If this was a car, and the engines exploded killing the drive, you can bet your ass that the automaker's name would be on the news.
And if it had happened several times and the flaw had been well publicized and people still hadn't taken their cars in to get fixed?
Yeah, it's not like this problem with Outlook is new or anything. In fact, it doesn't even exist on the current or previous (2003 & XP) versions of Outlook.
The initial interviews with Gabe Newell stated that someone had hacked their systems, installed key loggers, and so on, then had accessed the source repository from off-site, using the login information gathered from the key loggers to checkout the source tree.
No one had to email source code anywhere. Besides, with source that size (or even smaller), it's far easier to just burn a CD and take it with you, or log in remotely and download only what you need.
I picked up the OoT disc (the pre-order bundled disc for Wind Waker) for ~$20 used. The question is, though, how many people are going to actually be bringing these in so you can find them? I didn't find out about the previous Zelda disc until I saw someone bringing it into a store to turn in. At least this time I know about it, though it'll probably still be fairly hard to find (I doubt any kind of 'not for resale' marking will stop used copies from being available).
I'd still rather that they put the disc out for everyone to buy, there's little doubt that they'd sell plenty of copies to existing GC owners. If it comes down to it, though, it may be a good excuse to pick up that GC for the bedroom.
Games like Devil's Crush and Dungeon Explorer will forever go down as all-time greats of their genre.
Dungeon Explorer was one of the few games I had for my TG-16, unfortunately I left the system and the games in California (maybe I'll find them when I go back for XMas). When I got it, they had a bundle deal where you got Keith Courage (of course) and a choice for one other game that you would receive by mail. That was the one I chose, but they were backed up really bad, so they sent another game (the name of which I don't remember atm) of my choice as well. The only game I ever had besides those 3 was Splatterhouse, which a friend gave me after he sold his TG-16. The TG-16 itself came with an insert advertising the CD expansion and the TurboExpress by the time I got it, though I don't think the CD expansion was available in the US yet (it was 'coming soon'), as well as the A/V add-on. I really think the expansion-crazy consoles are what killed off Sega and NEC in the US, though maybe it would've been more widely accepted if Nintendo had brought over (or completed) more of their expansions in the early days (then again, maybe Nintendo just did their research on the US market better back then).
For portables I had the Lynx, simply because it was ~$80 right about the time the Lynx II came out. One of the more interesting things to me about the Lynx was that you could flip it over if you wanted to play with the buttons on the left and the control pad on the right, there was a switch or something to flip the video and you were all set.
The TurboExpress came out in 1990, a few months after the TG-16 itself (released in late 89 in the US), and priced about $100 more ($299).
The reason it could play the TG-16 games was simple, it was basically the same hardware in a smaller box with an LCD screen. This was also why it ate batteries at a rate that even the GameGear and Lynx probably never acheived.
so expensive liscences may not be a bad thing. it'll force the game developers to get more creative! and it'll stop the large companies from just milking a name.
If anything, a more expensive license will mean a smaller budget for the actual game. The only reason the LotR series of games seem to be faring even remotely well is because they don't seem to have a very high licensing cost on a per-game level (in other words, they seem to be able to use the licenses for pretty much as many games as they want, as long as the individual games are approved for the license).
That which changed in centuries in eras gone past, and decades in more recent eras, now changes in mere years.
This is true in all mediums, though. This is why the music industry is having so many problems with their sales figures. Even when they dump huge amounts of money into artists that fit today's pop culture, the sales are minor compared to popular artists of the past (even artists they dumped almost no money into in the past). The music industry also has distinct differences between popular music and social commentary. Music that contains significant social commentary only occasionally makes it's way into the mainstream. Art in terms of paintings and sculpture are even moreso in this realm, as even the most popular works are not going to make the artist a significant amount of money unless their work is incorporated into something else (ie game artists, or concept artists). Movies also carry this distinction, as do books. Stephen King is often derided for not writing as an artist might, but he's consistently a best seller. Your average 'chick flick' rarely has any social commentary outside of that which can be found just as easily on Oxygen or Lifetime.
There are TWO issues here - people treating games as art, and game developers treating games as art. If the latter does not happen, then there's no reason to expect the former to. In today's industry, I would argue that the latter happens "sometimes".
The latter will always happen 'sometimes', and chances are that the mainstream media will overlook each and every example until mainstream adoption of games is as close to 100% as it can be. Even then, we can expect about a decade or more of non-acceptance, just as many forms of music are not accepted as art (or were in the past). The fact is that the mainstream media isn't even in a position to judge art as art, until they hire someone that has already been doing just that for some time period (and let's face it, most people don't accept reviewers' points on the artistic value of a film or album, they just want to know if it's good). If game journalism took itself more seriously, there'd be less of a problem there, as the mainstream press could have a valuable resource for picking up reviewers, and eventually being able to discuss games as art.
