That's the beauty of the 360. You can't lock a game to a single console because the consoles break so damn often. Although to be honest, I've had mine for nearly 2 1/2 years and it just broke a month ago after which it was less than 2 weeks turn around on getting it fixed by Microsoft at no charge. Didn't even have to pay for shipping so I think they are handling the issue as well as they can. They should NOT fail as often as they do, but what's done is done I guess.
Anyway, I recently got into Fallout 3 on my new xbox while I was waiting for my old one to be repaired. After it came back I put the old one in my living room and then found that my downloadable content would only work on my account, not my wife's account. I had to login to the xbox live site and move the licenses from the one console to the other. Solved the problem. It was a bit frustrating but I can understand why they do it. Keeps me from going to a friends house, logging into my account on live and then downloading DLC packs to other consoles. I mean I can do that, and I can play it on the other console just fine, but I guess other users on those consoles would not be able to access it. Seems like a fair trade off. I can still get to it from any console, but other users can only play it on the console that I have a license on.
Or maybe I've got it all wrong and there was just some issue with other users playing it on the one console until I did the license move thing.
I've bought several games that were great in theory but that I just couldn't enjoy if you paid me. I recently went through about 20 demos and found that of all of them, I only really liked one. These were 20 games that I would have otherwise just bought and hoped for the best, only be to be disappointed in the end, and quite a bit poorer considering that new xbox games are $60 each. To make matters worse, the actual games does not always match the demo. Conker Live & Reloaded was great in the demo. I couldn't wait for it to finally come out so I could play the whole thing. I picked it up on release day and raced home. Popped it in and immediately noticed that the game play was quite a bit different than what I had played on the demo disc from some magazine.
It's one thing to buy a game and end up not liking it. It's quite another to play a demo of the game only to buy the full game and find out that the game company decided to make some major changes to how the game was played. Of course I couldn't return the game so I was out $$$.
Tom Daschle thought he was a lock to be a senator forever until he got the boot. Seniority can go a long way but being popular in your home state can go farther.
But if you really just wanted a phone to make calls, why did you buy an iPhone? Sure it's phone features are great and I dig the visual voice mail although some sort of way to view text of the voice mail so I don't have to listen to the audio at all would be even better. Not using it as a media player or using any of the other cool features just seems silly though. I totally agree with you that doing anything at anytime with an iPhone will suck the battery right out of it. I've never had a device that could drain a batter like an iPhone. Even so, I bought mine to do lots of stuff and I charge it regularly. I've also seen cases for it that have a battery inside and I'm going to look into getting one of those I think.
Also, I've noticed that Stanza doesn't use much battery. Obviously if you have the screen really bright it will use more than if it's dim, but I have mine on the default setting and I didn't notice it using much battery at all, at least not compared to everything else I do on the phone. Will it last anywhere near as long as a Kindle? Of course not. But it will last plenty long for you to read a book now and again throughout the day without adversely affecting your talk time too much.
For a long while I was set on getting an ereader. I just had to have one. I tried reading books on my crackberry but the screen was just too damn small and scrolling was a pain. The only thing that kept be from buying a Sony ereader or a Kindle was the price. For the money you can instead buy an Xbox 360 (I have two and the last was only $160 thanks to a coupon at CircuitCity), or an Iphone ($199 for an 8 gig) or hell, get both. So that's what I ended up doing. I bought both.
Is my ereader experience as great as that on a Kindle? I dunno. What I do know is that it's "good enough" for my uses. I just want to read some fiction. I want to kick back and read some Robin Cook or Dean Koontz in the can or at a theater while waiting for the show or whatever. I use Stanza on my iPhone and I downloaded a few collections via torrents and I'm all set for quite a while. Plus I have a phone and an mp3 player and God knows what else I've added to my phone. And like I said earlier, I also have a second Xbox 360 which obviously lets me play games but I wanted a second for streaming movies and tv shows into my bedroom.
Maybe if I had a train ride to work everyday a Kindle would make sense, but even then it's too big to be dropped in my pocket and I'd still have to have my phone with me. Who wants yet another gadget to lug around?
