Wrong, if they detect that you've cheated then you are put out of good standing with VAC. Your games are intact, you just can't join VAC-secured servers in VAC-enabled games (All Goldsrc and Source games, plus Red Orchestra).
Sorry, but DRM will never go away as long as piracy still exists. Zero-day and Day-one warez cannibalize PC game sales, and as long as DRM prevents that, they're golden.
Steam is really no better, it's just that it hasn't had the same sort of character assassination that SecuROM and Starforce have gone through because they happen to have made HL2.
This is a non-issue in any editor which allows you to switch to a 4-space [Tab]. I can't think of a single editor or IDE that supports Python syntax highlighting and somehow doesn't support 4-space tabs.
-We've gone from 5 tabs to 50+ screens. It's crap.
No, you've gone from 5 tabs to 5 main menu items, it's only that instead of going left to right it goes up and down.
-The menu defaults to the "showcase" channel, which advertises Microsoft's newest games. This means that Microsoft, not content with getting us to pay $300+ for a console and $50 / year for Live, feels the need to advertise to us every time we go to the dashboard.
Are you new to 360's in general? The OXE was cluttered with advertisements in more traditional form, banner ads. And I'm pretty sure the default menu item was the game I had in my DVD drive when I turned it on from a fresh start last night.
-Old themes port very poorly, stretched across the background in awkward ways.
Paid themes were for suckers anyway, they usually looked awful even in the old system. Is the NXE not a new enough theme for you?
-Haven't fixed the glaring file management bugs - it's not possible to do something like, say, delete 150 old Oblivion saves to reclaim disk space while keeping 5 of them without pressing 4 buttons for each individual savegame. Not a problem until you realize they're over a megabyte apiece, and on a 20gb hard disk this adds up fast.
I might be mad except for the fact that one of my biggest issues with the old system, the way it loaded the list of arcade games you had installed, has in fact been 100% fixed. Personally, I play my games far more often than I delete saves, so I can understand if their engineers put priority on different things (and avoid playing awful games like Oblivion period).
Overall, I'm a huge fan of the NXE because it makes the interface a good deal more responsive. The old blade system seemed to always be one or two steps behind you and I was never a big fan of its stylings, and now it feels quite polished and slick.
I wouldn't trust php.net too much. Although the docs themselves are nice, one thing they don't cover is best practices, which is vital for a language with as much older cruft from times gone by as has PHP.
Worse, the comments section frequently features insecure or non-edge-cased code, which will inevitably find its way into some enterprise system and result in a cock-up of epic proportions.
The economy was circling the crapper when he came in (lookup exactly when the.bomb blew. Compare and contrast to economic coverage leading up to the election. Uh huh.) and then stuff went FOOM! just a few months into his term.
If you're talking about the the dot-com bust, it came and went. Our current economic crisis is a product of Bush's & friends complacency post-bust, anyone with their head on straight could see that predatory loans made to people who couldn't possibly pay them back couldn't go on forever.
So when you factor in a flaky congress flipping hands several times and having razor thin margins throughout, I'll give a solid B- for a grade.
Congress was a rubber stamp for the president for 6 out of his 8 years in office except on perhaps the only legislation I've ever agreed with him upon for the right reasons (Immigration). It's pretty easy to pass whatever you want when your party votes almost entirely lock-step with you.
Demerits for total failure to stand up to excess spending, but bonus points for Alito and Roberts
What, thanks for leaving two legacies of Bush's policies to sit and screw up the Supreme Court for decades to come?
The record business HAS moved into the 21st century. iTunes, Amazon and others allow you to buy music online for cheap, and in most cases it's not even DRM-encumbered anymore. What's more, indie record labels have exploded and most of them allow you to download music straight from them instead of going through a big label.
You don't have a good excuse anymore. Stop stealing music you morons,
and if the reasons for that needs explaining to you well.... you are probably waiting for absentee voting to begin so you can be one of the first to vote for Obama.