Fortunately, I'm perfectly happy with game reviews that tell me whether or not a game is technically sound and fun, even though I may have to read several reviews to get an accurate opinion on the game. I don't need someone to point out the significance or social commentary in a game any more than I do in my music, movies, or the pictures I hang on the wall. Most of it in the more generally accepted forms of art is as subtle as getting hit in the face with a shovel anyway.
* The first two Sonic games sold very well, since they were pure gameplay. When, however, Sega began to flesh Sonic out as a "full" character, American gamers rejected him (e.g., the Sonic Adventure series).
Unless you consider that the interlude portions of Sonic Adventure just drag the game down. Sure, there are a handful of side quests you can perform and whatever, but overall it detracts from what made Sonic, well, Sonic. The Sonic games were about platform gaming at a fast pace, and the Sonic Adventure series is anything but fast-paced (that being said, the actual platform portions are pretty good).
* Starfox was a great game for the NES. As Nintendo added more storyline, fewer people bought the game, which was not too bad as far as gameplay. Then look at the Dinosaur Planet/Starfox Adventures fiasco: Nintendo forces one of its franchises upon Rare's newest game. This game, once moved to the Gamecube, was looking wonderful. By the time it's done, however, it's more of an "interactive movie"; it's downright beautiful, it has a rich storyline (if a little hokey at times), but it's not deep in the gameplay area. People bought the game but were disappointed.
I really can't comment, since I have never owned a StarFox game. IIRC, the series started on the SNES, which I never owned, and by the time I bought a GameCube, it was fairly common knowledge that StarFox Adventures wasn't a very good game.
* For the last condition, look at Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonius: good storyline, great gameplay, perhaps too toony look for most. Underrated and underbought, because of Sly and his world. I guarantee, you make the characters human, change a few names, and call it Thief, it sells.
I never would've bought Sly Cooper if it weren't for a demo that my roommate brought home one day. I hadn't been sold on the idea that platformers could work in 3D until I played the demo. I agree, though, that with a more 'realistic' look, the game probably would have sold better, though I don't think it would've been as good of a game (because the look really sets it apart).
" I bought this game and was never able to get it working on any computer, it was buggy as hell, somtimes you'd gett he game started but textures would be all over, its not suprising nobody bought this game, if people had heard it was buggy, the same reason many did not buy the new lara croft game.
I didn't buy NOLF for 2 reasons: 1) The developer's titles are always buggy. When Blood 2 was released by GameSpy at a fairly cheap price with 'the patch' that was supposed to fix everything, I bought it, and it was still horribly buggy.
2) The whole idea and everything anyone said about the game did not appeal to me in the least.
That being said, the new Tomb Raider game sold fairly well, and was pretty high on the charts, just not for very long (which indicates the buggy thing, people that held off didn't buy it after reading reviews and/or there were plenty of used copies available). It may not have beaten previous Tomb Raiders' sales, but there are many developers out there that would love the sales of the newest edition of the series.
The preview pane exploits were patched before the point where Outlook started blocking exe files.
Basically, they'd have to be using an unpatched Outlook 2000 or older to have gotten hit through that method, unless there's some big preview pane exploit no one knows about.
Anyway, it's not like Valve's ever jumped to early conclusions before, and I'd take their current explanation ('we dont know') over their previous explanation ('Outlook did it') any day.
and even if it were something they had planned to distribute, they have not distributed it yet. Therefore, they are absolutely not in violation of the GPL, because there's no requirement to distribute source to people that did not receive the software from you in the first place.
none of which addresses the statement quoted. You justified the extra cost of the Mac specifically with the ability to use the machine for 5 years, when the simple fact is that any machine used for those simple tasks could be used for 5 years, regardless of what hardware and OS it's running.
And the government is not propping it up either. Social security is propping up government spending
Social Security is propping up government spending, but because of that it's had to be propped up itself. Additionally, due in part to the way government likes to take money from Social Security to balance other portions of the budget, money that goes into Social Security today goes straight out to pay beneficiaries. This is why it can't support itself once the baby boomers begin to retire, or even any time when unemployment is high. The money I've been putting in for the last 5 years is spent, and the chance of it being there when it's my turn to collect is slim to none.
Nixon alone put over $900 million into Social Security to prop up the expansions he made to benefits, including a 10% increase in payout, plus a cost-of-living scale that increased based on the year you retire, rather than the year you collect (though that, by it's very nature, reduces the payout to individuals over the way most people would expect it to work).
and then you've got the different types of boxed sets:
- the base set with the 3 movies (times the 12 different editions of those 3 movies)
- the extended set that includes Animatrix
- the extra-extended set that includes Animatrix and whatever that extra DVD was that they packaged with the Matrix not too long ago
- the GIANT BOX (think Ultima IX) that includes all of the above and a National Geographic special on the locations in the movie (never mind that they're urban locations) and giant 'blue pill' and 'red pill' bookends, sponsored by Advil Liquigels.
