 but that is a lie from what I seen. This is WP7.5. So... since MS still has a negligible share with the REAL WP7 being out for a year or so... then clear WP7 ALREADY failed. When there is a new iOS or Android device people fall over themselves to buy it. With MS? Not so much. They tried and tried again and there are well over a dozen versions of Windows for non-pc's and ALL of them failed. INCLUDING WP7. They needed to do a major update to attempt to save it. Yet again. This is hardly the first.5 mobile version.
And 8 is already well on its way. You don't release versions so fast if you are convinced any of them are any good. WP7.5 has failed because I might as well wait for 8 if I wanted a Windows phone (which I don't) since it is clear everyone at MS believes THAT will be the big one... or maybe WP9.
Since it is safe to assume that this new phone is NOT going to be sold out in an instant, it will need time to get traction. But everyone knows it time is limited before the NEXT version that claims to do things completely different will be out.
There is just very little to recommend the phone to anyone who is not a windows fan. It ain't cheap, it doesn't come with a unique feature like ping, it isn't sexy.
The real problem is that there are no real windows fans. Nobody uses windows because they want to. They use it because they are unwilling to use anything else. I take a dump twice a day because else I will die and the alternative of a colostimie bag (no way I am going to google the proper spelling of that) is repulsive.
Mac users love macs. Android users love android. Linux users love Linux. Windows users? They only love the promise of the cold comfort of the grave and the release from their hellish lives it will bring.
That is why this one will yet again fail, because nobody NEEDS a Windows phone and nobody WANTS one.
Mind you, I could be wrong but I been right on this subject for over a dozen times (yes there really been that many attempts by MS) so I feel fairly comfortable I will be right once again. It is kinda like predicting that it will be a cloudy day in Ireland. Sometimes past performance IS an indicator of future behavior (translated mandatory warning in Holland on financial products).
So... as agile as say a Google? Which Google? Google the brainstorm of a handful of guys or Google the mega corp with offices all over the world? The agile startup might have been more sexy but it only was capable of things in potentia. It had potential, that was realized as it grew. The snow flake that falls is not an avalanche. Neither can it become one. It can cause one but the moment the snowflake has started on the path to an avalanche it has seized to be a simple snowflake.
I can whip up a fairly complex website for say a job site but the moment it needs to scale I will need more then myself, the more it needs to scale up, the less flexible it will become. Even if the code itself will remain flexible, the support structure around it will become by its growth less flexible. A oak sprout can easily bent but it can only become a great oak by sacrificing its flexibility for sheer size. Then it doesn't have to be flexible anymore to survive being stepped on. Few things can step on a 1000 year old oak.
Also, how agile do you want government to be? Agile means fast, do you WANT government to do its requisition process fast? With no procedures to investigate, file complaints? Nobody told early Google how to buy its hardware but experience has shown that when big orders are involved, oversight is desperately needed and oversight is low.
Government is slow and inefficient because it involves a lot of different interests.
And what is the alternative anyway? For every Google there are a hundred FAILED startups. Good luck explaining that to the voter, the government funding a 100 different projects and getting commercial results of 99 of them failing. See recent fallout over funding for electric cars and solar panels.
And big business? Lets see, the American car industry failed miserable and needed the state to help them out... but no doubt republicans will say that came because of all the regulation. This is proven because regulations were removed from the finance industry and they... oh wait... they failed even more massively didn't they. Gosh... private industry small startups fail left and right... big business fails left and right... compared to that, the state ain't doing so badly.
Anyway, think very carefully what you wish for when you wish for an efficient state. The most efficient form of law and order is to simply kill any offender for any offence. No lengthy trials, no costly jails, no rehabilitation with a near perfect failure rate.
There were efficient governments in the past. People fought tooth and nail to get rid of them.
But some of us are not and we might have to loose speed FAST. NOW, not AFTER our brains have processed not just that we need to stop in a hurry BUT that now something is wrong and we have to do something we never really thought about doing while whatever has made it necessary to stop is approaching at 130km/h.
Or translated, I am driving on cruise control, which means I am NOT fully in control of the car because I am not expecting anything, when suddenly there is an accident in front me. I slam on the brakes and rather then them working fully against ONLY the weight of the car, they now got to work against the engine to. A Jaguar engine, not a tiny city mobile. Now I got to get my hands of the steering wheel while I am trying to avoid a high speed collision and fiddle with the keys...
Your use case only applies if a decide to disengage cruise control early on while driving comfortable with plenty of time to asses the situation and come up with a solution.
I hope if this ever happens to anyone, they will have that time and empty road ahead of them and quickness of mind to come up with your solution because I just know your average motorists is perfectly capable of doing this... why yes, I do not drive, I go by train. Why do you ask?
16GB system memory PLUS 2GB video memory. That is a decent spec for a modern game PC. Consoles NEVER in their entire history have been up to spec to even a budget game PC. Considering the history I think you will be lucky with 2GB total memory.
And as for no-physical media. That would rob them of endless miles of advertising space in the shops. It would ALSO require them to add a HD that is NOT sold as dump ware because absolutely nobody else is willing to buy them anymore. Have you noticed that console HD space has been running just behind Netbook HD space? The netbooks go up a notch, the consoles take the old notch? Netbooks go 600, consoles take 320. (Budget PC's for earlier in history)
That is because while HD's are dirt cheap by PC buyers standards, they are a massive chunk out of the budget of a console.
As for 4k resolution... yes, same as consoles are now HD right? Well, I played Red Dead Redemption. Nice game but no way in HELL that was true HD. I played lego games with smaller pixels. It was called Duplo!
Your post reminds me a bit of the mockups people do for new handheld consoles. There are some to drool over DS renderings out there... then what do we get? A piece of plastic with an eye watering 3D display... I want my fans vision! Not reality!
You can see it best when you run a console game on a PC, the only taxing thing is when you turn all the options on (in your graphics driver) and raise the resolution because on the same resolution and same options as a console, your PC will fall asleep.
It ain't just GPU or even memory. It is even such a simple thing as HD speed. What game developer would code for the slowest laptop HD out there? A console developer.
Put all the limitations together and you can see why some of the biggest money earners in gaming history have not made their way on to the console. The Sims and WoW. None of the games are visually immidiately impressive but they simply take a LOT of memory and a LOT of random disk access.
Why? Because they are non-linear games. The next time you wonder at the marvel of the graphical complexity of a BF3 or even a Rage, ask yourself this... how much am I seeing at a time? Randomly? The games are on rails, with very old style dark corridors between areas to allow the swapping of areas. They remind me a LOT of theme park rides. Where you have large rooms seperated for sound and sight with dark corners.
