Small detail... this has nothing to do with Android. Apple has a beef with the design of the physical phone, the packaging, the cabling AND Samsungs skin for Android. In this suit at least, they got no complaint against Android itself.
We can see this with the consoles, none of them can play proper PC games. Why do you think Half-Life 2 for the xbox looked far worse? And that is an OLD game.
While for most geeks the difference between a PC and a gaming PC ain't all that big, for the average consumer there is a HUGE difference. Their PC is a P4. People still use non flatscreens for screens!
A reference PC that can play games for half a decade will need to be a cutting edge machine to survive for that long. You can't just use a 200 dollar machine because not only will it already be crap, it will be even crappier by the time it has any adoption at all.
The reference gaming PC has been thought up before and it never works. Either it is to expensive to get adopted or so cheap it ain't any good.
Explain the navy please. If men are so obsessed with sex why do MEN volunteer to spend months if not years at sea with no females? No, not all US sailors are gay. Okay, most of them but not all. Some are bi.
But seriously, this myth that men are obsessed with sex needs to die.
Doubtless, when you see it in use you KNOW that a person is trying to claim something that he wishes to be true but can't even be bothered to get the simplest anecdote or anon post to support it. Doubtless the other side does the same. No proof, not even a hint but we nonetheless can't doubt it.
A weasel word if ever there was one.
Remember that story about the "Kraken". That is very similar, in science an extra-ordinary claim should have extra-ordinary evidence. Doubtless is the word of religious freaks and others who think evidence is something only the other side got to bother with.
Doubtless Timothy has posted numerous slanted posts based on faked photo's and instead of questioning them with this evidence (and it is hardly the first time evidence of outright lies have been published) he just goes "oh but the other side does the same" with no evidence.
Facts... I suppose they only matter if they support your point of view.
A surgeon will recommend to operate. A lawyer to do legal work. A soldier to kill someone.
This guy is at WIPO, patents and such is what this guy does. You won't get creative commons out of him.
The problem is not even this guy, the problem is his opposition. There isn't one. As always, "Yes Prime Minister" has the example. Story: Hacker is given the task of coming up with a new transport policy involving road, rail and air. He soon learns that each sector is represented by a civil servant fighting not for the common good but for HIS sector.
This story alone does not cover it. In another story his chauffeur comments on a radio story and points out that all the decisions for public transport, public schools and public healthcare are made by people that go to private hospitals, send their kids to private schools and have chauffeur driven cars. Which Hacker sayed they need because else they would have to make public transport a lot more reliable...
The problem ain't sector reps fighting for their sector, the problem is the common man, the non-commercial, the non-status quo, has no such rep fighting for their cause.
People who are in ivory towers have plenty of sky bridges connecting them to other ivory towers. But never ever a connection to ground level. I have seen it myself, even if some newbie tries, the disconnect is already so great once they have enough power that any contact attempt is extremely uncomfortable so they soon learn not to do it again.
This is just how the system works, calling this guy an idiot only helps keep the system in place. Sadly getting a useful opposition in place is nearly impossible.
TFA addresses what you raise, only the popular products will be funded by things like kickstarter. The slick, good looking and easy to digest. Some think that other works that do not have an easy appeal also deserve funding. That is hard to do when all funding is obtained through an idols like method of a popularity contest.
Patronage of any kind always means that what gets produced is what the person paying for it wants to be produced. He who pays the piper, decides the tune.
That you mention paypal shows how little you know of the world. I think wikileaks should be funded... can I donate through paypal? So much for you freedom in funding. The rich still decide how the money flows.
Terry Pratchett is probably well known on Slashdot and reasonably harmless, few would have an issue with him. He writes enjoyable books and makes a great deal of money with them. Is someone who can donate a million at the drop of a hat, just making a living?
The US has something called the working poor. People with a full time job, sometimes even two, who still can't make ends meet. Somehow it is then hard to care for a brit who writes books in the evening hours after his day job of being a spokes person for a nuclear power plant. He wouldn't have gone hungry would he?
Lets face it, most authors are only poor if they aren't any good at all and can't hold a decent day job or they insist on suffering for their art OR just plain suck at life and think that because they think they got a great book inside them, the world owes them NOT just a living but a rich living.
I notice TFA is in response to that flood of text about the death of the creative class, which I stopped reading after the line where video store clerks are apparently creative... I thought the creative class was programmers and artists, not store clerks.
As I am getting older I am getting more and more opposed to art and the leeching it brings with it. In Holland we give a lot of tax payers money to artists who then insist on more and more control over what they were payed to create... I have a very simple solution for all artists. Either ZERO government grants OR total control. Not both. The infighting should solve the problem, no artists left... and then what? And then NOTHING. People have ALWAYS created art, you often have to hit them quite hard to stop doing it. If art can come out of the darkest concentration camps it cannot be killed. Granted, this is NOT the art most unpopular artists approve off, a toilet nailed to a wall with an claimed price of 3 million but no actual bidders let alone buyers. That kind of art survives purely on patronage, not by art lovers but by people who want to be seen as art lovers through spending other peoples money on it.
The world is changing, once if you wanted to write you had to spend ages at it and then you had one book. Any copies took years! Then the printing press changed and made books cheap to buy BUT also far far cheaper to write. Without the printing press, without tech, many books would never have been written. Not least because many would have been unable to write or read in the first place.
Now the internet allows people to write far more, almost anyone can publish content. Salon.com would never have the reach if it was a paper magazine. But while the content and reach has grown the market hasn't. There is only so much content I can consume and frankly most of it isn't worth it. I do not need to the read the 1000th angst filled novel with a dystopian world view.
Maybe if nobody is willing to pay for your book it just isn't good enough. Is that such a complex concept?
The article talks about the great novels written under the patronage system... and forgets the torrent of drivel that history rightfully forgot about. I am actually a bit of a fan of drivel, the "dollar" books series, the works of Brian Daley or even Alen Dean Foster and "worse". Commercial trash that none at Salon would defend BUT they do sell, the authors DO make a living at them.
How am I supposed to feel sympathy for a group of people unable to make a living who sneer at a people in the same group who do make a living at the same job? It reminds me a bit of most feminists who want to fight for the right for women to be ceo's. I notice that the picket line demanding women can be garbage collectors is far far shorter.
There are people struggling to raise their family working double jobs. Crying that you can't sell your book written at Starbucks is NOT going to pull any heart strings.
Get a job. Write in your spare time. If you are any good, you will make it. If not, then you ain't any good. Though shit. We all got a book inside of us, and that is where it should stay.
Well not free but the employers pays it 100% in for instance Holland.
Almost everyone gets travel expenses but car users get a fixed amount per mile that is not enough to cover it, public transport users just hand in their tickets for a full refund.
Remember that the entire world is NOT the US and that pre-tax amount of a salary says very little about how much you actually are getting.