Just one problem, all the Black Hats will be at the movies, too. The only real solution for them is to setup computers to launch attacks automatically when the movie starts.
Of course, the admins could just set it up so the firewall takes the entire network offline before the movie starts and hope things cool down when the movie's over.
On the other hand, almost every project I've worked on has required a significant amount of ramp-up time to get familiar with the specifics peculiar to that project. Although most of my work so far has had significant overlap, there's always been a lot of new ground to cover before real work starts.
That being said, the position I was originally hired for is nothing like what I'm doing now (they were basically hiring anyone that could do some moderate lifting and follow directions to do POP site installations, now I'm writing software). They also have us update our resumes regularly because they put them on contract bids to meet those types of specific task points (ie worked on X equipment for X amount of time). Maybe the simple point that I work for a division that does mostly contract work makes learning and diversity in skills more important than specific skillsets, but in the end someone has to meet the skill points to get the contracts (and they'll often send people to school to meet those skill points if they have time, or hire accordingly).
If you dont have time to take 2-3 classes, just take 1 class/semester at a regular uni.
I don't think it's just a matter of having the time to go to class. When I was in school full-time, it seemed like the majority of the work was really on my own time anyway, and that most of the actual courses were extremely slow-paced. Even when the teachers could manage lectures in a fairly quick time and let people go once all of the questions were answered, the time between classes and the frequency (ie 2 or 3 times a week) often meant that the pace was extremely slow. The only time the pace was ever beneficial was when the homework was significant and time-consuming.
In one particular case, I had a pascal course in which the majority of the projects were given to everyone ahead of time. Within 2 weeks with very little out-of-class work I had completed most of the work for the semester (it helped that I could apply my knowledge of C to Pascal fairly easily after the first day of lecture with only a few concepts needing to be looked up/checked in the book from time to time).
The only classes that ever seemed to make sense in this time frame were history courses, or other courses where the majority of the work involved extremely large reading assignments (of course, since I'm a slow reader, that could just be me).
A good school teaches you how to learn, especially in computer science. My dad has a certificate in CS and very little of what was required to get that certificate is even taught today, but because he knows how to do research and teach himself just about anything (in fact, he only got the certificate to prove a point) he can still do as well in the field as people with a more recent education at a higher level.
On the other hand, while a good school teaches you to learn, most of the online and other quick degree programs are tailored to stuff information into your head rather than teaching you to learn. Places that offer courses for most of the IT certifications are often like this, especially because they can get you to keep coming back for all of the other certifications if you never learn how to study for them on your own.
speaking of bad TV, I realized last nite why CSI is so damned popular: there's absolutely not a friggin thing worth watching on Thursday nite when CSI is on. It's like someone decided that no one watches TV on Thursday.
Oh well, I guess the fact that I just now realized this means that I don't normally watch TV on thursday nite, either.
DRM just happens to be a cheap and effective way to discourage illegal downloading of these games. As rampant as P2P filesharing is, I'm surprised they aren't charging $100 for these games. Be thankful it hasn't come to that yet.
I think that was his point. DRM is completely ineffective at discouraging illegal downloading because the downloaded copies have the DRM stripped out or disabled, usually within hours of a game's release (especially because so many developers use the same 2 or 3 DRM packages).
The only thing it is effective at is stopping people from letting each other borrow their games, especially those that don't know much about the CDKeys and such that they're dealing with. They're stopping games from being pirated the way Doom was (everyone just copying floppies for each other or installing the game on their friends' computers), but they're not stopping the people selling illegal copies or distributing through P2P and warez sites.
On the flip side, the people that actually buy the software have to deal with things like their CDKeys being stolen, because someone's key generator actually worked and the key got banned by the publisher/developer for multiple simultaneous users. Or certain CD-ROM drives not working with the copy protection (UT and Diablo 2 both had problems with one of my CD-ROM drives, which eventually broke, so I had to replace the drive anyway...). Then there's the spin-up time on the CD whenever anything needs to be loaded from it. Certainly the people that download it don't need to worry about that, and I've installed many no-CD cracks for games I don't play online simply because CD spinup or CD swapping can be such a pain in the ass. Let's not even get started with the idea of having to keep all of the CDs for every game I might want to play in the near future near my computer. I might as well play on a console (and in general, I play a lot more games on consoles now, because PC gaming has lost much of it's convenience).
til now I tried a quite vast amount of adapter and conventer to connect the PS2 with a beamer but I couldn't match the image quality of a DC+VGA adapter.