This is why I don't bother with PC games anymore. The last game I bought for PC was HL2 and then I picked up the Orange Box for 360 and have never looked back. Sure 360 games have some bugs but I don't have to worry about what hardware I have, are my drivers up to date, do I have the latest patches, and all the other crap that goes along with pc gaming. Plus, I know a year from now my 360 will still play all of the 360 games (unless it breaks of course) whereas with pc gaming, my hardware that I have today may not be able to play the latest and greatest a year from now, at least not with decent looking graphics with a good frame rate. Console gaming is cheaper, less of a hassle, and in some cases, a much better overall experience.
I have the Xbox 360 version and on Tuesday I bought the first DLC. I then spent nearly two hours trying to find the stupid thing because what I read online said to go west from the factory when in fact I only needed to go a short distance south. Had I not read that, I would have probably found it on my own in five or ten minutes.
That said, I've been more than happy with both the original game and the expansion. I don't feel that the expansion does the game justice as it's too linear and doesn't quite have the same feel, but I feel like they pull it off because it's a simulation of something else so it still fits. I've had the game lockup a few times and I've gotten stuck three times. The last time I was stuck happened within the expansion and it was when I cut the corner on a walkway and stepped off the beaten path. My character could turn around but could not jump nor move in any direction. I reloaded from my last save and all was fine. I've learned when playing Fallout 3 you need to save early and often and I do just that.
I realize from reading a lot of material concerning the game that there is literally a shitload of bugs in this game but I wonder if that has anything to do with the sheer size of the game. I've never played anything else that allows you so much freedom. Games like HL2 are nice and long but very linear. It has to be easier to test a linear game. In Fallout you have so many options, so many ways you can do things. Do you follow the guidebook and do things in order or do you just wander all over the place? And is there even really an order to it at all? You have so many sidequests and encounters that a huge number of variables need to be considered when testing the game.
Honestly I think the game rocks. It's immensely fun to play and I've logged close to 40 hours in game thus far. Are there bugs and problems? Sure. But don't you find that in nearly every game these days? Can Bethesda really be expected to find every single bug? They worked on this for years. It's massive. At some point they need to turn a profit to stay in business. How many testers and how many hours would it take to test every possible scenario? To do so would be crazy. They test most of it and hope they get all of the major bugs.
Yes, yes it did. You can however, find it avail online at the usual places, as a rip from a game that sounds a lot less crappy. Odd that the store bought version is the crappy one. I typically download all of my tunes and on occasion I grab something that is less than great. I then grab another copy from someone else. I was thinking everyone had a crap copy until I read the news that the actual master was shite. How can a band as large as Metallica make such an amateur mistake? If we want to crank things up in our tunes or overdrive our amps or whatever, we can do that after we buy the cd thank you very much. No need for you to muck things up in the studio.
Not that it's all that great of a cd anyway. They have a couple of slower parts that sound really great and then they go into the heavy stuff and I dunno... just doesn't feel right. Tis a shame. I think they have a lot of talent and I used to be a huge fan.
The desperate need something too. Isn't some job paying some wage better than nothing at all? Just because you are unemployed doesn't mean you qualify for any handouts. My wife just this week finally found a job after being unemployed for the past four months. Could we make it on just my income? Not quite. We had to miss a few payments on the car and had some other issues. She now has a job that pays decent but it's only temp and doesn't offer bennies. But so what? It allows us to get things back in order, get caught up on bills, and work toward something better/more permanent. The bottom of the barrel jobs can help people get through tough times. They aren't careers, but sometimes you just need something to get you from point a to point b.
As for companies offering only minimum wage and no bennies, in most cases when you find yourself or both you and your spouse suddenly unemployed, anything IS better than nothing. In my wife's case we knew she would be unemployed for a bit because we just moved to somwhere much cheaper than where we were living so it was not unexpected and we planned for it the best we could. However, I have a number of friends that were SUDDENLY and without warning let go. For some of them it was a same day deal. Show up to work and find out you no longer have a job. No advance warning at all. For some they had no idea the company was planning on downsizing at all.