Because we all know that the republican party actually embraces conservative ideals and isn't just pandering to big money and overly-religious types, right?
Nobody knows what's exactly going to go down in an Obama presidency, but I can tell you exactly what's going to happen to a McCain presidency; four more years of failed policies and lock-step agreement with the GOP. We as a nation can not afford that.
I don't know how you could like Doom 2 and Serious Sam and not like Quake 1. It was pretty much the exact same game except in 3D and with a different motif (Lovecraftian instead of Aliens/Evil Dead). Quake 2's single player was indeed rubbish but the multiplayer was superb once you desaturated the colored lighting and Quake 3 is basically a more accessible Quake 2 with sensible colored lighting and better weapon balance.
Popularity indeed shifted from normal deathmatch games, but they shifted first to 'crazy' gimmicky games like Unreal Tournament and then to 'tacticool' Halo and Counterstrike wannabes, and it was mainly a side-effect of the multiplayer of Quake being so fucking cut-throat; it was possible to get REALLY good at the game and the new generation of gamers wanted something with more immediate satisfaction. However, after a period of time I found modern shooters get quite boring and more recently I've been giving multiplayer Doom, multiplayer Quake and now Quake Live a serious shot and have found depth and a sense of fulfillment that I could never really get from a modern multiplayer 'tacticool' shooter.
Does it fix IE7's broke-as-shit handling of links when zoomed in? I hated using IE7 on other computers because I would click on a link and it wouldn't work unless I moved my mouse right until it turned into a finger pointer.
Vista's sales were hurt because it was a lateral step from XP (for every awesome and good new feature there is another one which seems completely short-sighted and dumb). The copy protection is no worse than XP's draconian activation mechanisms, and if there are any draconian DRM-enforcement mechanisms built-in I certainly haven't run into any.
For the curious, I run Ubuntu Linux at work for productivity and Vista 64-bit at home for gaming.
Blaming their going under on piracy is equally disingenuous. If anyone, you should be pointing the finger at their publisher Edios for being so utterly horribly managed.
Seriously, they had some of the best talent and published some of the best games of the late 20th century. None of their blockbuster franchises have survived intact.
Source? ID proper has released exactly three games in the last ten years, not including their mobile division:
Quake 2
Quake 3
Doom 3
Quake 2 and Quake 3 were both ridiculously fucking awesome games. Only Doom 3 is of dubious quality, and even with that handicap it is their highest selling game by far. The whole myth of making 'great tech demos' has only been around as long as Doom 3 has, and honestly the biggest problem with Doom 3 is that the engine was ahead of its time to the point that games done with it these days are hamstrung by its limitations, and I doubt id Tech 5 will have the same problems. If any company is deserving of churning out mediocrity, it's Raven (and even they lost a good number of people who were dissatisfied with how awful Quake 4 was).
Also, keep in mind that id used to be a tiny company, only capable of working on one big-budget game at a time. However, their dissatisfaction with the quality of Quake 4 led them to creating a second team who is now working on Quake Live, and they are planning on expanding even further so they can work on Doom 4, Quake Live (and whatever follows) and Rage at the same time.
And this doesn't even begin to touch on id's mobile division, which has been quietly coming out with games for the mobile phone market for ages, and are shining beacons of fun in a pool of mediocrity. Go find yourself a phone capable of playing Doom RPG or either of the Orcs and Elves (also came out on DS) and I guarantee you that you'll be impressed as long as you realize playing a phone game and not a PSP.
Keep in mind though, that using a no CD crack is pretty much a requirement for running many games in Windows too. All convenience issues aside, SecuROM and other DRM can actually break the games' ability to run in many systems CD or not.
"Can break" and "pretty much a requirement" are two drastically different measures. I have never run into problems with copy protection, and if copy protection was actually as damaging as you say it is, it wouldn't be used.
And yes, abandoning copy protection HAS been done before. Remember all of the bad publicity that Starforce got a couple of years ago? Hardly anybody uses that shit anymore because it actually did measurable damage to users systems. The copy protection being used these days, although still not 100%, plays much nicer with people's systems and most people don't even know it's there.