I've seen some really bad PS2 converters, but couldn't this also have to do with the fact that the DC supports 640x480 natively, while the PS2 does not?
When you buy CD, your buying that recording copy. You don't get a reel-to-reel or whatever the master recording was.
Exactly, there isn't much of a standard for recording music, but this is the equivalent of getting the wav files of the individual parts of every song on the album. If an artist decides to distribute that themselves, that's great. If it's copied from the artist's laptop and released against his wishes, that's a real problem.
I would have to say that pre-releases of music and movies on the internet are a problem as well, but those tend to be problems within the industry, as it is people in the industry that lend these things out or give people advance copies, and they find their way onto the internet and into the hands of pirates (so to speak).
This is a case of someone attacking Valve's computers specifically and copying code for release. I'm guessing that it's most likely the same people that have the most to benefit from this code leak, the people developing cheats for Valve's games.
You had a choice at $149 between a few games (Zelda, Metroid, a couple others I don't remember because I wasn't interested), or, more recently, the GameBoy Player. I went with Zelda because I found Metroid at Blockbuster (new) for $20.
For $150 you can probably get a couple of good games with a GameCube now, especially if you buy used and/or stick with older games. The majority of the games I have for my Cube cost less than $30.
Yes, but only if it's done properly. Broad tax cuts (and, even worse, tax cuts for the wealthy) like Bush's aren't very expensive.
Aren't very expensive to who? The easiest way to increase the amount of money that a given tax cut will 'cut' is to reduce taxes on the wealthy a very minor amount. If you cut taxes on people making $20,000/year, there's very little tax to cut and very little money coming in from those people to begin with (if any, I don't remember where the cut-off point is, but it's certainly not much lower than that).
The bulk of the money went to the upper middle and upper class individuals. Those individuals are likely to save the money instead of spending, which doesn't stiumlate the economy at all.
Are these people saving money in their mattresses? Are they putting it in shoeboxes in the closet? If they're saving it, they put it in a bank, or in a CD, or stock/bonds. Any of those things stimulate the economy just as much as (if not more than) spending it.
Think about it: an upper middle class or upper class individual already has the money to buy an expensive car (or they already own one); an extra $3000 isn't going to mean anything (they already had a spare $3000, another spare $3000 isn't going to mean a bit of difference). Someone who's living paycheck-to-paycheck may not have the money to buy a car or computer; an extra $3000 makes them much more likely to do so.
Ah, but if a 1% tax cut gives one person $3000, it'll give someone in a lower bracket $300, or $30, or $3. A $3000 tax cut for the top tax brackets is the equivalent of $21,000 or more in the bottom of the tax bracket, which is far more than someone in the bottom of the tax bracket even pays in taxes (or makes in some cases; in other words, you'd be giving people money rather than taking taxes from them).
So, yes, tax cuts do stimulate the economy, but only if they go to the people who will spend it.
Everyone spends money, especially when they get tax refunds (unless you're George Bush and you tell the IRS to keep it for next year, which most wouldn't do knowing they could get the interest for themselves at the very least, and banks invest the money you give them to save). I use my federal tax refunds to pay my state taxes most of the time.
Sidenote 2: The US cannot stand any more tax cuts. We actually need tax increases. With $6 trillion in debt, a huge defecit, increased spending, and trillions in Social Security debt, this country needs to start being responsible with money.
Why doesn't the US get rid of defecits the same way people get out of debt? Because it's unpopular. Don't spend money you don't have. If you have trillions in Social Security debt, fix Social Security. Spending is astronomical. Additionally, if you increase taxes, who are you going to increase them on? If you increase taxes on the people that contribute the most to the country's current tax bill, you're taxing the people that can most easily afford to leave the country for a place that will let them keep more of their money. How much is enough? 70%, 80%? I'm irritated enough at having to pay less than half that percentage in taxes, and I am living paycheck to paycheck most of the time.
Sidenote 3: Much of Europe is in the same situation as the US, if not a worse situation. Social programs cost money, and with the ratio of retirees to workers increases, so will the defecit. France has already had problems with the EU for holding too much debt, and Italy has the lowest birth rate in the world.
Most of Europe has a significantly lower birth rate than the US. The US, however (not knowing what the various European systems use) was supposed to be setup so that people got back the money they put in. My Social Security money was not supposed to go to my grandparents (or my parents). They paid Social Security money believing that they would get the money they put in, but the government spent it, so they give them my Social Security money. The government needs to fix the system so that it works the way it was supposed to, or scrap it entirely (put in a cut-off age or whatever, I don't care, as long as it's done soon). They've been propping it up for too long now, since it went bankrupt years ago.
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If this was a car, and the engines exploded killing the drive, you can bet your ass that the automaker's name would be on the news.
And if it had happened several times and the flaw had been well publicized and people still hadn't taken their cars in to get fixed?