The real way to tax a PC is to load up the Sims or Operation Flashpoint and to load up the scene with different models. The makers of F.E.A.R. talked about this, they could choose either to have a room impress with lights or with monsters but not both. Next time you see a "big" area on a console, ask yourself, what is missing. What did they have to cut in Y to make X happen.
With a PC, you can simply do both. That is why custom maps, mods and whatever are often so much more impressive to what the original game developers can do. Because anyone that uses mods KNOWS their PC must exceed the recommended spec, not just meet minimum. But on the console, it is all the same absolute minimum approach.
Remember all those people that thought a PS3 would make a good linux machine? They probably never tried it. When was the last time you where happy with a PC with 256mb memory, the smallest and slowest laptop HD they could find and a power consumption that would make Nvidia blush?
Right after I learned a few basics of the C16 (C64 was for rich kids) I programmed a small game. Granted it wasn't much, dodge missles in a balloon but it was a game. And it was within a weekend. Instant gratification was a LOT easier back in the days. Only thing that gotten close was knocking up a light organ with Andruino and a robot that tries to stay within a given distance of your hand. Also quick knock-ups although they were done based on years of programming experience.
We had it easier as oldies when if you weren't rich you HAD to code your own stuff because you couldn't afford bought games or even to load them from tape in a cassete drive which you didn't have.
Anyway, if you want to get kids down, just remind them that for every scientists there are dozens of people running the same test time and time again all over the country. For every top programmer there are dozens of people writing the same HR program or website over and over again.
Maybe it is better to not tell them. Let them dream.
A lot of reactions talk about the cost of fuel... seemingly these people forget that the satellite in question might still have fuel available that is going unused. What if out of this research it becomes clear that any new satellite needs the requirement to have enough fuel left for one last journey to the collector satellite orbit where it will be dismantled.
I wonder how a slashdot story about Darpa seeking input on a research project for some kind of network that can route around damage would be received. Seems like Slashdot is getting more and more users that immediately go negative rather then exploring the possibilities.
4chan is hardly a child-porn website. Just that if you allow anonymous image postings, the child porn trolls soon follow. You might as well call Slashdot the GNAA hideout. Or a libertarian website.
Anontalk is a "splinter" group that does heavily favor free speech, totally unrestricted free speech... trouble is that there really isn't that much to speak about in the west except endless silly conspiracies. The only really censored type of speech is related to child porn. So... what do you? Either you have free speech and child porn is part of it, or you don't. Yahoo by the way hosts far more child porn, depending on what you call child porn? Does the art of David Hamilton qualify? It does for some.
Any posted child porn is quickly removed of 4chan but the nature of a public board is that the users really create the content. 4chan has a board for beautifull women. It USED to be mostly asian models because 4chan is a copy of the japanese 2chan board. But over time more and more people used it who had an almost insane hatred of anything non-white. Now the board is filled with "amateur" (read to ugly to be paid) western women. Users deciding content.
So is 4chan about porn then?
If you consider lolcats porn, then yes. 4chan is better known for endless lolcats then child porn which frankly in quite a few years of occasional use I have only seen in the form of deleted posts. Then again, I never ventured into/b/
It must be comforting to have such a limited mind as TechLA. The law is the law and it has to be obeyed at all costs (although I am willing to bet TechLA has a large number of traffic tickets and other stuff where he considered the law not to apply to him).
In the real world where there are many shades of gray the difference between hooliganism, vigilantism, rebellion and terrorism are often blurred. Many a freedom fighter has been called a terrorist. Often by the same side in their own life time.
Anonymous is upsetting the status quo, they are doing things others rather wish they didn't do. It depends on your own allegiance to those "others" what you think of Anonymous. OR on your desire to have the status quo continue uninterrupted because you don't want your boat rocked.
GODWIN ALERT.
Ich habe es nicht gewust (to any Germans wanting to complain about the spelling, remember, you lost) is not just uttered by Nazi's and their symphatizers who don't have the guts to stand up for what they believe. It is used by those that chose to look the other way. None so blind as those that don't want to see.
A while back there was a lot to do about a surveillance camera showing a toddler in China being hit by a car and left injured on the ground by an endless stream of passerby's and even driving over by another car. What kind of person could possible do that? Is it a chinese thing? No. All these people were people like TechLA. People that didn't want their little lives interrupted for even one second. It is not even that they are evil through actions, they probably comforting their empty souls with the thought, "Somebody else will fix it." I am not doing anything but surely someone else will so that is okay then.
All evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing... TechLA is not a good man, he is a moral vacuum. While the real world has many greys that doesn't mean you can comfortable color yourself gray and say "Ich have es nicht gewust".
Anon has taken it upon itself to fight things it thinks it is wrong. Are they greenpeace? Slave liberators? Nazi-hunters? Or are they moral commitees? Witch-hunters? Free slave hunters? Are they jews fighting for their own homeland or palestinians fighting for their own? Is what they are fighting for good or bad? Depending on what you call it you make the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist.
Anon is in this instance fighting child porn producers (this is no "harmless" p2p users, the attacked forum users tend to exchange self made child porn). It is for me very hard to therefor not call Anonymous in this instance Freedom fighters.
TechLA either think childporn is good OR he just doesn't want to deal with the hassle of people fighting for a good cause. Either way, he is a morally reprehensible person. You can think differently but ask yourself WHY anon's action are really upsetting you so much.
But they were usually modded down quickly by Apple fanboys. Bill Gates is often evil figure in computing but it was a blessing that EVERYONE else, including Steve Jobs, screwed up completely and we our home computers became machines based on cloned hardware and even cloned software. Or what do you think Apples response would have been to either Compaq or DrDos? Oh wait we KNOW. Clone a Mac and get sued. Luckily IBM was asleep at the wheel and Compaq cloned the IBM and we all bought IBM compatibles at a fraction of the price. And because they were clones, they weren't locked down and some drunk Fin wrote an OS and the rest is history and the future.
None of this would have happened if Apple had won the race. Or if IBM had won the race. Or commodore or any of the others. Don't be fooled by the "nice" image of Apple or the "open" base of OSX. That happened because they were to small. Want to see what PC's would have looked like if Apple had produced them? Buy an iPhone. Expensive option is the only option and totally closed down.
Real history doesn't have heroes. If we are lucky it is a tale of the lesser of two evils having the upperhand. In this case it was Bill Gates. Who won't be remembered as a great man but just as not as totally evil if the people he defeated had won. It is sorta like how the world is better of for America having dominated for the last half century. Oh, not because the Americans are so nice but the world would have been a lot worse under Nazi/Japanese/British/USSR rule.