The job market indicates this person is worth more by evidence of his new offer; it's up to you as a manager to make the case that you do or do not need to pay that increased amount for this person/skillset/experience level. It's not his problem that the market views his value as increased!
Not really how the job market works, maybe the other company has a terrible reputation and needs to pay more. Maybe they have very bad secondary benefits.
To get back on track, 7k is not worth leaving a job over. I presume it is per year after all, an pre-taxes. So it means each month he might get a few hundred extra, big deal. He basically got to ask himself, where do I get the best shot at a salary increase of 70k in the not to distant future. That is the kind of money that gets interesting.
Why is this guy considering leaving for a tiny increase just as the a small companies flag ship product is about to launch? 7k shouldn't do it unless he has been feeling undervalued for a long time. That is the problem when you start considering your managers as friends, they get the bigger bonus the lower they keep your salary.
I wouldn't leave for a small salary increase but being underpaid or for that matter an annoying commute, that would do it.
George Lucas shows one form of control, refusing to release his movies until he was good and ready for it. There was a reason the original Star Wars movies didn't make it to TV for a long time (at least in Holland, don't know about the rest of the world). And when he does release the movies, he controls what is released, not the customer. Why restore Jabba the Hut but not Biggs? There is a scene earlier in the movie that is mentioned in books even picture books where Luke talks to Biggs who is about to leave to join the rebellion. For a movie that isn't exactly deep to begin with it would add something. But instead Lucas makes Greedo shoot first.
Loosing control of distribution is deadly, just ask any Walmart supplier. Walmart sets the terms. Alone. You comply or die. I can well imagine that the movie industry would not want to be told to supply what Walmart wants. Solo shooting first? Walmart could sell it, it could dictate it.
Same with staggered releases, it makes sense for the industry. They can avoid having to spend all the money at once and adjust a movies release strategy depending on American results. There are reasons some movies do well after having bombed in the states and for that matter vice versa. Look at movie posters, every country gets its own. Releasing a movie at once, globally requires a high upfront cost and no tweaking to recover from an error.
So it, is understandable to don't want to loose control because they want total control... whoever wins, we loose. Because we, you and me the consumer, are just cash dispensers to either. Both iTunes AND the movie industry want to squeeze us for every penny we can get. The only difference is where the penny ends up. Steve "Disney" Jobs, remember that (although he is now dead so it matters less). Control means a lot when you are dealing with a product with no real value because it has no scarcity. Disney knows this and releases its classic movies for limited times only because... if they didn't, they wouldn't be special anymore. How can a VHS tape be a limited item when they are created in the millions? Yet Snow White IS a limited release. And it is advertised as such. The power of advertising is truly awesome to behold. Remember, these are NOT tapes specially signed or with toys that are produced in limited numbers. Unsold tapes and DVD's are simply recalled until the next, limited release.
It is as if someone sold factory chicken as a once per year item, buy it now for that special occasion! What a con.
Control is what the movie industry desires, it is understandable but does that mean I as an individual have to allow them to have it? Just because they want it doesn't mean it is something that is desirable for society as a whole.
It is not like control has benefited the industry. Control makes one lazy, the industry hasn't innovated in years. Decades ago I used to visit a movie theather in a student town in Wageningen, it was between an art house and a commercial setup. They ran English animation for instance in English by default, Dutch dubbing is the worst since funny voices are a must especially the unfunny ones. Dutch bugs bunny voice does not suit watership down.
Anyway, in that theather, they ran without a break if there were few people and people didn't want one. Even skipping ads. Late arrival? Get stuffed, the movie started the doors closed. End of story. This was before mobile phones.
Recently pathe, a large chain, announced the same policy. After years of loosing customers in the upper markets they realized that going for the bottom is not a long term plan. They had the large theathers, they had the must see movies, so they thought they could pull anything they wanted. They were wrong. Now they face the struggle of clearing out those customers that are costing them and regain the customers they lost...
And that is the ultimate loss of control of the movie industry. Once I stopped going to theathers, I no longer needed to watch a movie when the industry wanted me to watch it (when it is runni
OSX itself is open because Apple could not afford to design a completely closed system at that time, remember, when OSX launched, Apple was still hurting. OSX was make or break for the company. When Apple had the resources to create the OS they really wanted, they created iOS which is not open at all.
Spurring innovation? That generally is meant to include encouraging others. Einstein is considered so great NOT just because of his brilliant mind but because he has encouraged so many other scientists to build on his work and made science more approachable. Jobs sues anyone daring to build on his work. He spurs innovation only so far as it suits him, to gain control. MS did just the same and then stopped when it no longer made business sense. Jobs would have done the same.
Remember PsyStar? Apple sued. There is a similar story on the PC side, that company was called Compaq, they too copied someone elses machine, IBM's. They survived and Gates supported it with his DOS. It meant cheap PC's. So cheap anyone could afford them. Have you ever looked at just how much a early Apple cost vs a IBM compatible?
The history of computing is filled with a lot of lucky breaks leading to cheap ubiqutious computing. Jobs was a hurdle on that path. There were others in Apple responsible for the tech achievements. All Jobs did was sue, charge a premium for design and take the credit for other peoples work. A business man. A business man who ALWAYS tried to squeeze every last penny out of a deal. There are worse people on the planet but I won't mourn his passing. Admire the real heroes of computing who did far more and without expecting a large chunk of cash and total control in return. Even Gates is mode admirable, a louse of a business person he is at least doing something more with the money then just sitting on it.
Sorry if this upsets you but I don't need to make rich people into heroes to feel good about wanting to be rich too.
That roughly says it all. That urinal is considered to be worth a couple of million. Nobody has payed it but it gotta be worth it right? Because it is ART! And nobody can quite figure out why nobody else is pointing out the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
You are aware it was not Steve Jobs who invented the gui or window interface or the mouse? He sold it.
It is like attributing that urinal and attributing it to the gallery owner who sold it (or rather tried to sell it since it wasn't sold). What next, attributing the plane to Boeing because they sell them?
There are inventors and innovators and there are business men who sell the resulting products. Don't confuse the two or you will end up being a MBA trying to sell something that doesn't exist.
Sun once did well, and then it didn't. Apple once did well and then it didn't... and people waited and then it did well again. What it will be in the future is anyone's guess.
Success is fleeting, you can be the greatest bokser and still be remembered by most as a dimwitted black guy. You can play the most beloved Sci-Fi character that a LOT of female geeks dreamed about and still be remembered as a fat balding man. You can make PC's more affordable then they ever were before and still be remembered as the guy that makes expensive PC's people can't afford.
Mind you, I wouldn't put Torvalds in that list. Gates and Jobs are business men. They went for the big bucks. In doing so, they changed society and some of it was decent but a lot of it wasn't. They are not heroes, they are icons. Heroes sacrifice for the greater good, are noble, achieve for the sake of it, not the money of it.