When was the last time you actually played classic Doom?
Doom was one part Aliens, two parts Evil Dead. Doom's maps were in large part very explorable, with many dead ends and interesting level design situations that didn't ever make any architectural sense but played interestingly. The monsters were dumb, but they were very distinct and dozens could be on the screen at any given time, and even the dumbest monsters placed in the right kinds of situations could create interesting combat 'puzzles' for the player to shoot their way out of. The weapons were varied and felt like they had weight behind them, while none of them being a 'cure-all' in all situations. It also had amazing co-op and while the deathmatch mode was a bit spartan by todays standards the deathmatch gameplay itself still withstands scrutiny these days against its Quake brethren.
Doom 3 tried to take a 'scary game' approach. It stopped being scary after the second or third jump-scare, and the levels were linear to the point of boredom. The monsters were still dumb, but not intelligently placed and you could only see two or three of them on the screen at any given time. The weapons felt like all of the 'oomph' was taken out of them (and it turns out this was done on purpose to make the game seem scarier). Coop was only possible with a mod, and the deathmatch mode was a poor man's Quake instead of a worthy successor to Doom 2's gameplay.
id says that Doom 4 will more enemies on screen and gibs, which is a start. I don't have a whole lot of hope for much else of the 'classic doom' goodness to return, though. After all, Doom 3 was their most financially successful game and they probably think the formula 'worked'.
At least we still have Quake Live and Rage to look forward to...
I don't know what you're running, but all of my hardware had drivers from reputable companies that worked flawlessly out of the box. Of course, Vista probably has driver problems with older hardware, but then why are you installing Vista on said hardware in the first place?
Moral of the story: Get Vista with new hardware and leave XP on your older machines.
You did forget one thing though, video games. The difference between playing a game in 640x480 interlaced and 1280x720 is quite drastic to say the least. I've played a 360 on a huge 36 inch CRT and even at that size the interlacing makes it impossible to make out text and small detail.
Then again, I took the easy way out. I bought a VGA connector for my 360 and hooked it up to the VGA port on my LCD monitor. Hey presto, an HD experience on the cheap. Of course, PC's have had "High Definition" gaming for years, but considering how many games are console-only or delayed by 6 months you might consider the investment worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong, if they detect that you've cheated then you are put out of good standing with VAC. Your games are intact, you just can't join VAC-secured servers in VAC-enabled games (All Goldsrc and Source games, plus Red Orchestra).
Sorry, but DRM will never go away as long as piracy still exists. Zero-day and Day-one warez cannibalize PC game sales, and as long as DRM prevents that, they're golden.
Steam is really no better, it's just that it hasn't had the same sort of character assassination that SecuROM and Starforce have gone through because they happen to have made HL2.
Did they ever fix the fact that all anybody ever did was queue up for scenarios? In other words, do people actually bother to defend in RvR?
This is a non-issue in any editor which allows you to switch to a 4-space [Tab]. I can't think of a single editor or IDE that supports Python syntax highlighting and somehow doesn't support 4-space tabs.
No, you've gone from 5 tabs to 5 main menu items, it's only that instead of going left to right it goes up and down.
Are you new to 360's in general? The OXE was cluttered with advertisements in more traditional form, banner ads. And I'm pretty sure the default menu item was the game I had in my DVD drive when I turned it on from a fresh start last night.
Paid themes were for suckers anyway, they usually looked awful even in the old system. Is the NXE not a new enough theme for you?
I might be mad except for the fact that one of my biggest issues with the old system, the way it loaded the list of arcade games you had installed, has in fact been 100% fixed. Personally, I play my games far more often than I delete saves, so I can understand if their engineers put priority on different things (and avoid playing awful games like Oblivion period).
Overall, I'm a huge fan of the NXE because it makes the interface a good deal more responsive. The old blade system seemed to always be one or two steps behind you and I was never a big fan of its stylings, and now it feels quite polished and slick.