But hey, the punters who want their shinies got to believe that their guru is a hero else they might have to ask themselves why very expensive phones with a gigantic profit margin can't be produced in America or at least without near slave labor. Dennis Ritchie? Richard Stallman? Not sexy enough, to difficult with him asking troublesome questions.
So, the fanboys turn Jobs into a man he never was and put their fingers in their ears whenever someone dares to ask why he is considered such a hero.
And I don't just mean straight money. Housing? Washing? Mom bringing food? Old washing machine?
Mind you, as a European your story is proof that it can't be done. Do I really want my doctor to do 12 years over his story (6 years study, 6 years working for each study year)? Seems a bit wasteful.
But Hey, I am from Holland, the country whose economy isn't down the drain. What do know.
In times gone by women worked the field and carried their babies with them. As the children learned to walk to would first play work and soon work for real.
Or are you talking of days gone by in which very young children were send down the mines because they fit in the narrowest spaces, don't get paid much and nobody cared to much if they died?
Am I the only developer using a very large desktop area? I must be because both Mac, Windows, Unity and Gnome 3.0 SUCK DONKEYBALLS when all you need from your desktop is a very large space to put windows on. KDE is the worsed. MS tried the Active Desktop thing before and it only makes sense for people that see the desktop. I don't, there are windows in front of it on which I am doing my work. I HATE files on the desktop because I first need remove windows to access it. At most I use it because it is an easy place to find in most file managers.
As an experienced users, focus follows mouse is also a must. I very often switch input between windows/apps and that means every click to focus I don't have to do saves a lot of time and agro. It is so bad that on windows I routinely have input go to wrong window simply because I am so used to not having to click a window or WORSE part of a window to have THAT part of my screen receive input.Why should I ever want to move the mouse away from a window and still have the input go to that window?
The OSX unified menu is not just a killer of focus follows mouse (the menu would change as your mouse passes other windows on the way to menu) on a large desktop it means the menu can be a long way away from the window. This would matter less if you didn't need to first click the window to give it focus and then go back to the menu to use the menu... I do notice that most hardcore mac users are users of special packages that have an insane amount of short cuts on their input devices. But us mere mortals have to deal with apps that are far less optimized.
Unity loves to put the menu on the far left... so if your main monitor happens to be on the right... happy mouse travelling!
Gnome 3.0... actually, I am not sure what the hell it is trying to do. Crash a lot? Make years of development of utilities a waste as nothing works anymore? Create a desktop with absolutely ZERO options for configuration?
I know what the flaw is with the recent KDE, Gnome 3.0 and Unity developments. The linux year of the desktop never happened (despite the fact that it has been years my employers even had to consider whether to allow me to use Linux as my development desktop) and they saw how iOS and even Android suddenly got people to use non-MS Windows... and they think that this audience will make them the millions they been dreaming off in secret.
Hell, even MS is doing with Windows 8. Surely it is the standard desktop that is the block to selling more? It even makes some sense. The more supposedly "noob" friendly the app, the more it deviates from the old windows (and I mean here the style slowly evolved from the xerox design, not MS specific). Check your latest brand name computer and its crapware. Wanna bet the config utitlities and virus software looks "slick" with non-standard buttons and such?
Do "users" really like it? I don't. But I am a developer so I don't matter.
So, when asked once again to rescue a windows machine for people who are perfectly good friends but not the brightest people in the world, I installed Ubuntu instead once Flash updates had made certain that it was good enough for people who only use the web, play music, download and chat.
Surely these people, a few who have a below average IQ (this is not me being elitist, one of them has been tested as being around 85 ) would never be able to work with Linux?
Well, they did and not only did they manage but do you remember the nerd rage when Ubuntu switched the window buttons? None of them even cared, most hadn't even noticed. All I really had to do to instruct them was how to accept updates.
Yes, that was silly because when Unity hit, that was the end of the experiment. Unity was NOT understandable and Gnome 3.0 was no better. It was a disaster far worse then ANY MS update EVER. It broke about a dozen installs and I had no easy way to recover. And while these people had no problem switching from Windows to Ubuntu they NEED their Facebook and so i just reinstalled windows and r
The biggest problem FF14 had was a most serious case of consulitus. Considering the game is still not ready for the PS3 after a year, that was a really dumb mistake but one Japanese are prone to make. For some reason, games from the east just don't have the polish, technical polish, that we have come to take for granted in the west.
Part of the reason might be that the japanese just don't do PC's. Most western game companies started on the PC or similar user controlled machines like the amiga or mac. We have come to take for granted that a PC game might have to run without sound because there is no sound card and so most games come with a mixer panel to mix not just music, but speech, special effect, environment and music. Many DS games I played don't even allow you to turn the music off and sound is a hardware slider affecting all sound the same.
It is more then just simple missing configurations. I was quite shocked when recently caved and bought a PS3 by the BLACK saving screens... wtf? When was the last time a PC game even had to pause while saving? Oh wait, Rage, another game with a serious case of consilitus (try changin ammo on your equipped but not in the quick set, weapon. It will switch to weapon in your quickset instead of changing ammo).
How does this relate to FF14? Simple:
Config: Changing resolution or ANY other setting requires you to quit the game and launch a seperate config utility. This utility is NOT launched during first or indeed any startup. You have to dig for it.
Character loading screen, not just akward it takes AGES. Just to render three chars. I can run any game with full details but FF14 bring my PC to its knees.
Monthly fee? If you want more then one character, you pay more. You quickly pay a monthly fee far higher then any other mainstream game. If this game was the best in its class, that might be okay... but it is not.
Classes, you create a character, either a fighter or a crafter. Maybe... as everywhere else in the game, explanation is zero. That is what fans call hardcore. I call it needlessly complex. Every MMO explains with simple text what your choices are during config. FF14 makes it guessing game.
The chat system. Apparently there is one. Good luck on figuring it out. 99% of MMO's use an IRC like system. Two did not. Age of Conan and FF14. Gosh, what else do they have in common?
The menu... I know consoles don't have keyboards... oh wait, the PS3 can use keyboards just fine and you can get a working one for 5 bucks... so WHY the menu on a PC? The menu hursts us.
The game feels full of potential but they need to hire some white nerds to make it into a product that is not a pain to use. I know the Japanese committed horrible war crimes but come on, it has been over half a century, STOP punishing yourselves! Enjoy the comforts of the modern age, buy a chair and use common sense design in your computer games.
The graphics are still insanely pretty, especially with the large amount of gear that allows you to dress you avatar as you want to. Including special clothes for cat girls. CAT GIRLS!
The backgroud story is also interesting. The problem was that the game was unplayable and not much fun. Whether the fun part will be saved if the the game actually becomes playable that is the big question.