I think a large part of what is making the current crisis so bad is how quickly some of this has been happening. And of course how widespread the problem is isn't helping matters. I've always been able to find a job by just asking around among friends and someone always knew some company that was hiring. Not anymore.
My first thought was WoW as well. How the hell could any game beat WoW with so many people paying every single month. I don't believe for a second that GH has beaten it. Then again, if we are talking just console games... I don't think WoW is avail on console is it? I've never played it so I dunno... just know that I'm in the minority as it seems to be the most popular game there is.
And IIRC those new HDTVs that claim to do 120 don't actually do it they just generates a frame that links the other two. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that though
You are wrong. The whole point of the tv's that that do 120 is that they don't have to add any frames. Film is usually 24 fps. At 120 hz you show the same frame 5 times and everything is peachy. At 60hz you have an issue. You show it twice and you are at 48... so you need to make up the difference somehow. That said, from what I've read, 120hz on it's own doesn't make much of a noticeable difference, however other things like smoothing, anti-judder (or whatever it's called... that's what it was called in a cnet article) can make a big difference.
umm... what? For some reason this made me think of unions... where did you get the torrent for (whatever)? Oh, I hit up tracker local 142. It's got all the goods! lol
Your point though remains and I download most tv shows and movies that I want to see. For tv shows I can get the wide screen version without commercials. Sometimes I even get episodes before they air. Weeds had the first four or five eps posted online about a month before the season started. Was great until I had to wait so long for the next episode after watching them all back to back in one sitting.
I know it's not an online game but it is an rpg and similar in many respects. This is a genre I've never gotten into before due to the learning curve. I normally stick to run and gun shooters like Halo, Gears, etc. Fallout 3 starts off with a nice tutorial that doesn't seem like just a tutorial. You don't have someone saying look up, look down, look left, now right like in some games. It starts with the story, with your birth, and then you have to do simple stuff that progresses the story and teaches you the basic controls at the same time. I didn't have to stop and think about how to do something or check the control mapping before proceeding. I found it to be quite intuitive.
Brighthouse had some failure a couple weeks back and cable tv service was out for 8 to 20 hours depending on where you lived. Happened right when two big sports games were on tv so a lot of people were pissed. Brighthouse is doing pro-rated refunds for that time period. They also sent a coupon for a free pay per view movie and a letter of apology. A coupon for a free pay per view event, wrestling, boxing, whatever, would have been much nicer as I've already seen all of the pay per movies that I want to see right now. I thought it was a nice gesture though.
Yea yea, blah blah. Make your own god damn films if you feel so strongly! No seriously. Make some films so we have something better to watch then the current batch of horse shit. You can't. Neither can I. Nor can anyone else. That is why we get the same shit recycled over and over. That's not always a bad thing. For example, I thought Rob Zombie did a good job with Halloween. To me he proved himself with his first couple of films and then he took on the remaking of a masterpiece. As far as slasher films go, you've gotta give props to the original Halloween. It paved the way for Jason and Freddie and everyone else. That's not to say it's one of the greatest films of all time, but in the horror genre, I think you've gotta put it in the top 10 or 20.
That said, if you could find the funding to make a really great non-recycled-horse-shit movie, how many people would ever get the chance to see it? There are a lot of great indie films but they don't get shown on every screen everywhere like the shit Hollywood churns out month after month and until society wises up and says fuck this, I want quality or I'm not going to spend my money anymore, nothing will change.
Then again, I like a lot of what Hollywood has been putting out lately. Vantage Point, Strangers, and Alphabet Murders are three movies I watched last night that I thought were decent.
Thank you for clearing that up. I'll admit, I was one of the confused.
New rule: confusing shit is not to be posted until mid-afternoon so that we may have a chance to get enough caffeine into our weary bodies that we just might notice the slight difference in the name. Or, if that's too much to ask, pertinent info such as this could be included in the fucking summary.