Yeah, it's not like this problem with Outlook is new or anything. In fact, it doesn't even exist on the current or previous (2003 & XP) versions of Outlook.
The initial interviews with Gabe Newell stated that someone had hacked their systems, installed key loggers, and so on, then had accessed the source repository from off-site, using the login information gathered from the key loggers to checkout the source tree.
No one had to email source code anywhere. Besides, with source that size (or even smaller), it's far easier to just burn a CD and take it with you, or log in remotely and download only what you need.
I picked up the OoT disc (the pre-order bundled disc for Wind Waker) for ~$20 used. The question is, though, how many people are going to actually be bringing these in so you can find them? I didn't find out about the previous Zelda disc until I saw someone bringing it into a store to turn in. At least this time I know about it, though it'll probably still be fairly hard to find (I doubt any kind of 'not for resale' marking will stop used copies from being available).
I'd still rather that they put the disc out for everyone to buy, there's little doubt that they'd sell plenty of copies to existing GC owners. If it comes down to it, though, it may be a good excuse to pick up that GC for the bedroom.
Games like Devil's Crush and Dungeon Explorer will forever go down as all-time greats of their genre.
Dungeon Explorer was one of the few games I had for my TG-16, unfortunately I left the system and the games in California (maybe I'll find them when I go back for XMas). When I got it, they had a bundle deal where you got Keith Courage (of course) and a choice for one other game that you would receive by mail. That was the one I chose, but they were backed up really bad, so they sent another game (the name of which I don't remember atm) of my choice as well. The only game I ever had besides those 3 was Splatterhouse, which a friend gave me after he sold his TG-16. The TG-16 itself came with an insert advertising the CD expansion and the TurboExpress by the time I got it, though I don't think the CD expansion was available in the US yet (it was 'coming soon'), as well as the A/V add-on. I really think the expansion-crazy consoles are what killed off Sega and NEC in the US, though maybe it would've been more widely accepted if Nintendo had brought over (or completed) more of their expansions in the early days (then again, maybe Nintendo just did their research on the US market better back then).
For portables I had the Lynx, simply because it was ~$80 right about the time the Lynx II came out. One of the more interesting things to me about the Lynx was that you could flip it over if you wanted to play with the buttons on the left and the control pad on the right, there was a switch or something to flip the video and you were all set.
The TurboExpress came out in 1990, a few months after the TG-16 itself (released in late 89 in the US), and priced about $100 more ($299).
The reason it could play the TG-16 games was simple, it was basically the same hardware in a smaller box with an LCD screen. This was also why it ate batteries at a rate that even the GameGear and Lynx probably never acheived.
so expensive liscences may not be a bad thing. it'll force the game developers to get more creative! and it'll stop the large companies from just milking a name.
If anything, a more expensive license will mean a smaller budget for the actual game. The only reason the LotR series of games seem to be faring even remotely well is because they don't seem to have a very high licensing cost on a per-game level (in other words, they seem to be able to use the licenses for pretty much as many games as they want, as long as the individual games are approved for the license).
That which changed in centuries in eras gone past, and decades in more recent eras, now changes in mere years.
This is true in all mediums, though. This is why the music industry is having so many problems with their sales figures. Even when they dump huge amounts of money into artists that fit today's pop culture, the sales are minor compared to popular artists of the past (even artists they dumped almost no money into in the past). The music industry also has distinct differences between popular music and social commentary. Music that contains significant social commentary only occasionally makes it's way into the mainstream. Art in terms of paintings and sculpture are even moreso in this realm, as even the most popular works are not going to make the artist a significant amount of money unless their work is incorporated into something else (ie game artists, or concept artists). Movies also carry this distinction, as do books. Stephen King is often derided for not writing as an artist might, but he's consistently a best seller. Your average 'chick flick' rarely has any social commentary outside of that which can be found just as easily on Oxygen or Lifetime.
There are TWO issues here - people treating games as art, and game developers treating games as art. If the latter does not happen, then there's no reason to expect the former to. In today's industry, I would argue that the latter happens "sometimes".
The latter will always happen 'sometimes', and chances are that the mainstream media will overlook each and every example until mainstream adoption of games is as close to 100% as it can be. Even then, we can expect about a decade or more of non-acceptance, just as many forms of music are not accepted as art (or were in the past). The fact is that the mainstream media isn't even in a position to judge art as art, until they hire someone that has already been doing just that for some time period (and let's face it, most people don't accept reviewers' points on the artistic value of a film or album, they just want to know if it's good). If game journalism took itself more seriously, there'd be less of a problem there, as the mainstream press could have a valuable resource for picking up reviewers, and eventually being able to discuss games as art.