I got my doubts but for SE it is a choice between abandoning a huge money sink or sink a little bit more money into and hope to score after all.
There are enough FF fans and enough MMO fans that want something different then WoW to create a succesful game after all. The game had huge potential but the bugs killed it.
If they can create a new engine that can actually draw the graphics with a reasonable speed on a top end machine I am willing to give it another try. For now they have not yet achieved this and I am NOT going to pay for a year to fund the development.
You are the fish, the game company is the fisher and the difference is between how noticable the hook is versus the bait. But with many F2P games they don't even bother with bait anymore, they just throw in a stick of dynamite and scoop up your carcass.
A game costs money, fine, I can deal with that. But when I pay 40 for a full price game and you then try to charge me 6 for a saddle.... I feel ripped off.
EA is very bad at this, it has always been the case with DRM that the pirate got the smoother gaming experience in not just having to deal with Discs and activation but also not needing the CPU sucking DRM code.
But with DLC and even worse, exclusive packs, the pirate gets EVERYTHING where as the regular consumer often can't even get the full package even if he could afford to pay for each and every one of them. A US only pack? Nice way to turn the EU gamer to the pirate website that has said package available.
Take a look at games like Dragon Age, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect. Loads of "extra's" either paid or promotional that a pirate gets for free while a paying customer can't get them all and will need to spend well over a hundred euro's for a single game.
These game companies are actively loosing sales from me. I used to buy when it was still a single game you bought and that was it. Hell, with a game with so many boring elements as Mass Effect what is even the point in buying it before all the DLC is done since it has zero replay value. Or do they think I had so much fun scanning planets and opening endless containers that I want to do it all again?
If you want my money make clear to me that I know EXACTLY in advance how much I am going to end up paying. And then STOP trying to hit me up for more money. There are LAWS for other industries to prevent exactly this. It is NOT allowed for travel companies to keep hitting you up with extra fees. Hidden service fees are outlawed. But game companies are happily trying all the scum bag methods that other industries have been sentenced for in court.
A while ago I had a rather depressing exchange with one of those "14 dollars per months is WAAAAAY to expensive" people who believes that servers are free. Free2Play is everything but.
A good example if Lotro, it has gone F2P and this means you gotta buy expansions not with hard cash but with points. The latest one is 3250 points which comes to about 40 euro's. The last expansion when it was still pay to play was 24 euro's for a physical copy... so... F2P costs more.
It is even weirder that F2P people then buy items that have no value in the game anymore. Dyes for instance, my scholar still has stacks from levelling up, yet they sell for hard cash. It seems to be a certain type of person why falls for this and a game company has to make a decision about who they want to cater for. I have played some of the F2P games from asia and the money squeeze is just ruining the entire experience for me. As a cheap westerner I prefer to simply pay a trivial amount per month and be done with it then "play for free" but have the game try to squeeze way more money out of me at every turn. Again Lotro is an example, almost every screen has a huge golden coin on it to link to the store. Which is a disaster in website design.
But I don't think this is anything really new. We had licenses being squeezed near the end of their life or "me too" games that were clearly designed to have broad low reaching appeal with minimum investment for maximum returns.
It only gets depressing when regular game companies start to believe that catering for the losers who have nothing to do but to whine endlessly on the forum about how they don't want to pay 14 bucks is a way forward. Here is a hint, if someone is going to bitch about such a tiny amount, they probably can't afford to buy all the optional extra's either. What you will be left with is a game deserted by the regular players and free players trying to limit their spending while dealing with complaints from lawyers about how you ruined their clients life by taking all their money.
Oh, didn't think of that? Well, it is a concern, it is hard to get into debt playing WoW. But what is to stop me from spending my rent money on a free2play game? And there are a LOT of countries with rather severe rules to protect the stupid from themselves. Do you want to deal with those laws as a game company?
Just take 14 bucks from ten million individuals each and every month. That should be enough to satisfy anyone.
Debian is to Ubuntu what grass is to a steak. Grass is turned into a steak but no amount of frying and pepper is going to make grass taste good without the intervention of a cow.
Happy grass eating. I am going to get me a nice juicy dead cow.
Mint still has the old Gnome for now, the major downside is that it is run by kids who think raping Google is a good way to get me to give them money... NO IT IS NOT.
But once you reconfigured all your browsers to not use a custom search and removed the stupid motto from the command line it is Ubuntu as it should be.
really, I got to wonder about the Linux distro's. Is there some curse on 2011 so they had to make sure that 2011 ABSOLUTLY had NO FUCKING chance of becoming the year of the linux desktop?
It is sad, Ubuntu made linux so easy I installed it for several people who used to get their windows corrupted within a month. They had NO problems switching to Linux whatsoever. Even the buttons on the left didn't throw them. Then comes the 11.04 update, they just click okay because that is what they told them to do and now they are all back on windows.
Good work Shuttlecock. You are loosing the experience AND the in-experienced at the same time. Getting tired of having money?
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In some US states there is a three strike rules which means that after your 2nd conviction any new conviction carries a rather serious jail sentence not proportional to the direct seriousness of the 3rd conviction.
Mind you, it is not as bad as the bleeding hearts will tell you. Whenever they come up with an example of a third time loser going away for a petty crime, they conveniently forget to mention the serious nature of the first 2 CONVICTIONS (remember, convictions are rare, it is HIGHLY unlikely a repeat offender will have committed the same number of crimes as he/she has convictions). So, a two time rapist gets sent away for stealing a loaf of bread straight out of jail... am I supposed to feel sorry for that guy now?
Anyway, drugs is considered a serious offense in the US. You can agree or disagree with this BUT the fact remains that if you are arrested for your third joint you could face a serious jail sentence. If you are prepared to risk DECADES in jail for a joint, then you are addicted.
If you want to protest the drugs laws there are other methods. But simply be arrested for the third time knowing you are going to be locked up a long time and still doing it, that is NOT a case for marijuana being "harmless".
If as drunk driver is arrested for the third time, do you also deny that this person has a drinking problem?
If a smoker is fired for secretly smoking in an explosion hazard zone at the only job he is ever likely to have, do you deny this person is a nicotine addict?
But no, a pot smoker who throws his life away is doing it because the drugs have no effect on him whatsoever.
The few I have known ALL had issues. Whether that was because of the drugs OR that their issues let them to drugs I don't know. Maybe there are some functional pot smokers but when the common image of a pot smoker is that of a schizophrenic who can only hold a subsidized shop while complaining about the state and people who pay taxes, while the prisons are populated who couldn't just say no after the 2nd jail time... I am going to keep thinking pot smokers are either addicted or so mentally defective they created the addiction in their own mind.