Wow! Someone who admits that they aren't as smart as they thought they were and admits their ignorance. On the internet no less!
I am not being snide or sarcastic when I say the world needs more people like you. I'd give you mod points if i had any.
I wouldn't trust php.net too much. Although the docs themselves are nice, one thing they don't cover is best practices, which is vital for a language with as much older cruft from times gone by as has PHP.
Worse, the comments section frequently features insecure or non-edge-cased code, which will inevitably find its way into some enterprise system and result in a cock-up of epic proportions.
If you're talking about the the dot-com bust, it came and went. Our current economic crisis is a product of Bush's & friends complacency post-bust, anyone with their head on straight could see that predatory loans made to people who couldn't possibly pay them back couldn't go on forever.
Congress was a rubber stamp for the president for 6 out of his 8 years in office except on perhaps the only legislation I've ever agreed with him upon for the right reasons (Immigration). It's pretty easy to pass whatever you want when your party votes almost entirely lock-step with you.
What, thanks for leaving two legacies of Bush's policies to sit and screw up the Supreme Court for decades to come?
The record business HAS moved into the 21st century. iTunes, Amazon and others allow you to buy music online for cheap, and in most cases it's not even DRM-encumbered anymore. What's more, indie record labels have exploded and most of them allow you to download music straight from them instead of going through a big label.
You don't have a good excuse anymore. Stop stealing music you morons,
Because we all know that the republican party actually embraces conservative ideals and isn't just pandering to big money and overly-religious types, right?
Nobody knows what's exactly going to go down in an Obama presidency, but I can tell you exactly what's going to happen to a McCain presidency; four more years of failed policies and lock-step agreement with the GOP. We as a nation can not afford that.
I don't know how you could like Doom 2 and Serious Sam and not like Quake 1. It was pretty much the exact same game except in 3D and with a different motif (Lovecraftian instead of Aliens/Evil Dead). Quake 2's single player was indeed rubbish but the multiplayer was superb once you desaturated the colored lighting and Quake 3 is basically a more accessible Quake 2 with sensible colored lighting and better weapon balance.
Popularity indeed shifted from normal deathmatch games, but they shifted first to 'crazy' gimmicky games like Unreal Tournament and then to 'tacticool' Halo and Counterstrike wannabes, and it was mainly a side-effect of the multiplayer of Quake being so fucking cut-throat; it was possible to get REALLY good at the game and the new generation of gamers wanted something with more immediate satisfaction. However, after a period of time I found modern shooters get quite boring and more recently I've been giving multiplayer Doom, multiplayer Quake and now Quake Live a serious shot and have found depth and a sense of fulfillment that I could never really get from a modern multiplayer 'tacticool' shooter.
Does it fix IE7's broke-as-shit handling of links when zoomed in? I hated using IE7 on other computers because I would click on a link and it wouldn't work unless I moved my mouse right until it turned into a finger pointer.
Why is this news? Tech Report has been doing this for years and it never made the slashdot front page.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15009
Good guide by the way, I got the Grand Experiment a few weeks ago and it's been great.
You are a deplorable human being for glorifying prison rape.
Vista's sales were hurt because it was a lateral step from XP (for every awesome and good new feature there is another one which seems completely short-sighted and dumb). The copy protection is no worse than XP's draconian activation mechanisms, and if there are any draconian DRM-enforcement mechanisms built-in I certainly haven't run into any.
For the curious, I run Ubuntu Linux at work for productivity and Vista 64-bit at home for gaming.
Blaming their going under on piracy is equally disingenuous. If anyone, you should be pointing the finger at their publisher Edios for being so utterly horribly managed.
Seriously, they had some of the best talent and published some of the best games of the late 20th century. None of their blockbuster franchises have survived intact.