It's amazing the company survived after producing these turds. The funny thing is that other computers at the time also had their share of problems. My brother-in-law bought a scanner for his Windows machine and couldn't get it to work at all. I bought a scanner for my Performa after he'd fiddled with hsi for 2 or three weeks with no success and mine was working in a half hour. Of course the whole machine would lock up occasionally, or do really odd things, but when it was working, it worked better than his.
The world is a much different place these days. Now owning a Mac is "cool" and I wouldn't be surprised to see companies like Dell making clones if Mac clones were to make a comeback. Jobs isn't going to let that happen if there is anything he can do to stop it however. I don't recall him EVER having anything nice to say about cloning and I know that due to some of the clones being better than what Apple was shipping, at least on paper, it was causing Apple to lose money and didn't do much to expand the user base which had been the whole point. When you are looking at a catalog and see one computer offers xyz for $$$ and another offers something that looks like it has xyz and abc for only $$, you might just buy that one. I don't disagree that the clones may have been inferior, but first time buyers often have no idea what quality to expect and if their only experience is the clone, they'll have a bad opinion of Apple in general.
That said, I had an Apple Performa 6360 and I don't know if a clone company could have made anything worse that that piece of crap. The OS which was 7.5.3 was crap. The hardware had issues. An Apple guy had to come to my house and replace all of the innards because there was a defect that caused it to crash often. Service was prompt however and he arrived the very next day after I was on the phone with Apple for a couple hours. Thankfully Apple got things turned around and make really great computers these days.
I think the point everyone seems to be forgetting is Google's promise that when their plans for taking over the world are complete, their employees deaths will be quick and painless while the rest of us will be made to suffer for quite some time.
Don't forget we'll also need a way to launch it. And how do we decide who gets to fly first? It holds what, 7 people at a time? 500,000 co-owners... knowing my luck I'd be in the one of the last groups... I'd die of old age before I ever got a turn. And lets not even consider how much it would cost to launch it... nor the logistics of the whole thing. Sure, having a shuttle would be damn cool, but getting to fly the shuttle you just paid mega bucks for would be freakin amazing!!!
It depends on what you are offering. Google seems to be quite good at breaking into existing markets. I've used Gmail for a long time now and most people I know also use it. Even people who before handled email themselves have switched to Gmail. I did just for the spam filtering because no matter how many hours I spent working on it, I could never get filters setup just right on my own servers. A quick signup with Google and a few minutes changing dns and now email for my domains runs through Gmail. I can still access it with whatever program and my phone, plus I have a nice reliable web interface that I didn't have when I did my own email. Yahoo and Hotmail used to dominate and I'm sure they probably still have the majority of the market, either one, but Gmail has grown by leaps and bounds and continues to get larger.
And then there is Google itself. It dominates and has for years.
The iPod and iPhone are two prime examples of taking over markets. If I read the article correctly a week or so ago, the iPhone either has or is about to pass up Blackberry for sales.
What would it take to become larger than eBay? I dunno. Amazon used to have auctions, and maybe they still do, but the couple of times I visited years ago the place was dead. The hot action was on eBay. If a behemoth like Amazon can't pull it off... then again, eBay has continued to piss people off. But so has PayPal, for a lot longer and they are still going strong. Maybe you can treat your customers like shite and get away with it because you are just so large.
Use a proxy? If you are sophisticated enough to write a bot for this sort of thing, you surely know about using proxies and most likely have some at your disposal. Or maybe your mom hates you and won't let you get broadband to the basement so you are still on dial-up. Each time you dial in, you get a different ip address. But then again, how are you possibly running a bot that needs to make a lot of connections on dial-up? lol
Ah, rifles... I was thinking shotguns and couldn't find anything about one that large. The 4 bore... 4 gauge... whatever, looks mighty impressive next to a the.30-06 shell. Good God that's a monster.
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That's the beauty of the 360. You can't lock a game to a single console because the consoles break so damn often. Although to be honest, I've had mine for nearly 2 1/2 years and it just broke a month ago after which it was less than 2 weeks turn around on getting it fixed by Microsoft at no charge. Didn't even have to pay for shipping so I think they are handling the issue as well as they can. They should NOT fail as often as they do, but what's done is done I guess.