Show me a functional pothead and I might change my mind. Mind you, that only will convince me that like alcohol, some people can handle the occasional use.
If we can accept that someone standing out in the bitter cold for their smoke or someone who has a bottle in their desk has a problem, why is marijuana to be considered harmless?
Below some people claim that anyone who uses it knows they can stop any time... yes, because anyone who had one drink is automatically an addict OR that you can have one drink without turning into an alcoholic means alcohol can't be addictive.
Clean up the act of potheads and maybe the public perception will change.
Oh and a final note, most potheads claim to want a better world yet happily smoke a drug that is soaked in blood. Doesn't matter that you don't like the rules that lead to the drug wars, your smoke is still soaked in blood. If you think people shouldn't buy blood diamonds why do you smoke stuff obtained through so much bloodshed and human misery?
The coin has a "worth" of 1 million AUD but contains 50 million AUD of gold...
And you wonder why the economy is down the crapper. Also... 50 million worth of gold. Perhaps some better use could be found for it then a vanity piece to show just how much Australia bows before its British superiors?
I would have shaped in the form of a blade and put it in a guillotine. Some might scoff at the sharpness of such a blade but with that weight it will do the job. Just more messily, mad max style.
Everyone is talking about WP7 but that is a lie from what I seen. This is WP7.5. So... since MS still has a negligible share with the REAL WP7 being out for a year or so... then clear WP7 ALREADY failed. When there is a new iOS or Android device people fall over themselves to buy it. With MS? Not so much. They tried and tried again and there are well over a dozen versions of Windows for non-pc's and ALL of them failed. INCLUDING WP7. They needed to do a major update to attempt to save it. Yet again. This is hardly the first .5 mobile version.
And 8 is already well on its way. You don't release versions so fast if you are convinced any of them are any good. WP7.5 has failed because I might as well wait for 8 if I wanted a Windows phone (which I don't) since it is clear everyone at MS believes THAT will be the big one... or maybe WP9.
Since it is safe to assume that this new phone is NOT going to be sold out in an instant, it will need time to get traction. But everyone knows it time is limited before the NEXT version that claims to do things completely different will be out.
There is just very little to recommend the phone to anyone who is not a windows fan. It ain't cheap, it doesn't come with a unique feature like ping, it isn't sexy.
The real problem is that there are no real windows fans. Nobody uses windows because they want to. They use it because they are unwilling to use anything else. I take a dump twice a day because else I will die and the alternative of a colostimie bag (no way I am going to google the proper spelling of that) is repulsive.
Mac users love macs. Android users love android. Linux users love Linux. Windows users? They only love the promise of the cold comfort of the grave and the release from their hellish lives it will bring.
That is why this one will yet again fail, because nobody NEEDS a Windows phone and nobody WANTS one.
Mind you, I could be wrong but I been right on this subject for over a dozen times (yes there really been that many attempts by MS) so I feel fairly comfortable I will be right once again. It is kinda like predicting that it will be a cloudy day in Ireland. Sometimes past performance IS an indicator of future behavior (translated mandatory warning in Holland on financial products).
So... as agile as say a Google? Which Google? Google the brainstorm of a handful of guys or Google the mega corp with offices all over the world? The agile startup might have been more sexy but it only was capable of things in potentia. It had potential, that was realized as it grew. The snow flake that falls is not an avalanche. Neither can it become one. It can cause one but the moment the snowflake has started on the path to an avalanche it has seized to be a simple snowflake.
I can whip up a fairly complex website for say a job site but the moment it needs to scale I will need more then myself, the more it needs to scale up, the less flexible it will become. Even if the code itself will remain flexible, the support structure around it will become by its growth less flexible. A oak sprout can easily bent but it can only become a great oak by sacrificing its flexibility for sheer size. Then it doesn't have to be flexible anymore to survive being stepped on. Few things can step on a 1000 year old oak.
Also, how agile do you want government to be? Agile means fast, do you WANT government to do its requisition process fast? With no procedures to investigate, file complaints? Nobody told early Google how to buy its hardware but experience has shown that when big orders are involved, oversight is desperately needed and oversight is low.
Government is slow and inefficient because it involves a lot of different interests.
And what is the alternative anyway? For every Google there are a hundred FAILED startups. Good luck explaining that to the voter, the government funding a 100 different projects and getting commercial results of 99 of them failing. See recent fallout over funding for electric cars and solar panels.
And big business? Lets see, the American car industry failed miserable and needed the state to help them out... but no doubt republicans will say that came because of all the regulation. This is proven because regulations were removed from the finance industry and they... oh wait... they failed even more massively didn't they. Gosh... private industry small startups fail left and right... big business fails left and right... compared to that, the state ain't doing so badly.
Anyway, think very carefully what you wish for when you wish for an efficient state. The most efficient form of law and order is to simply kill any offender for any offence. No lengthy trials, no costly jails, no rehabilitation with a near perfect failure rate.
There were efficient governments in the past. People fought tooth and nail to get rid of them.
But some of us are not and we might have to loose speed FAST. NOW, not AFTER our brains have processed not just that we need to stop in a hurry BUT that now something is wrong and we have to do something we never really thought about doing while whatever has made it necessary to stop is approaching at 130km/h.
Or translated, I am driving on cruise control, which means I am NOT fully in control of the car because I am not expecting anything, when suddenly there is an accident in front me. I slam on the brakes and rather then them working fully against ONLY the weight of the car, they now got to work against the engine to. A Jaguar engine, not a tiny city mobile. Now I got to get my hands of the steering wheel while I am trying to avoid a high speed collision and fiddle with the keys...
Your use case only applies if a decide to disengage cruise control early on while driving comfortable with plenty of time to asses the situation and come up with a solution.
I hope if this ever happens to anyone, they will have that time and empty road ahead of them and quickness of mind to come up with your solution because I just know your average motorists is perfectly capable of doing this... why yes, I do not drive, I go by train. Why do you ask?
16GB system memory PLUS 2GB video memory. That is a decent spec for a modern game PC. Consoles NEVER in their entire history have been up to spec to even a budget game PC. Considering the history I think you will be lucky with 2GB total memory.
And as for no-physical media. That would rob them of endless miles of advertising space in the shops. It would ALSO require them to add a HD that is NOT sold as dump ware because absolutely nobody else is willing to buy them anymore. Have you noticed that console HD space has been running just behind Netbook HD space? The netbooks go up a notch, the consoles take the old notch? Netbooks go 600, consoles take 320. (Budget PC's for earlier in history)
That is because while HD's are dirt cheap by PC buyers standards, they are a massive chunk out of the budget of a console.