Fortunately, I'm perfectly happy with game reviews that tell me whether or not a game is technically sound and fun, even though I may have to read several reviews to get an accurate opinion on the game. I don't need someone to point out the significance or social commentary in a game any more than I do in my music, movies, or the pictures I hang on the wall. Most of it in the more generally accepted forms of art is as subtle as getting hit in the face with a shovel anyway.
* The first two Sonic games sold very well, since they were pure gameplay. When, however, Sega began to flesh Sonic out as a "full" character, American gamers rejected him (e.g., the Sonic Adventure series).
Unless you consider that the interlude portions of Sonic Adventure just drag the game down. Sure, there are a handful of side quests you can perform and whatever, but overall it detracts from what made Sonic, well, Sonic. The Sonic games were about platform gaming at a fast pace, and the Sonic Adventure series is anything but fast-paced (that being said, the actual platform portions are pretty good).
* Starfox was a great game for the NES. As Nintendo added more storyline, fewer people bought the game, which was not too bad as far as gameplay. Then look at the Dinosaur Planet/Starfox Adventures fiasco: Nintendo forces one of its franchises upon Rare's newest game. This game, once moved to the Gamecube, was looking wonderful. By the time it's done, however, it's more of an "interactive movie"; it's downright beautiful, it has a rich storyline (if a little hokey at times), but it's not deep in the gameplay area. People bought the game but were disappointed.
I really can't comment, since I have never owned a StarFox game. IIRC, the series started on the SNES, which I never owned, and by the time I bought a GameCube, it was fairly common knowledge that StarFox Adventures wasn't a very good game.
* For the last condition, look at Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonius: good storyline, great gameplay, perhaps too toony look for most. Underrated and underbought, because of Sly and his world. I guarantee, you make the characters human, change a few names, and call it Thief, it sells.
I never would've bought Sly Cooper if it weren't for a demo that my roommate brought home one day. I hadn't been sold on the idea that platformers could work in 3D until I played the demo. I agree, though, that with a more 'realistic' look, the game probably would have sold better, though I don't think it would've been as good of a game (because the look really sets it apart).
" I bought this game and was never able to get it working on any computer, it was buggy as hell, somtimes you'd gett he game started but textures would be all over, its not suprising nobody bought this game, if people had heard it was buggy, the same reason many did not buy the new lara croft game.
I didn't buy NOLF for 2 reasons:
1) The developer's titles are always buggy. When Blood 2 was released by GameSpy at a fairly cheap price with 'the patch' that was supposed to fix everything, I bought it, and it was still horribly buggy.
2) The whole idea and everything anyone said about the game did not appeal to me in the least.
That being said, the new Tomb Raider game sold fairly well, and was pretty high on the charts, just not for very long (which indicates the buggy thing, people that held off didn't buy it after reading reviews and/or there were plenty of used copies available). It may not have beaten previous Tomb Raiders' sales, but there are many developers out there that would love the sales of the newest edition of the series.
The preview pane exploits were patched before the point where Outlook started blocking exe files.
Basically, they'd have to be using an unpatched Outlook 2000 or older to have gotten hit through that method, unless there's some big preview pane exploit no one knows about.
Anyway, it's not like Valve's ever jumped to early conclusions before, and I'd take their current explanation ('we dont know') over their previous explanation ('Outlook did it') any day.
and even if it were something they had planned to distribute, they have not distributed it yet. Therefore, they are absolutely not in violation of the GPL, because there's no requirement to distribute source to people that did not receive the software from you in the first place.
none of which addresses the statement quoted. You justified the extra cost of the Mac specifically with the ability to use the machine for 5 years, when the simple fact is that any machine used for those simple tasks could be used for 5 years, regardless of what hardware and OS it's running.
And the government is not propping it up either. Social security is propping up government spending
Social Security is propping up government spending, but because of that it's had to be propped up itself. Additionally, due in part to the way government likes to take money from Social Security to balance other portions of the budget, money that goes into Social Security today goes straight out to pay beneficiaries. This is why it can't support itself once the baby boomers begin to retire, or even any time when unemployment is high. The money I've been putting in for the last 5 years is spent, and the chance of it being there when it's my turn to collect is slim to none.
Nixon alone put over $900 million into Social Security to prop up the expansions he made to benefits, including a 10% increase in payout, plus a cost-of-living scale that increased based on the year you retire, rather than the year you collect (though that, by it's very nature, reduces the payout to individuals over the way most people would expect it to work).
A couple other items I forgot:
-Special limited edition DVD with all of the footage filmed for Enter the Matrix
- Bundled copy of Enter the Matrix
- Special Edition Girl in the Red Dress interactive DVD-ROM
ok, maybe I'm going too far.
and then you've got the different types of boxed sets:
- the base set with the 3 movies (times the 12 different editions of those 3 movies)
- the extended set that includes Animatrix
- the extra-extended set that includes Animatrix and whatever that extra DVD was that they packaged with the Matrix not too long ago
- the GIANT BOX (think Ultima IX) that includes all of the above and a National Geographic special on the locations in the movie (never mind that they're urban locations) and giant 'blue pill' and 'red pill' bookends, sponsored by Advil Liquigels.