Quake 2 and Quake 3 were both ridiculously fucking awesome games. Only Doom 3 is of dubious quality, and even with that handicap it is their highest selling game by far. The whole myth of making 'great tech demos' has only been around as long as Doom 3 has, and honestly the biggest problem with Doom 3 is that the engine was ahead of its time to the point that games done with it these days are hamstrung by its limitations, and I doubt id Tech 5 will have the same problems. If any company is deserving of churning out mediocrity, it's Raven (and even they lost a good number of people who were dissatisfied with how awful Quake 4 was).
Also, keep in mind that id used to be a tiny company, only capable of working on one big-budget game at a time. However, their dissatisfaction with the quality of Quake 4 led them to creating a second team who is now working on Quake Live, and they are planning on expanding even further so they can work on Doom 4, Quake Live (and whatever follows) and Rage at the same time.
And this doesn't even begin to touch on id's mobile division, which has been quietly coming out with games for the mobile phone market for ages, and are shining beacons of fun in a pool of mediocrity. Go find yourself a phone capable of playing Doom RPG or either of the Orcs and Elves (also came out on DS) and I guarantee you that you'll be impressed as long as you realize playing a phone game and not a PSP.
"Can break" and "pretty much a requirement" are two drastically different measures. I have never run into problems with copy protection, and if copy protection was actually as damaging as you say it is, it wouldn't be used.
And yes, abandoning copy protection HAS been done before. Remember all of the bad publicity that Starforce got a couple of years ago? Hardly anybody uses that shit anymore because it actually did measurable damage to users systems. The copy protection being used these days, although still not 100%, plays much nicer with people's systems and most people don't even know it's there.
When was the last time you actually played classic Doom?
Doom was one part Aliens, two parts Evil Dead. Doom's maps were in large part very explorable, with many dead ends and interesting level design situations that didn't ever make any architectural sense but played interestingly. The monsters were dumb, but they were very distinct and dozens could be on the screen at any given time, and even the dumbest monsters placed in the right kinds of situations could create interesting combat 'puzzles' for the player to shoot their way out of. The weapons were varied and felt like they had weight behind them, while none of them being a 'cure-all' in all situations. It also had amazing co-op and while the deathmatch mode was a bit spartan by todays standards the deathmatch gameplay itself still withstands scrutiny these days against its Quake brethren.
Doom 3 tried to take a 'scary game' approach. It stopped being scary after the second or third jump-scare, and the levels were linear to the point of boredom. The monsters were still dumb, but not intelligently placed and you could only see two or three of them on the screen at any given time. The weapons felt like all of the 'oomph' was taken out of them (and it turns out this was done on purpose to make the game seem scarier). Coop was only possible with a mod, and the deathmatch mode was a poor man's Quake instead of a worthy successor to Doom 2's gameplay.
id says that Doom 4 will more enemies on screen and gibs, which is a start. I don't have a whole lot of hope for much else of the 'classic doom' goodness to return, though. After all, Doom 3 was their most financially successful game and they probably think the formula 'worked'.
At least we still have Quake Live and Rage to look forward to...
I don't know what you're running, but all of my hardware had drivers from reputable companies that worked flawlessly out of the box. Of course, Vista probably has driver problems with older hardware, but then why are you installing Vista on said hardware in the first place?
Moral of the story: Get Vista with new hardware and leave XP on your older machines.
A 64-bit version that actually has driver support?
You did forget one thing though, video games. The difference between playing a game in 640x480 interlaced and 1280x720 is quite drastic to say the least. I've played a 360 on a huge 36 inch CRT and even at that size the interlacing makes it impossible to make out text and small detail.
Then again, I took the easy way out. I bought a VGA connector for my 360 and hooked it up to the VGA port on my LCD monitor. Hey presto, an HD experience on the cheap. Of course, PC's have had "High Definition" gaming for years, but considering how many games are console-only or delayed by 6 months you might consider the investment worthwhile.
You mean COPS?
Exactly. If Linden Labs has such trouble keeping their own grid up, what hope do us mere mortals have?
If I had mod points, you'd be getting them. Nice post.