As for 4k resolution... yes, same as consoles are now HD right? Well, I played Red Dead Redemption. Nice game but no way in HELL that was true HD. I played lego games with smaller pixels. It was called Duplo!
Your post reminds me a bit of the mockups people do for new handheld consoles. There are some to drool over DS renderings out there... then what do we get? A piece of plastic with an eye watering 3D display... I want my fans vision! Not reality!
You can see it best when you run a console game on a PC, the only taxing thing is when you turn all the options on (in your graphics driver) and raise the resolution because on the same resolution and same options as a console, your PC will fall asleep.
It ain't just GPU or even memory. It is even such a simple thing as HD speed. What game developer would code for the slowest laptop HD out there? A console developer.
Put all the limitations together and you can see why some of the biggest money earners in gaming history have not made their way on to the console. The Sims and WoW. None of the games are visually immidiately impressive but they simply take a LOT of memory and a LOT of random disk access.
Why? Because they are non-linear games. The next time you wonder at the marvel of the graphical complexity of a BF3 or even a Rage, ask yourself this... how much am I seeing at a time? Randomly? The games are on rails, with very old style dark corridors between areas to allow the swapping of areas. They remind me a LOT of theme park rides. Where you have large rooms seperated for sound and sight with dark corners.
The real way to tax a PC is to load up the Sims or Operation Flashpoint and to load up the scene with different models. The makers of F.E.A.R. talked about this, they could choose either to have a room impress with lights or with monsters but not both. Next time you see a "big" area on a console, ask yourself, what is missing. What did they have to cut in Y to make X happen.
With a PC, you can simply do both. That is why custom maps, mods and whatever are often so much more impressive to what the original game developers can do. Because anyone that uses mods KNOWS their PC must exceed the recommended spec, not just meet minimum. But on the console, it is all the same absolute minimum approach.
Remember all those people that thought a PS3 would make a good linux machine? They probably never tried it. When was the last time you where happy with a PC with 256mb memory, the smallest and slowest laptop HD they could find and a power consumption that would make Nvidia blush?
You don't think the media can make something out a truck full of CUSHION's crashing?
As for beans... those jokes just write themselves.
This is the media, low standards are to them a challenge.
Right after I learned a few basics of the C16 (C64 was for rich kids) I programmed a small game. Granted it wasn't much, dodge missles in a balloon but it was a game. And it was within a weekend. Instant gratification was a LOT easier back in the days. Only thing that gotten close was knocking up a light organ with Andruino and a robot that tries to stay within a given distance of your hand. Also quick knock-ups although they were done based on years of programming experience.
We had it easier as oldies when if you weren't rich you HAD to code your own stuff because you couldn't afford bought games or even to load them from tape in a cassete drive which you didn't have.
Anyway, if you want to get kids down, just remind them that for every scientists there are dozens of people running the same test time and time again all over the country. For every top programmer there are dozens of people writing the same HR program or website over and over again.
Maybe it is better to not tell them. Let them dream.
A lot of reactions talk about the cost of fuel... seemingly these people forget that the satellite in question might still have fuel available that is going unused. What if out of this research it becomes clear that any new satellite needs the requirement to have enough fuel left for one last journey to the collector satellite orbit where it will be dismantled.
I wonder how a slashdot story about Darpa seeking input on a research project for some kind of network that can route around damage would be received. Seems like Slashdot is getting more and more users that immediately go negative rather then exploring the possibilities.
Insane much? Child porn is now a right if you have been abused?
Even a UN human rights advocate wouldn't go that far... yet.
4chan is hardly a child-porn website. Just that if you allow anonymous image postings, the child porn trolls soon follow. You might as well call Slashdot the GNAA hideout. Or a libertarian website.
Anontalk is a "splinter" group that does heavily favor free speech, totally unrestricted free speech... trouble is that there really isn't that much to speak about in the west except endless silly conspiracies. The only really censored type of speech is related to child porn. So... what do you? Either you have free speech and child porn is part of it, or you don't. Yahoo by the way hosts far more child porn, depending on what you call child porn? Does the art of David Hamilton qualify? It does for some.
Any posted child porn is quickly removed of 4chan but the nature of a public board is that the users really create the content. 4chan has a board for beautifull women. It USED to be mostly asian models because 4chan is a copy of the japanese 2chan board. But over time more and more people used it who had an almost insane hatred of anything non-white. Now the board is filled with "amateur" (read to ugly to be paid) western women. Users deciding content.
So is 4chan about porn then?
If you consider lolcats porn, then yes. 4chan is better known for endless lolcats then child porn which frankly in quite a few years of occasional use I have only seen in the form of deleted posts. Then again, I never ventured into /b/
It must be comforting to have such a limited mind as TechLA. The law is the law and it has to be obeyed at all costs (although I am willing to bet TechLA has a large number of traffic tickets and other stuff where he considered the law not to apply to him).
In the real world where there are many shades of gray the difference between hooliganism, vigilantism, rebellion and terrorism are often blurred. Many a freedom fighter has been called a terrorist. Often by the same side in their own life time.
Anonymous is upsetting the status quo, they are doing things others rather wish they didn't do. It depends on your own allegiance to those "others" what you think of Anonymous. OR on your desire to have the status quo continue uninterrupted because you don't want your boat rocked.
GODWIN ALERT.
Ich habe es nicht gewust (to any Germans wanting to complain about the spelling, remember, you lost) is not just uttered by Nazi's and their symphatizers who don't have the guts to stand up for what they believe. It is used by those that chose to look the other way. None so blind as those that don't want to see.
A while back there was a lot to do about a surveillance camera showing a toddler in China being hit by a car and left injured on the ground by an endless stream of passerby's and even driving over by another car. What kind of person could possible do that? Is it a chinese thing? No. All these people were people like TechLA. People that didn't want their little lives interrupted for even one second. It is not even that they are evil through actions, they probably comforting their empty souls with the thought, "Somebody else will fix it." I am not doing anything but surely someone else will so that is okay then.
All evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing... TechLA is not a good man, he is a moral vacuum. While the real world has many greys that doesn't mean you can comfortable color yourself gray and say "Ich have es nicht gewust".
Anon has taken it upon itself to fight things it thinks it is wrong. Are they greenpeace? Slave liberators? Nazi-hunters? Or are they moral commitees? Witch-hunters? Free slave hunters? Are they jews fighting for their own homeland or palestinians fighting for their own? Is what they are fighting for good or bad? Depending on what you call it you make the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist.
Anon is in this instance fighting child porn producers (this is no "harmless" p2p users, the attacked forum users tend to exchange self made child porn). It is for me very hard to therefor not call Anonymous in this instance Freedom fighters.