Jobs only sold PC's that were cheaper then what had been available before but more expensive then what came later. He provided a useful torn in MS side to at least slightly hobble MS complete and total dominance of computing but he did it for no other reason then a big payout. And when Apple gained more dominance we saw exactly what MS total control had saved us from far worse. Can you imagine what PC computing would have been like without Gates and just Jobs? Forget Linux, forget dual-booting, forget GPL. One OS to serve them all and in darkness bind them. The lord of iOS.
The man is now dead and the world has lost little, greater people die every day with barely a pause in anyone's mind. A smart businessmen is gone but there will be others. Maybe his replacement won't feel that he needs to get 30% of every transaction.
It is harsh but ultimately Jobs did more good for the world by failing and barely hanging on then by succeeding. It was good WinTel defeated Apple but that Apple was always there as an alternative to keep that evil alliance in check.
But if Jobs had been a true success and he would have filled Bill Gates shoes, the world of computing would off far far worse.
His true epitaph: ruthless megalomaniac businessman whose greatest contribution is that he kept another ruthless megalomaniac from achieving total power. Yes, you read it here first! Jobs is Darth Vader. The emo dark look says it all.
A LOT of posts are about how this is not a war according to the rules of wars and how the rules of war are not being followed. The contradiction never seems to face these posters. If it is not a war, then the rules of war need not be followed.
The simple fact is that the world has no rule book that really applies to these situations. For that matter, the term war applies to any conflict in which a large enough number of people get killed, so yes, Mexico IS in an official UN recognized war JUST by the numbers involved, not because there was a declaration of war or any of that nonsense.
It seems a lot of people, whether they like the UN or not, desperately want their to be rules that can be used as simple guidelines to make the world easy to understand. Sorry, no such rules exist. The real world is extremely complex and we make the rules up as we go along as best as we can. Yes, it is scary so crawl back under the covers and think in terms of rights and wrongs and let the grown ups deal with things.
A group initiated actions against the USA and the USA reacted. Whether you think either side is more or less right doesn't matter, both sides think of themselves as being the right side. But since it is a group vs a state their just ain't any rules. No conventions, just a few "well it is would be nice if you could at least somewhat try to behave".
You might not like it but it is senseless trying to draw rules, conventions and laws dealing with wars between nations into this because they don't apply.
It reminds me of conspiracy theorists, many of them seem to be quite happy to believe the world is entirely controlled by group X because at least it means SOMEONE is in control and can be blamed for them not having had a date. (CmdrTaco, DAMN YOU)
No rules, no laws. Just you in the world that ain't a nice place in which their is a bogeyman and he doesn't play by your rules no matter how hard you do.
Just ask one of the retards what the US should have done post 9/11 instead. Do nothing? That is not the human way. Stop trying to force the world to change by pretending humanity is something it is not. Realize the truth and THEN act but don't live in lala-land.
A bit of background info: Nokia once thought to have Maemo/MeeGo (Linux) as its OS for its highend phones (replacing symbian), keep Symbian for the midrange feature phones (not quite smart phones) and S40 for the low end.
The N900 was that high end phone and it sold out. Whether that means it did well is hard to say, after all if you produce one unit and you sell it, you are sold out, but still, there was a demand. The N900 was however a trial phone, it was deliberately made to be a developers phone to test the market. The market liked it.
So there was going to be a successor that would be slicker. First it was supposed to have a physical keyboard but eventually it became the N9.
So... where to launch that phone? In the west where the N900 sold out and where people have the money for a high end phone? Nah... I don't know where it sells but so far it seems to be nowhere.
You produce a phone, have units of it created and then just don't sell it in the west at all. That is a strategy that can't be explained by just being a but stupid or misguided. NOT selling a major highend phone in the places it could do well cannot be anything but deliberate move to have it fail. "See Linux don't sell on phones? We put them on the market at 900 dollars in a refuge camp in Somalia and not a single one sold. PROOF!"
Companies are ultimately run by people who are perfectly capable of making really stupid decissions. But somehow when it comes to malice we presume companies to be machines. I think only someone with a clear agenda could make such a dumb decission. The N9 isn't going to the company any more, its costs have already been made. Even if you are not convinced of its success, a normal person would just sell it and see what happens. To deliberately sabotage it needs an agenda. Can anyone think of anyone who recently started at Nokia who might have an agenda?
MS needs nothing. It could use Nokia to helps WP7 to become a success but if it doesn't, it will just try again with WP8. Something it is ALREADY doing right now. What happens to Nokia in the meantime isn't any concern of MS. If it dies, MS will just get another victim, if it survives... well ask HTC why it makes Android phones.
And of course, if Nokia fails then MS has one less competitor, a competitor that with Symbian and its phones was a major reason MS wasn't sellings its own phone OS for years on end.
Nokia itself probably never considered Apple, they thought the enemy was MS and that they had won the battle... and then iOS happened and changed the game and then Android happened and finished them off.
And of course, they finished themselves off as well. MeeGo had a change of being something different and it could have sold Linux phones at a premium to guys like me who wants a real OS with free applications. 1000 euro's for a phone like that? NP. The N900 sold well enough and people were looking forward to its replacement. But Nokia itself lost interest in the high end market and for that matter in the low end market. What can you say of the fortunes of a company that refuses to release a successor to a phone into areas it did very well in? "Oh I see you bought our previous phone?!? Well, no new phone for you, that should teach you to buy our stuff". (See N9)
Nokia will probably "learn" if it is still capable of it, that in certain relationships, one partner tends to be the taker. And MS is the biggest taker that ever existed. Bye bye Nokia.
Calculate the effect of the iPhone 5 being banned from europe vs the next Galaxy phone from Samsung. This battle is raging right now. For Apple, this is a major part of their business, it brings in a lion share of their profit.
For Samsung? They got plenty of other ventures, a block will hurt their bottom line but not in any significant way. Samsung is larger then Apple in many ways BUT not that much larger, it is just far more diversified.
It isn't fair to say Apple if a bubble stock because Apple isn't to blame for how much outsiders are willing to pay for its shares but during the bubble companies with promise were valued over companies with results. Had an ordinary factory turning out a steady profit for several centuries and wanted an investment during the internet bubble? NOT INTERESTED, burning through investor capitol like it was bonfire night, that was the ticket to get the investors piling their cash on the fires.
Apple if of course not doing that at all but what is its value based upon? A very narrow product line that depends on an economic climate in which people are willing to splurge.
Now whether this is a successful strategy depends on what you think the economic crisis is having and going to have. SOME seem to think that ALL people will feel the pain but this hasn't been the case. The crisis has hit hard but Apple is doing very well indeed. The real result of the crisis seems to be that the divide between have's and have not's is increasing. The iPhone buying bankiers got their social wellfare benefits and the factory workers have to sell of their house to pay for it. The rich not only kept their money, they got more of it. More to spend on more gadgets while the poor got less but they already didn't have enough to buy them anyway. So, some will steal them, getting the rich to buy even more...