Just one problem, all the Black Hats will be at the movies, too. The only real solution for them is to setup computers to launch attacks automatically when the movie starts.
Of course, the admins could just set it up so the firewall takes the entire network offline before the movie starts and hope things cool down when the movie's over.
I agree on that point.
On the other hand, almost every project I've worked on has required a significant amount of ramp-up time to get familiar with the specifics peculiar to that project. Although most of my work so far has had significant overlap, there's always been a lot of new ground to cover before real work starts.
That being said, the position I was originally hired for is nothing like what I'm doing now (they were basically hiring anyone that could do some moderate lifting and follow directions to do POP site installations, now I'm writing software). They also have us update our resumes regularly because they put them on contract bids to meet those types of specific task points (ie worked on X equipment for X amount of time). Maybe the simple point that I work for a division that does mostly contract work makes learning and diversity in skills more important than specific skillsets, but in the end someone has to meet the skill points to get the contracts (and they'll often send people to school to meet those skill points if they have time, or hire accordingly).
If you dont have time to take 2-3 classes, just take 1 class/semester at a regular uni.
I don't think it's just a matter of having the time to go to class. When I was in school full-time, it seemed like the majority of the work was really on my own time anyway, and that most of the actual courses were extremely slow-paced. Even when the teachers could manage lectures in a fairly quick time and let people go once all of the questions were answered, the time between classes and the frequency (ie 2 or 3 times a week) often meant that the pace was extremely slow. The only time the pace was ever beneficial was when the homework was significant and time-consuming.
In one particular case, I had a pascal course in which the majority of the projects were given to everyone ahead of time. Within 2 weeks with very little out-of-class work I had completed most of the work for the semester (it helped that I could apply my knowledge of C to Pascal fairly easily after the first day of lecture with only a few concepts needing to be looked up/checked in the book from time to time).
The only classes that ever seemed to make sense in this time frame were history courses, or other courses where the majority of the work involved extremely large reading assignments (of course, since I'm a slow reader, that could just be me).
A good school teaches you how to learn, especially in computer science. My dad has a certificate in CS and very little of what was required to get that certificate is even taught today, but because he knows how to do research and teach himself just about anything (in fact, he only got the certificate to prove a point) he can still do as well in the field as people with a more recent education at a higher level.
On the other hand, while a good school teaches you to learn, most of the online and other quick degree programs are tailored to stuff information into your head rather than teaching you to learn. Places that offer courses for most of the IT certifications are often like this, especially because they can get you to keep coming back for all of the other certifications if you never learn how to study for them on your own.
speaking of bad TV, I realized last nite why CSI is so damned popular: there's absolutely not a friggin thing worth watching on Thursday nite when CSI is on. It's like someone decided that no one watches TV on Thursday.
Oh well, I guess the fact that I just now realized this means that I don't normally watch TV on thursday nite, either.
DRM just happens to be a cheap and effective way to discourage illegal downloading of these games. As rampant as P2P filesharing is, I'm surprised they aren't charging $100 for these games. Be thankful it hasn't come to that yet.
I think that was his point. DRM is completely ineffective at discouraging illegal downloading because the downloaded copies have the DRM stripped out or disabled, usually within hours of a game's release (especially because so many developers use the same 2 or 3 DRM packages).
The only thing it is effective at is stopping people from letting each other borrow their games, especially those that don't know much about the CDKeys and such that they're dealing with. They're stopping games from being pirated the way Doom was (everyone just copying floppies for each other or installing the game on their friends' computers), but they're not stopping the people selling illegal copies or distributing through P2P and warez sites.
On the flip side, the people that actually buy the software have to deal with things like their CDKeys being stolen, because someone's key generator actually worked and the key got banned by the publisher/developer for multiple simultaneous users. Or certain CD-ROM drives not working with the copy protection (UT and Diablo 2 both had problems with one of my CD-ROM drives, which eventually broke, so I had to replace the drive anyway...). Then there's the spin-up time on the CD whenever anything needs to be loaded from it. Certainly the people that download it don't need to worry about that, and I've installed many no-CD cracks for games I don't play online simply because CD spinup or CD swapping can be such a pain in the ass. Let's not even get started with the idea of having to keep all of the CDs for every game I might want to play in the near future near my computer. I might as well play on a console (and in general, I play a lot more games on consoles now, because PC gaming has lost much of it's convenience).
oops ;) Now that I've had a good laugh at my own expense, I can't seem to remember the word I should've used there. Ooh yeah, deported ;)
til now I tried a quite vast amount of adapter and conventer to connect the PS2 with a beamer but I couldn't match the image quality of a DC+VGA adapter.