TechLA either think childporn is good OR he just doesn't want to deal with the hassle of people fighting for a good cause. Either way, he is a morally reprehensible person. You can think differently but ask yourself WHY anon's action are really upsetting you so much.
But they were usually modded down quickly by Apple fanboys. Bill Gates is often evil figure in computing but it was a blessing that EVERYONE else, including Steve Jobs, screwed up completely and we our home computers became machines based on cloned hardware and even cloned software. Or what do you think Apples response would have been to either Compaq or DrDos? Oh wait we KNOW. Clone a Mac and get sued. Luckily IBM was asleep at the wheel and Compaq cloned the IBM and we all bought IBM compatibles at a fraction of the price. And because they were clones, they weren't locked down and some drunk Fin wrote an OS and the rest is history and the future.
None of this would have happened if Apple had won the race. Or if IBM had won the race. Or commodore or any of the others. Don't be fooled by the "nice" image of Apple or the "open" base of OSX. That happened because they were to small. Want to see what PC's would have looked like if Apple had produced them? Buy an iPhone. Expensive option is the only option and totally closed down.
Real history doesn't have heroes. If we are lucky it is a tale of the lesser of two evils having the upperhand. In this case it was Bill Gates. Who won't be remembered as a great man but just as not as totally evil if the people he defeated had won. It is sorta like how the world is better of for America having dominated for the last half century. Oh, not because the Americans are so nice but the world would have been a lot worse under Nazi/Japanese/British/USSR rule.
But hey, the punters who want their shinies got to believe that their guru is a hero else they might have to ask themselves why very expensive phones with a gigantic profit margin can't be produced in America or at least without near slave labor. Dennis Ritchie? Richard Stallman? Not sexy enough, to difficult with him asking troublesome questions.
So, the fanboys turn Jobs into a man he never was and put their fingers in their ears whenever someone dares to ask why he is considered such a hero.
Cue mod down by a fanboy.
You know how an infinite amount of monkeys can write Shakespear?
Well, you can get a slashdot editor with just 1 monkey. One that has donated its brain to science... and then died.
And don't forget that oh so reliable source and who owns it.
And I don't just mean straight money. Housing? Washing? Mom bringing food? Old washing machine?
Mind you, as a European your story is proof that it can't be done. Do I really want my doctor to do 12 years over his story (6 years study, 6 years working for each study year)? Seems a bit wasteful.
But Hey, I am from Holland, the country whose economy isn't down the drain. What do know.
In times gone by women worked the field and carried their babies with them. As the children learned to walk to would first play work and soon work for real.
Or are you talking of days gone by in which very young children were send down the mines because they fit in the narrowest spaces, don't get paid much and nobody cared to much if they died?
What yesterday are you talking about?
Am I the only developer using a very large desktop area? I must be because both Mac, Windows, Unity and Gnome 3.0 SUCK DONKEYBALLS when all you need from your desktop is a very large space to put windows on. KDE is the worsed. MS tried the Active Desktop thing before and it only makes sense for people that see the desktop. I don't, there are windows in front of it on which I am doing my work. I HATE files on the desktop because I first need remove windows to access it. At most I use it because it is an easy place to find in most file managers.
As an experienced users, focus follows mouse is also a must. I very often switch input between windows/apps and that means every click to focus I don't have to do saves a lot of time and agro. It is so bad that on windows I routinely have input go to wrong window simply because I am so used to not having to click a window or WORSE part of a window to have THAT part of my screen receive input.Why should I ever want to move the mouse away from a window and still have the input go to that window?
The OSX unified menu is not just a killer of focus follows mouse (the menu would change as your mouse passes other windows on the way to menu) on a large desktop it means the menu can be a long way away from the window. This would matter less if you didn't need to first click the window to give it focus and then go back to the menu to use the menu... I do notice that most hardcore mac users are users of special packages that have an insane amount of short cuts on their input devices. But us mere mortals have to deal with apps that are far less optimized.
Unity loves to put the menu on the far left... so if your main monitor happens to be on the right... happy mouse travelling!
Gnome 3.0... actually, I am not sure what the hell it is trying to do. Crash a lot? Make years of development of utilities a waste as nothing works anymore? Create a desktop with absolutely ZERO options for configuration?
I know what the flaw is with the recent KDE, Gnome 3.0 and Unity developments. The linux year of the desktop never happened (despite the fact that it has been years my employers even had to consider whether to allow me to use Linux as my development desktop) and they saw how iOS and even Android suddenly got people to use non-MS Windows... and they think that this audience will make them the millions they been dreaming off in secret.
Hell, even MS is doing with Windows 8. Surely it is the standard desktop that is the block to selling more? It even makes some sense. The more supposedly "noob" friendly the app, the more it deviates from the old windows (and I mean here the style slowly evolved from the xerox design, not MS specific). Check your latest brand name computer and its crapware. Wanna bet the config utitlities and virus software looks "slick" with non-standard buttons and such?
Do "users" really like it? I don't. But I am a developer so I don't matter.
So, when asked once again to rescue a windows machine for people who are perfectly good friends but not the brightest people in the world, I installed Ubuntu instead once Flash updates had made certain that it was good enough for people who only use the web, play music, download and chat.
Surely these people, a few who have a below average IQ (this is not me being elitist, one of them has been tested as being around 85 ) would never be able to work with Linux?
Well, they did and not only did they manage but do you remember the nerd rage when Ubuntu switched the window buttons? None of them even cared, most hadn't even noticed. All I really had to do to instruct them was how to accept updates.
Yes, that was silly because when Unity hit, that was the end of the experiment. Unity was NOT understandable and Gnome 3.0 was no better. It was a disaster far worse then ANY MS update EVER. It broke about a dozen installs and I had no easy way to recover. And while these people had no problem switching from Windows to Ubuntu they NEED their Facebook and so i just reinstalled windows and r
The biggest problem FF14 had was a most serious case of consulitus. Considering the game is still not ready for the PS3 after a year, that was a really dumb mistake but one Japanese are prone to make. For some reason, games from the east just don't have the polish, technical polish, that we have come to take for granted in the west.
Part of the reason might be that the japanese just don't do PC's. Most western game companies started on the PC or similar user controlled machines like the amiga or mac. We have come to take for granted that a PC game might have to run without sound because there is no sound card and so most games come with a mixer panel to mix not just music, but speech, special effect, environment and music. Many DS games I played don't even allow you to turn the music off and sound is a hardware slider affecting all sound the same.
It is more then just simple missing configurations. I was quite shocked when recently caved and bought a PS3 by the BLACK saving screens... wtf? When was the last time a PC game even had to pause while saving? Oh wait, Rage, another game with a serious case of consilitus (try changin ammo on your equipped but not in the quick set, weapon. It will switch to weapon in your quickset instead of changing ammo).