Meanwhile poor Samsung has to actually pay its employees decent wages and run factory after factory with middle class (No republicans, middle class does NOT include people making 250.000 or more per year) workers...
Valuing Apple high makes more and more sense, since the valuing is done by the rich who got their wellfare check over the working man's back.
Apples stock will only crumble once the poor of America realize that the American Dream is the opiate of the masses and rise up. And that won't happen. Apple got EXACTLY the right business model for the USA. Poor Americans.
Lets face it, us few Opera users are used to living a couple of years in the future.
Mind you until 27 Septembet 2012 I sometimes got upset but since the new law enacted two days ago put to death all IE/Chrome and Firefox users (Lynx users already got their punishment through usage) I am a lot more mellow about it.
I will translate it for those poor follows that are not gifted with the understanding of the Dutch language:
46 miljoen Amerikanen leven onder de armoedegrens; 41 miljoen Amerikanen kunnen zichzelf en hun gezin niet voeden zonder gratis voedselbonnen; 30 miljoen basisschoolkinderen kunnen op school ontbijten dankzij het National Breakfast Program; 10 miljoen kinderen krijgen ook een gratis of goedkope lunch op school; 48 miljoen Amerikanen hebben geen ziektekostenverzekering; 38 miljoen Amerikanen zijn onderverzekerd voor ziekte of arbeidsongeschiktheid; 2 miljoen Amerikanen moesten dit jaar hun huis veilen; 5 miljoen huiseigenaren hangt dit boven het hoofd; 14 miljoen Amerikanen hebben volgens de officiële cijfers geen baan, deskundigen schatten het werkelijke cijfer op 25 miljoen werklozen.
46 million Americans live below the poverty line; 41 million Americans can't feed themselves and their familye without free food coupons; 30 million primary school kids can eat breakfast at school thanks to the National Breakfast Program; 10 million kids get a free of cheap lunch at school; 48 million Americans have no health insurance; 38 million Americans are insured to low for disease or becoming unable to work; 2 million Americans have to sell their house this year; 5 million are awaiting a similar fate; 14 million Americans have no job according to official figures, experts estimate the true figure at 25 million.
Are these figures accurate? I know that for instance mortgage is a different thing in the US, in Holland the debt stays with you and if selling the house doesn't cover the debt you get to keep paying, whereas Americans can apparently just abandon the house and walk away, the debt is with the house. That changes things a lot, in Holland loosing your house often results in personal bankruptcy.
Neither do I want to pretend that Holland is much better, we have foodbanks here and they were appealing last winter for extra funding and donations to deal with the increased demand. And the Dutch government happily pretended that none of it was needed. Health insurance cost keep going up, hold you hats Americans, De basispremie voor de zorgverzekering gaat omhoog van 1107 euro dit jaar naar 1211 euro volgend jaar, verwacht het kabinet. De precieze bedragen verschillen per verzekeraar en worden later bekend. Ook de inkomensafhankelijke premie stijgt: van 7,05 naar 7,75 procent. the base insurance which covers a LOT but not everything (the basics real medicine is covered for ill or injured people, the fruity stuff less and less) is going up from 1107 euro this year to 1211 euro for the next year.
Insurance by the way is mandatory.
The increase is just more prove for most that the commercialization of health care isn't working at all in Holland. What are the American insurance rates for a single male who won't see 40 again and doesn't like taking to much risk? Both under the new system and the old system?
If you are on gmail, you are one click away from google+. If you are not on gmail, you are unlikely to have friends, stalk targets are NOT friends you hotmail user.
Oh and MySpace is very interested in your theory and how they still lost their entire userbase to facebook.
The Japanese have a different attitude towards gaming, or at least it appears to us that way. Insane hardmode seems to be done not through AI but by explaining nothing at all. They also don't tend to do PC gaming.
Having all the configuration outside the game, in a seperate program that doesn't even start up automatically for a first time config... what year is this again? That was the days of DOS. In 2011, PC gamers expect something better.
Especially in a game where tuning your config is so damned important, increasing resolution in this game didn't cost you a few fps, it turns the game from playable but ugly into pretty but a slideshow, and I MEAN slideshow, 2-3 FPS on a high end machine. The game, when it runs is beautifull in places, especially the characters are gorgeous but you have to run it (for PC) insanely low resolutions. Meanwhile the CPU barely ticks in. You got to wonder just how bad the PS3 really is when a game designed with the PS3 foremost in mind is choking a top end video card but barely touches the CPU. Multi-tasking seems not even to get a look in.
The entire interface as well is insanely complex, even simple things as a map or chat are a chore. Combat is even less clear with the game STILL taking minutes to register an action.
And finally the game itself... it is if they google "how to make a fun game" in reverse order and implemented only those ideas that nobody else had because they are not very good ideas.
FF14 has two good things, the into/presentation is gorgeous and so are the characters and the outfits. Everything else should just be dumped. The entire setup, menu, engine and game is just rotten to the core and shows that you should not allow console freaks to ever get near a PC.
That they continue working on it and offer the game for free shows that at least they get that they screwed up (Funcom, learn from this) but this is a game only a mother could love and I doubt Square Enix got the money or the skills to fix it. Lets face it, this doesn't require a change of leader, the entire team should be fired and the beta testers hunted down and killed.
But perhaps this is the fate of of when you have fanboys as beta testers. There are still people defending the game. Probably the same who think consoles are better then PC's because you don't pay a high fee for a high end machine but still must have bought a high end PC besides their PS3 to play this game.
But we should have been warned, FF11 was in many ways just as bad with the same "WTF were they thinking" approach. Just back then MMO's were still new and players were more open to see if being different for difference sake was going to produce anything interesting. Time has moved on and we now know that this never happens.
Maybe the next FF online will be made by Bioware, rescuer of badly done licenses in MMO land.
Americans would fund their government departments instead of asking them to be commercially indepedent so that instead of focussing on collecting as many fees as possible they can focus on quality.
But then, an American might have to pay TAXES! Boogaa boogaa! Cut funding to the bone and yet get bare bones service.
The USPTO is as good and as bad as Americans are allowing it to be through their votes for tax cuts.
Yes, there is rushed development and then there is long delayed development where somehow they can't figure it out and someone decides to launch it just to get it out of the door. Like say, a shuttle launch. No matter what the engineers say.
Boeing has killed a lot of people with stupid design flaws and cost cuttings, most aircraft companies have. Lets wait a bit to see if this will be a turkey or an eagle.
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Small detail... this has nothing to do with Android. Apple has a beef with the design of the physical phone, the packaging, the cabling AND Samsungs skin for Android. In this suit at least, they got no complaint against Android itself.