I've seen some really bad PS2 converters, but couldn't this also have to do with the fact that the DC supports 640x480 natively, while the PS2 does not?
When you buy CD, your buying that recording copy. You don't get a reel-to-reel or whatever the master recording was.
Exactly, there isn't much of a standard for recording music, but this is the equivalent of getting the wav files of the individual parts of every song on the album. If an artist decides to distribute that themselves, that's great. If it's copied from the artist's laptop and released against his wishes, that's a real problem.
I would have to say that pre-releases of music and movies on the internet are a problem as well, but those tend to be problems within the industry, as it is people in the industry that lend these things out or give people advance copies, and they find their way onto the internet and into the hands of pirates (so to speak).
This is a case of someone attacking Valve's computers specifically and copying code for release. I'm guessing that it's most likely the same people that have the most to benefit from this code leak, the people developing cheats for Valve's games.
You had a choice at $149 between a few games (Zelda, Metroid, a couple others I don't remember because I wasn't interested), or, more recently, the GameBoy Player. I went with Zelda because I found Metroid at Blockbuster (new) for $20.
For $150 you can probably get a couple of good games with a GameCube now, especially if you buy used and/or stick with older games. The majority of the games I have for my Cube cost less than $30.
Yes, but only if it's done properly. Broad tax cuts (and, even worse, tax cuts for the wealthy) like Bush's aren't very expensive.
Aren't very expensive to who? The easiest way to increase the amount of money that a given tax cut will 'cut' is to reduce taxes on the wealthy a very minor amount. If you cut taxes on people making $20,000/year, there's very little tax to cut and very little money coming in from those people to begin with (if any, I don't remember where the cut-off point is, but it's certainly not much lower than that).
The bulk of the money went to the upper middle and upper class individuals. Those individuals are likely to save the money instead of spending, which doesn't stiumlate the economy at all.
Are these people saving money in their mattresses? Are they putting it in shoeboxes in the closet? If they're saving it, they put it in a bank, or in a CD, or stock/bonds. Any of those things stimulate the economy just as much as (if not more than) spending it.
Think about it: an upper middle class or upper class individual already has the money to buy an expensive car (or they already own one); an extra $3000 isn't going to mean anything (they already had a spare $3000, another spare $3000 isn't going to mean a bit of difference). Someone who's living paycheck-to-paycheck may not have the money to buy a car or computer; an extra $3000 makes them much more likely to do so.
Ah, but if a 1% tax cut gives one person $3000, it'll give someone in a lower bracket $300, or $30, or $3. A $3000 tax cut for the top tax brackets is the equivalent of $21,000 or more in the bottom of the tax bracket, which is far more than someone in the bottom of the tax bracket even pays in taxes (or makes in some cases; in other words, you'd be giving people money rather than taking taxes from them).
So, yes, tax cuts do stimulate the economy, but only if they go to the people who will spend it.
Everyone spends money, especially when they get tax refunds (unless you're George Bush and you tell the IRS to keep it for next year, which most wouldn't do knowing they could get the interest for themselves at the very least, and banks invest the money you give them to save). I use my federal tax refunds to pay my state taxes most of the time.
Sidenote 2: The US cannot stand any more tax cuts. We actually need tax increases. With $6 trillion in debt, a huge defecit, increased spending, and trillions in Social Security debt, this country needs to start being responsible with money.
Why doesn't the US get rid of defecits the same way people get out of debt? Because it's unpopular. Don't spend money you don't have. If you have trillions in Social Security debt, fix Social Security. Spending is astronomical. Additionally, if you increase taxes, who are you going to increase them on? If you increase taxes on the people that contribute the most to the country's current tax bill, you're taxing the people that can most easily afford to leave the country for a place that will let them keep more of their money. How much is enough? 70%, 80%? I'm irritated enough at having to pay less than half that percentage in taxes, and I am living paycheck to paycheck most of the time.
Sidenote 3: Much of Europe is in the same situation as the US, if not a worse situation. Social programs cost money, and with the ratio of retirees to workers increases, so will the defecit. France has already had problems with the EU for holding too much debt, and Italy has the lowest birth rate in the world.
Most of Europe has a significantly lower birth rate than the US. The US, however (not knowing what the various European systems use) was supposed to be setup so that people got back the money they put in. My Social Security money was not supposed to go to my grandparents (or my parents). They paid Social Security money believing that they would get the money they put in, but the government spent it, so they give them my Social Security money. The government needs to fix the system so that it works the way it was supposed to, or scrap it entirely (put in a cut-off age or whatever, I don't care, as long as it's done soon). They've been propping it up for too long now, since it went bankrupt years ago.