How does this relate to FF14? Simple:
Config: Changing resolution or ANY other setting requires you to quit the game and launch a seperate config utility. This utility is NOT launched during first or indeed any startup. You have to dig for it.
Character loading screen, not just akward it takes AGES. Just to render three chars. I can run any game with full details but FF14 bring my PC to its knees.
Monthly fee? If you want more then one character, you pay more. You quickly pay a monthly fee far higher then any other mainstream game. If this game was the best in its class, that might be okay... but it is not.
Classes, you create a character, either a fighter or a crafter. Maybe... as everywhere else in the game, explanation is zero. That is what fans call hardcore. I call it needlessly complex. Every MMO explains with simple text what your choices are during config. FF14 makes it guessing game.
The chat system. Apparently there is one. Good luck on figuring it out. 99% of MMO's use an IRC like system. Two did not. Age of Conan and FF14. Gosh, what else do they have in common?
The menu... I know consoles don't have keyboards... oh wait, the PS3 can use keyboards just fine and you can get a working one for 5 bucks... so WHY the menu on a PC? The menu hursts us.
The game feels full of potential but they need to hire some white nerds to make it into a product that is not a pain to use. I know the Japanese committed horrible war crimes but come on, it has been over half a century, STOP punishing yourselves! Enjoy the comforts of the modern age, buy a chair and use common sense design in your computer games.
The graphics are still insanely pretty, especially with the large amount of gear that allows you to dress you avatar as you want to. Including special clothes for cat girls. CAT GIRLS!
The backgroud story is also interesting. The problem was that the game was unplayable and not much fun. Whether the fun part will be saved if the the game actually becomes playable that is the big question.
I got my doubts but for SE it is a choice between abandoning a huge money sink or sink a little bit more money into and hope to score after all.
There are enough FF fans and enough MMO fans that want something different then WoW to create a succesful game after all. The game had huge potential but the bugs killed it.
If they can create a new engine that can actually draw the graphics with a reasonable speed on a top end machine I am willing to give it another try. For now they have not yet achieved this and I am NOT going to pay for a year to fund the development.
You are the fish, the game company is the fisher and the difference is between how noticable the hook is versus the bait. But with many F2P games they don't even bother with bait anymore, they just throw in a stick of dynamite and scoop up your carcass.
A game costs money, fine, I can deal with that. But when I pay 40 for a full price game and you then try to charge me 6 for a saddle.... I feel ripped off.
EA is very bad at this, it has always been the case with DRM that the pirate got the smoother gaming experience in not just having to deal with Discs and activation but also not needing the CPU sucking DRM code.
But with DLC and even worse, exclusive packs, the pirate gets EVERYTHING where as the regular consumer often can't even get the full package even if he could afford to pay for each and every one of them. A US only pack? Nice way to turn the EU gamer to the pirate website that has said package available.
Take a look at games like Dragon Age, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect. Loads of "extra's" either paid or promotional that a pirate gets for free while a paying customer can't get them all and will need to spend well over a hundred euro's for a single game.
These game companies are actively loosing sales from me. I used to buy when it was still a single game you bought and that was it. Hell, with a game with so many boring elements as Mass Effect what is even the point in buying it before all the DLC is done since it has zero replay value. Or do they think I had so much fun scanning planets and opening endless containers that I want to do it all again?
If you want my money make clear to me that I know EXACTLY in advance how much I am going to end up paying. And then STOP trying to hit me up for more money. There are LAWS for other industries to prevent exactly this. It is NOT allowed for travel companies to keep hitting you up with extra fees. Hidden service fees are outlawed. But game companies are happily trying all the scum bag methods that other industries have been sentenced for in court.
A while ago I had a rather depressing exchange with one of those "14 dollars per months is WAAAAAY to expensive" people who believes that servers are free. Free2Play is everything but.
A good example if Lotro, it has gone F2P and this means you gotta buy expansions not with hard cash but with points. The latest one is 3250 points which comes to about 40 euro's. The last expansion when it was still pay to play was 24 euro's for a physical copy... so... F2P costs more.
It is even weirder that F2P people then buy items that have no value in the game anymore. Dyes for instance, my scholar still has stacks from levelling up, yet they sell for hard cash. It seems to be a certain type of person why falls for this and a game company has to make a decision about who they want to cater for. I have played some of the F2P games from asia and the money squeeze is just ruining the entire experience for me. As a cheap westerner I prefer to simply pay a trivial amount per month and be done with it then "play for free" but have the game try to squeeze way more money out of me at every turn. Again Lotro is an example, almost every screen has a huge golden coin on it to link to the store. Which is a disaster in website design.
But I don't think this is anything really new. We had licenses being squeezed near the end of their life or "me too" games that were clearly designed to have broad low reaching appeal with minimum investment for maximum returns.
It only gets depressing when regular game companies start to believe that catering for the losers who have nothing to do but to whine endlessly on the forum about how they don't want to pay 14 bucks is a way forward. Here is a hint, if someone is going to bitch about such a tiny amount, they probably can't afford to buy all the optional extra's either. What you will be left with is a game deserted by the regular players and free players trying to limit their spending while dealing with complaints from lawyers about how you ruined their clients life by taking all their money.
Oh, didn't think of that? Well, it is a concern, it is hard to get into debt playing WoW. But what is to stop me from spending my rent money on a free2play game? And there are a LOT of countries with rather severe rules to protect the stupid from themselves. Do you want to deal with those laws as a game company?
Just take 14 bucks from ten million individuals each and every month. That should be enough to satisfy anyone.
He says on an American website.
Debian is to Ubuntu what grass is to a steak. Grass is turned into a steak but no amount of frying and pepper is going to make grass taste good without the intervention of a cow.
Happy grass eating. I am going to get me a nice juicy dead cow.
Mint still has the old Gnome for now, the major downside is that it is run by kids who think raping Google is a good way to get me to give them money... NO IT IS NOT.
But once you reconfigured all your browsers to not use a custom search and removed the stupid motto from the command line it is Ubuntu as it should be.
really, I got to wonder about the Linux distro's. Is there some curse on 2011 so they had to make sure that 2011 ABSOLUTLY had NO FUCKING chance of becoming the year of the linux desktop?
It is sad, Ubuntu made linux so easy I installed it for several people who used to get their windows corrupted within a month. They had NO problems switching to Linux whatsoever. Even the buttons on the left didn't throw them. Then comes the 11.04 update, they just click okay because that is what they told them to do and now they are all back on windows.
Good work Shuttlecock. You are loosing the experience AND the in-experienced at the same time. Getting tired of having money?