We can see this with the consoles, none of them can play proper PC games. Why do you think Half-Life 2 for the xbox looked far worse? And that is an OLD game.
While for most geeks the difference between a PC and a gaming PC ain't all that big, for the average consumer there is a HUGE difference. Their PC is a P4. People still use non flatscreens for screens!
A reference PC that can play games for half a decade will need to be a cutting edge machine to survive for that long. You can't just use a 200 dollar machine because not only will it already be crap, it will be even crappier by the time it has any adoption at all.
The reference gaming PC has been thought up before and it never works. Either it is to expensive to get adopted or so cheap it ain't any good.
Explain the navy please. If men are so obsessed with sex why do MEN volunteer to spend months if not years at sea with no females? No, not all US sailors are gay. Okay, most of them but not all. Some are bi.
But seriously, this myth that men are obsessed with sex needs to die.
Lets face it, since nerds now have the right to marry, it has gotten a lot easier, if you forego the gender requirement.
Doubtless, when you see it in use you KNOW that a person is trying to claim something that he wishes to be true but can't even be bothered to get the simplest anecdote or anon post to support it. Doubtless the other side does the same. No proof, not even a hint but we nonetheless can't doubt it.
A weasel word if ever there was one.
Remember that story about the "Kraken". That is very similar, in science an extra-ordinary claim should have extra-ordinary evidence. Doubtless is the word of religious freaks and others who think evidence is something only the other side got to bother with.
Doubtless Timothy has posted numerous slanted posts based on faked photo's and instead of questioning them with this evidence (and it is hardly the first time evidence of outright lies have been published) he just goes "oh but the other side does the same" with no evidence.
Facts... I suppose they only matter if they support your point of view.
A surgeon will recommend to operate. A lawyer to do legal work. A soldier to kill someone.
This guy is at WIPO, patents and such is what this guy does. You won't get creative commons out of him.
The problem is not even this guy, the problem is his opposition. There isn't one. As always, "Yes Prime Minister" has the example. Story: Hacker is given the task of coming up with a new transport policy involving road, rail and air. He soon learns that each sector is represented by a civil servant fighting not for the common good but for HIS sector.
This story alone does not cover it. In another story his chauffeur comments on a radio story and points out that all the decisions for public transport, public schools and public healthcare are made by people that go to private hospitals, send their kids to private schools and have chauffeur driven cars. Which Hacker sayed they need because else they would have to make public transport a lot more reliable...
The problem ain't sector reps fighting for their sector, the problem is the common man, the non-commercial, the non-status quo, has no such rep fighting for their cause.
People who are in ivory towers have plenty of sky bridges connecting them to other ivory towers. But never ever a connection to ground level. I have seen it myself, even if some newbie tries, the disconnect is already so great once they have enough power that any contact attempt is extremely uncomfortable so they soon learn not to do it again.
This is just how the system works, calling this guy an idiot only helps keep the system in place. Sadly getting a useful opposition in place is nearly impossible.
TFA addresses what you raise, only the popular products will be funded by things like kickstarter. The slick, good looking and easy to digest. Some think that other works that do not have an easy appeal also deserve funding. That is hard to do when all funding is obtained through an idols like method of a popularity contest.
Patronage of any kind always means that what gets produced is what the person paying for it wants to be produced. He who pays the piper, decides the tune.
That you mention paypal shows how little you know of the world. I think wikileaks should be funded... can I donate through paypal? So much for you freedom in funding. The rich still decide how the money flows.
Terry Pratchett is probably well known on Slashdot and reasonably harmless, few would have an issue with him. He writes enjoyable books and makes a great deal of money with them. Is someone who can donate a million at the drop of a hat, just making a living?
The US has something called the working poor. People with a full time job, sometimes even two, who still can't make ends meet. Somehow it is then hard to care for a brit who writes books in the evening hours after his day job of being a spokes person for a nuclear power plant. He wouldn't have gone hungry would he?
Lets face it, most authors are only poor if they aren't any good at all and can't hold a decent day job or they insist on suffering for their art OR just plain suck at life and think that because they think they got a great book inside them, the world owes them NOT just a living but a rich living.
I notice TFA is in response to that flood of text about the death of the creative class, which I stopped reading after the line where video store clerks are apparently creative... I thought the creative class was programmers and artists, not store clerks.
As I am getting older I am getting more and more opposed to art and the leeching it brings with it. In Holland we give a lot of tax payers money to artists who then insist on more and more control over what they were payed to create... I have a very simple solution for all artists. Either ZERO government grants OR total control. Not both. The infighting should solve the problem, no artists left... and then what? And then NOTHING. People have ALWAYS created art, you often have to hit them quite hard to stop doing it. If art can come out of the darkest concentration camps it cannot be killed. Granted, this is NOT the art most unpopular artists approve off, a toilet nailed to a wall with an claimed price of 3 million but no actual bidders let alone buyers. That kind of art survives purely on patronage, not by art lovers but by people who want to be seen as art lovers through spending other peoples money on it.
The world is changing, once if you wanted to write you had to spend ages at it and then you had one book. Any copies took years! Then the printing press changed and made books cheap to buy BUT also far far cheaper to write. Without the printing press, without tech, many books would never have been written. Not least because many would have been unable to write or read in the first place.
Now the internet allows people to write far more, almost anyone can publish content. Salon.com would never have the reach if it was a paper magazine. But while the content and reach has grown the market hasn't. There is only so much content I can consume and frankly most of it isn't worth it. I do not need to the read the 1000th angst filled novel with a dystopian world view.
Maybe if nobody is willing to pay for your book it just isn't good enough. Is that such a complex concept?
The article talks about the great novels written under the patronage system... and forgets the torrent of drivel that history rightfully forgot about. I am actually a bit of a fan of drivel, the "dollar" books series, the works of Brian Daley or even Alen Dean Foster and "worse". Commercial trash that none at Salon would defend BUT they do sell, the authors DO make a living at them.
How am I supposed to feel sympathy for a group of people unable to make a living who sneer at a people in the same group who do make a living at the same job? It reminds me a bit of most feminists who want to fight for the right for women to be ceo's. I notice that the picket line demanding women can be garbage collectors is far far shorter.
There are people struggling to raise their family working double jobs. Crying that you can't sell your book written at Starbucks is NOT going to pull any heart strings.
Get a job. Write in your spare time. If you are any good, you will make it. If not, then you ain't any good. Though shit. We all got a book inside of us, and that is where it should stay.
Well not free but the employers pays it 100% in for instance Holland.
Almost everyone gets travel expenses but car users get a fixed amount per mile that is not enough to cover it, public transport users just hand in their tickets for a full refund.
Remember that the entire world is NOT the US and that pre-tax amount of a salary says very little about how much you actually are getting.
The job market indicates this person is worth more by evidence of his new offer; it's up to you as a manager to make the case that you do or do not need to pay that increased amount for this person/skillset/experience level. It's not his problem that the market views his value as increased!
Not really how the job market works, maybe the other company has a terrible reputation and needs to pay more. Maybe they have very bad secondary benefits.
To get back on track, 7k is not worth leaving a job over. I presume it is per year after all, an pre-taxes. So it means each month he might get a few hundred extra, big deal. He basically got to ask himself, where do I get the best shot at a salary increase of 70k in the not to distant future. That is the kind of money that gets interesting.
Why is this guy considering leaving for a tiny increase just as the a small companies flag ship product is about to launch? 7k shouldn't do it unless he has been feeling undervalued for a long time. That is the problem when you start considering your managers as friends, they get the bigger bonus the lower they keep your salary.
I wouldn't leave for a small salary increase but being underpaid or for that matter an annoying commute, that would do it.
George Lucas shows one form of control, refusing to release his movies until he was good and ready for it. There was a reason the original Star Wars movies didn't make it to TV for a long time (at least in Holland, don't know about the rest of the world). And when he does release the movies, he controls what is released, not the customer. Why restore Jabba the Hut but not Biggs? There is a scene earlier in the movie that is mentioned in books even picture books where Luke talks to Biggs who is about to leave to join the rebellion. For a movie that isn't exactly deep to begin with it would add something. But instead Lucas makes Greedo shoot first.
Loosing control of distribution is deadly, just ask any Walmart supplier. Walmart sets the terms. Alone. You comply or die. I can well imagine that the movie industry would not want to be told to supply what Walmart wants. Solo shooting first? Walmart could sell it, it could dictate it.
Same with staggered releases, it makes sense for the industry. They can avoid having to spend all the money at once and adjust a movies release strategy depending on American results. There are reasons some movies do well after having bombed in the states and for that matter vice versa. Look at movie posters, every country gets its own. Releasing a movie at once, globally requires a high upfront cost and no tweaking to recover from an error.
So it, is understandable to don't want to loose control because they want total control... whoever wins, we loose. Because we, you and me the consumer, are just cash dispensers to either. Both iTunes AND the movie industry want to squeeze us for every penny we can get. The only difference is where the penny ends up. Steve "Disney" Jobs, remember that (although he is now dead so it matters less). Control means a lot when you are dealing with a product with no real value because it has no scarcity. Disney knows this and releases its classic movies for limited times only because... if they didn't, they wouldn't be special anymore. How can a VHS tape be a limited item when they are created in the millions? Yet Snow White IS a limited release. And it is advertised as such. The power of advertising is truly awesome to behold. Remember, these are NOT tapes specially signed or with toys that are produced in limited numbers. Unsold tapes and DVD's are simply recalled until the next, limited release.
It is as if someone sold factory chicken as a once per year item, buy it now for that special occasion! What a con.
Control is what the movie industry desires, it is understandable but does that mean I as an individual have to allow them to have it? Just because they want it doesn't mean it is something that is desirable for society as a whole.
It is not like control has benefited the industry. Control makes one lazy, the industry hasn't innovated in years. Decades ago I used to visit a movie theather in a student town in Wageningen, it was between an art house and a commercial setup. They ran English animation for instance in English by default, Dutch dubbing is the worst since funny voices are a must especially the unfunny ones. Dutch bugs bunny voice does not suit watership down.
Anyway, in that theather, they ran without a break if there were few people and people didn't want one. Even skipping ads. Late arrival? Get stuffed, the movie started the doors closed. End of story. This was before mobile phones.
Recently pathe, a large chain, announced the same policy. After years of loosing customers in the upper markets they realized that going for the bottom is not a long term plan. They had the large theathers, they had the must see movies, so they thought they could pull anything they wanted. They were wrong. Now they face the struggle of clearing out those customers that are costing them and regain the customers they lost...
And that is the ultimate loss of control of the movie industry. Once I stopped going to theathers, I no longer needed to watch a movie when the industry wanted me to watch it (when it is runni
OSX itself is open because Apple could not afford to design a completely closed system at that time, remember, when OSX launched, Apple was still hurting. OSX was make or break for the company. When Apple had the resources to create the OS they really wanted, they created iOS which is not open at all.
Spurring innovation? That generally is meant to include encouraging others. Einstein is considered so great NOT just because of his brilliant mind but because he has encouraged so many other scientists to build on his work and made science more approachable. Jobs sues anyone daring to build on his work. He spurs innovation only so far as it suits him, to gain control. MS did just the same and then stopped when it no longer made business sense. Jobs would have done the same.
Remember PsyStar? Apple sued. There is a similar story on the PC side, that company was called Compaq, they too copied someone elses machine, IBM's. They survived and Gates supported it with his DOS. It meant cheap PC's. So cheap anyone could afford them. Have you ever looked at just how much a early Apple cost vs a IBM compatible?
The history of computing is filled with a lot of lucky breaks leading to cheap ubiqutious computing. Jobs was a hurdle on that path. There were others in Apple responsible for the tech achievements. All Jobs did was sue, charge a premium for design and take the credit for other peoples work. A business man. A business man who ALWAYS tried to squeeze every last penny out of a deal. There are worse people on the planet but I won't mourn his passing. Admire the real heroes of computing who did far more and without expecting a large chunk of cash and total control in return. Even Gates is mode admirable, a louse of a business person he is at least doing something more with the money then just sitting on it.
Sorry if this upsets you but I don't need to make rich people into heroes to feel good about wanting to be rich too.
That roughly says it all. That urinal is considered to be worth a couple of million. Nobody has payed it but it gotta be worth it right? Because it is ART! And nobody can quite figure out why nobody else is pointing out the emperor is not wearing any clothes.
You are aware it was not Steve Jobs who invented the gui or window interface or the mouse? He sold it.
It is like attributing that urinal and attributing it to the gallery owner who sold it (or rather tried to sell it since it wasn't sold). What next, attributing the plane to Boeing because they sell them?
There are inventors and innovators and there are business men who sell the resulting products. Don't confuse the two or you will end up being a MBA trying to sell something that doesn't exist.
Sun once did well, and then it didn't. Apple once did well and then it didn't... and people waited and then it did well again. What it will be in the future is anyone's guess.
Success is fleeting, you can be the greatest bokser and still be remembered by most as a dimwitted black guy. You can play the most beloved Sci-Fi character that a LOT of female geeks dreamed about and still be remembered as a fat balding man. You can make PC's more affordable then they ever were before and still be remembered as the guy that makes expensive PC's people can't afford.
Mind you, I wouldn't put Torvalds in that list. Gates and Jobs are business men. They went for the big bucks. In doing so, they changed society and some of it was decent but a lot of it wasn't. They are not heroes, they are icons. Heroes sacrifice for the greater good, are noble, achieve for the sake of it, not the money of it.
Jobs only sold PC's that were cheaper then what had been available before but more expensive then what came later. He provided a useful torn in MS side to at least slightly hobble MS complete and total dominance of computing but he did it for no other reason then a big payout. And when Apple gained more dominance we saw exactly what MS total control had saved us from far worse. Can you imagine what PC computing would have been like without Gates and just Jobs? Forget Linux, forget dual-booting, forget GPL. One OS to serve them all and in darkness bind them. The lord of iOS.
The man is now dead and the world has lost little, greater people die every day with barely a pause in anyone's mind. A smart businessmen is gone but there will be others. Maybe his replacement won't feel that he needs to get 30% of every transaction.
It is harsh but ultimately Jobs did more good for the world by failing and barely hanging on then by succeeding. It was good WinTel defeated Apple but that Apple was always there as an alternative to keep that evil alliance in check.
But if Jobs had been a true success and he would have filled Bill Gates shoes, the world of computing would off far far worse.
His true epitaph: ruthless megalomaniac businessman whose greatest contribution is that he kept another ruthless megalomaniac from achieving total power. Yes, you read it here first! Jobs is Darth Vader. The emo dark look says it all.
A LOT of posts are about how this is not a war according to the rules of wars and how the rules of war are not being followed. The contradiction never seems to face these posters. If it is not a war, then the rules of war need not be followed.
The simple fact is that the world has no rule book that really applies to these situations. For that matter, the term war applies to any conflict in which a large enough number of people get killed, so yes, Mexico IS in an official UN recognized war JUST by the numbers involved, not because there was a declaration of war or any of that nonsense.
It seems a lot of people, whether they like the UN or not, desperately want their to be rules that can be used as simple guidelines to make the world easy to understand. Sorry, no such rules exist. The real world is extremely complex and we make the rules up as we go along as best as we can. Yes, it is scary so crawl back under the covers and think in terms of rights and wrongs and let the grown ups deal with things.
A group initiated actions against the USA and the USA reacted. Whether you think either side is more or less right doesn't matter, both sides think of themselves as being the right side. But since it is a group vs a state their just ain't any rules. No conventions, just a few "well it is would be nice if you could at least somewhat try to behave".
You might not like it but it is senseless trying to draw rules, conventions and laws dealing with wars between nations into this because they don't apply.
It reminds me of conspiracy theorists, many of them seem to be quite happy to believe the world is entirely controlled by group X because at least it means SOMEONE is in control and can be blamed for them not having had a date. (CmdrTaco, DAMN YOU)
No rules, no laws. Just you in the world that ain't a nice place in which their is a bogeyman and he doesn't play by your rules no matter how hard you do.
Just ask one of the retards what the US should have done post 9/11 instead. Do nothing? That is not the human way. Stop trying to force the world to change by pretending humanity is something it is not. Realize the truth and THEN act but don't live in lala-land.
A bit of background info: Nokia once thought to have Maemo/MeeGo (Linux) as its OS for its highend phones (replacing symbian), keep Symbian for the midrange feature phones (not quite smart phones) and S40 for the low end.
The N900 was that high end phone and it sold out. Whether that means it did well is hard to say, after all if you produce one unit and you sell it, you are sold out, but still, there was a demand. The N900 was however a trial phone, it was deliberately made to be a developers phone to test the market. The market liked it.
So there was going to be a successor that would be slicker. First it was supposed to have a physical keyboard but eventually it became the N9.
So... where to launch that phone? In the west where the N900 sold out and where people have the money for a high end phone? Nah... I don't know where it sells but so far it seems to be nowhere.
You produce a phone, have units of it created and then just don't sell it in the west at all. That is a strategy that can't be explained by just being a but stupid or misguided. NOT selling a major highend phone in the places it could do well cannot be anything but deliberate move to have it fail. "See Linux don't sell on phones? We put them on the market at 900 dollars in a refuge camp in Somalia and not a single one sold. PROOF!"
Companies are ultimately run by people who are perfectly capable of making really stupid decissions. But somehow when it comes to malice we presume companies to be machines. I think only someone with a clear agenda could make such a dumb decission. The N9 isn't going to the company any more, its costs have already been made. Even if you are not convinced of its success, a normal person would just sell it and see what happens. To deliberately sabotage it needs an agenda. Can anyone think of anyone who recently started at Nokia who might have an agenda?
MS needs nothing. It could use Nokia to helps WP7 to become a success but if it doesn't, it will just try again with WP8. Something it is ALREADY doing right now. What happens to Nokia in the meantime isn't any concern of MS. If it dies, MS will just get another victim, if it survives... well ask HTC why it makes Android phones.
And of course, if Nokia fails then MS has one less competitor, a competitor that with Symbian and its phones was a major reason MS wasn't sellings its own phone OS for years on end.
Nokia itself probably never considered Apple, they thought the enemy was MS and that they had won the battle... and then iOS happened and changed the game and then Android happened and finished them off.
And of course, they finished themselves off as well. MeeGo had a change of being something different and it could have sold Linux phones at a premium to guys like me who wants a real OS with free applications. 1000 euro's for a phone like that? NP. The N900 sold well enough and people were looking forward to its replacement. But Nokia itself lost interest in the high end market and for that matter in the low end market. What can you say of the fortunes of a company that refuses to release a successor to a phone into areas it did very well in? "Oh I see you bought our previous phone?!? Well, no new phone for you, that should teach you to buy our stuff". (See N9)
Nokia will probably "learn" if it is still capable of it, that in certain relationships, one partner tends to be the taker. And MS is the biggest taker that ever existed. Bye bye Nokia.
A wise post, I will now stay on the beaten path, do as I am told by my betters and take it up the arse like you have been doing all your life.
Sheep.
Please mark me as a foe, I can't mark you because there is no option for mindless twit.
Calculate the effect of the iPhone 5 being banned from europe vs the next Galaxy phone from Samsung. This battle is raging right now. For Apple, this is a major part of their business, it brings in a lion share of their profit.
For Samsung? They got plenty of other ventures, a block will hurt their bottom line but not in any significant way. Samsung is larger then Apple in many ways BUT not that much larger, it is just far more diversified.
It isn't fair to say Apple if a bubble stock because Apple isn't to blame for how much outsiders are willing to pay for its shares but during the bubble companies with promise were valued over companies with results. Had an ordinary factory turning out a steady profit for several centuries and wanted an investment during the internet bubble? NOT INTERESTED, burning through investor capitol like it was bonfire night, that was the ticket to get the investors piling their cash on the fires.
Apple if of course not doing that at all but what is its value based upon? A very narrow product line that depends on an economic climate in which people are willing to splurge.
Now whether this is a successful strategy depends on what you think the economic crisis is having and going to have. SOME seem to think that ALL people will feel the pain but this hasn't been the case. The crisis has hit hard but Apple is doing very well indeed. The real result of the crisis seems to be that the divide between have's and have not's is increasing. The iPhone buying bankiers got their social wellfare benefits and the factory workers have to sell of their house to pay for it. The rich not only kept their money, they got more of it. More to spend on more gadgets while the poor got less but they already didn't have enough to buy them anyway. So, some will steal them, getting the rich to buy even more...
Meanwhile poor Samsung has to actually pay its employees decent wages and run factory after factory with middle class (No republicans, middle class does NOT include people making 250.000 or more per year) workers...
Valuing Apple high makes more and more sense, since the valuing is done by the rich who got their wellfare check over the working man's back.
Apples stock will only crumble once the poor of America realize that the American Dream is the opiate of the masses and rise up. And that won't happen. Apple got EXACTLY the right business model for the USA. Poor Americans.
Lets face it, us few Opera users are used to living a couple of years in the future.
Mind you until 27 Septembet 2012 I sometimes got upset but since the new law enacted two days ago put to death all IE/Chrome and Firefox users (Lynx users already got their punishment through usage) I am a lot more mellow about it.
American Dream becomes nightmare
I will translate it for those poor follows that are not gifted with the understanding of the Dutch language:
46 miljoen Amerikanen leven onder de armoedegrens; 41 miljoen Amerikanen kunnen zichzelf en hun gezin niet voeden zonder gratis voedselbonnen; 30 miljoen basisschoolkinderen kunnen op school ontbijten dankzij het National Breakfast Program; 10 miljoen kinderen krijgen ook een gratis of goedkope lunch op school; 48 miljoen Amerikanen hebben geen ziektekostenverzekering; 38 miljoen Amerikanen zijn onderverzekerd voor ziekte of arbeidsongeschiktheid; 2 miljoen Amerikanen moesten dit jaar hun huis veilen; 5 miljoen huiseigenaren hangt dit boven het hoofd; 14 miljoen Amerikanen hebben volgens de officiële cijfers geen baan, deskundigen schatten het werkelijke cijfer op 25 miljoen werklozen.
46 million Americans live below the poverty line; 41 million Americans can't feed themselves and their familye without free food coupons; 30 million primary school kids can eat breakfast at school thanks to the National Breakfast Program; 10 million kids get a free of cheap lunch at school; 48 million Americans have no health insurance; 38 million Americans are insured to low for disease or becoming unable to work; 2 million Americans have to sell their house this year; 5 million are awaiting a similar fate; 14 million Americans have no job according to official figures, experts estimate the true figure at 25 million.
Are these figures accurate? I know that for instance mortgage is a different thing in the US, in Holland the debt stays with you and if selling the house doesn't cover the debt you get to keep paying, whereas Americans can apparently just abandon the house and walk away, the debt is with the house. That changes things a lot, in Holland loosing your house often results in personal bankruptcy.
Neither do I want to pretend that Holland is much better, we have foodbanks here and they were appealing last winter for extra funding and donations to deal with the increased demand. And the Dutch government happily pretended that none of it was needed. Health insurance cost keep going up, hold you hats Americans, De basispremie voor de zorgverzekering gaat omhoog van 1107 euro dit jaar naar 1211 euro volgend jaar, verwacht het kabinet. De precieze bedragen verschillen per verzekeraar en worden later bekend. Ook de inkomensafhankelijke premie stijgt: van 7,05 naar 7,75 procent. the base insurance which covers a LOT but not everything (the basics real medicine is covered for ill or injured people, the fruity stuff less and less) is going up from 1107 euro this year to 1211 euro for the next year.
Insurance by the way is mandatory.
The increase is just more prove for most that the commercialization of health care isn't working at all in Holland. What are the American insurance rates for a single male who won't see 40 again and doesn't like taking to much risk? Both under the new system and the old system?
If you are on gmail, you are one click away from google+. If you are not on gmail, you are unlikely to have friends, stalk targets are NOT friends you hotmail user.
Oh and MySpace is very interested in your theory and how they still lost their entire userbase to facebook.
The Japanese have a different attitude towards gaming, or at least it appears to us that way. Insane hardmode seems to be done not through AI but by explaining nothing at all. They also don't tend to do PC gaming.
Having all the configuration outside the game, in a seperate program that doesn't even start up automatically for a first time config... what year is this again? That was the days of DOS. In 2011, PC gamers expect something better.
Especially in a game where tuning your config is so damned important, increasing resolution in this game didn't cost you a few fps, it turns the game from playable but ugly into pretty but a slideshow, and I MEAN slideshow, 2-3 FPS on a high end machine. The game, when it runs is beautifull in places, especially the characters are gorgeous but you have to run it (for PC) insanely low resolutions. Meanwhile the CPU barely ticks in. You got to wonder just how bad the PS3 really is when a game designed with the PS3 foremost in mind is choking a top end video card but barely touches the CPU. Multi-tasking seems not even to get a look in.
The entire interface as well is insanely complex, even simple things as a map or chat are a chore. Combat is even less clear with the game STILL taking minutes to register an action.
And finally the game itself... it is if they google "how to make a fun game" in reverse order and implemented only those ideas that nobody else had because they are not very good ideas.
FF14 has two good things, the into/presentation is gorgeous and so are the characters and the outfits. Everything else should just be dumped. The entire setup, menu, engine and game is just rotten to the core and shows that you should not allow console freaks to ever get near a PC.
That they continue working on it and offer the game for free shows that at least they get that they screwed up (Funcom, learn from this) but this is a game only a mother could love and I doubt Square Enix got the money or the skills to fix it. Lets face it, this doesn't require a change of leader, the entire team should be fired and the beta testers hunted down and killed.
But perhaps this is the fate of of when you have fanboys as beta testers. There are still people defending the game. Probably the same who think consoles are better then PC's because you don't pay a high fee for a high end machine but still must have bought a high end PC besides their PS3 to play this game.
But we should have been warned, FF11 was in many ways just as bad with the same "WTF were they thinking" approach. Just back then MMO's were still new and players were more open to see if being different for difference sake was going to produce anything interesting. Time has moved on and we now know that this never happens.
Maybe the next FF online will be made by Bioware, rescuer of badly done licenses in MMO land.
Americans would fund their government departments instead of asking them to be commercially indepedent so that instead of focussing on collecting as many fees as possible they can focus on quality.
But then, an American might have to pay TAXES! Boogaa boogaa! Cut funding to the bone and yet get bare bones service.
The USPTO is as good and as bad as Americans are allowing it to be through their votes for tax cuts.
Yes, there is rushed development and then there is long delayed development where somehow they can't figure it out and someone decides to launch it just to get it out of the door. Like say, a shuttle launch. No matter what the engineers say.
Boeing has killed a lot of people with stupid design flaws and cost cuttings, most aircraft companies have. Lets wait a bit to see if this will be a turkey or an eagle.