Anyway, I recently got into Fallout 3 on my new xbox while I was waiting for my old one to be repaired. After it came back I put the old one in my living room and then found that my downloadable content would only work on my account, not my wife's account. I had to login to the xbox live site and move the licenses from the one console to the other. Solved the problem. It was a bit frustrating but I can understand why they do it. Keeps me from going to a friends house, logging into my account on live and then downloading DLC packs to other consoles. I mean I can do that, and I can play it on the other console just fine, but I guess other users on those consoles would not be able to access it. Seems like a fair trade off. I can still get to it from any console, but other users can only play it on the console that I have a license on.
Or maybe I've got it all wrong and there was just some issue with other users playing it on the one console until I did the license move thing.
Yes, yes, yes!!!
I've bought several games that were great in theory but that I just couldn't enjoy if you paid me. I recently went through about 20 demos and found that of all of them, I only really liked one. These were 20 games that I would have otherwise just bought and hoped for the best, only be to be disappointed in the end, and quite a bit poorer considering that new xbox games are $60 each. To make matters worse, the actual games does not always match the demo. Conker Live & Reloaded was great in the demo. I couldn't wait for it to finally come out so I could play the whole thing. I picked it up on release day and raced home. Popped it in and immediately noticed that the game play was quite a bit different than what I had played on the demo disc from some magazine.
It's one thing to buy a game and end up not liking it. It's quite another to play a demo of the game only to buy the full game and find out that the game company decided to make some major changes to how the game was played. Of course I couldn't return the game so I was out $$$.
I use the same setup for poker. Nothing beats five aces!!!
Tom Daschle thought he was a lock to be a senator forever until he got the boot. Seniority can go a long way but being popular in your home state can go farther.
But if you really just wanted a phone to make calls, why did you buy an iPhone? Sure it's phone features are great and I dig the visual voice mail although some sort of way to view text of the voice mail so I don't have to listen to the audio at all would be even better. Not using it as a media player or using any of the other cool features just seems silly though. I totally agree with you that doing anything at anytime with an iPhone will suck the battery right out of it. I've never had a device that could drain a batter like an iPhone. Even so, I bought mine to do lots of stuff and I charge it regularly. I've also seen cases for it that have a battery inside and I'm going to look into getting one of those I think.
Also, I've noticed that Stanza doesn't use much battery. Obviously if you have the screen really bright it will use more than if it's dim, but I have mine on the default setting and I didn't notice it using much battery at all, at least not compared to everything else I do on the phone. Will it last anywhere near as long as a Kindle? Of course not. But it will last plenty long for you to read a book now and again throughout the day without adversely affecting your talk time too much.
For a long while I was set on getting an ereader. I just had to have one. I tried reading books on my crackberry but the screen was just too damn small and scrolling was a pain. The only thing that kept be from buying a Sony ereader or a Kindle was the price. For the money you can instead buy an Xbox 360 (I have two and the last was only $160 thanks to a coupon at CircuitCity), or an Iphone ($199 for an 8 gig) or hell, get both. So that's what I ended up doing. I bought both.
Is my ereader experience as great as that on a Kindle? I dunno. What I do know is that it's "good enough" for my uses. I just want to read some fiction. I want to kick back and read some Robin Cook or Dean Koontz in the can or at a theater while waiting for the show or whatever. I use Stanza on my iPhone and I downloaded a few collections via torrents and I'm all set for quite a while. Plus I have a phone and an mp3 player and God knows what else I've added to my phone. And like I said earlier, I also have a second Xbox 360 which obviously lets me play games but I wanted a second for streaming movies and tv shows into my bedroom.
Maybe if I had a train ride to work everyday a Kindle would make sense, but even then it's too big to be dropped in my pocket and I'd still have to have my phone with me. Who wants yet another gadget to lug around?
This is why I don't bother with PC games anymore. The last game I bought for PC was HL2 and then I picked up the Orange Box for 360 and have never looked back. Sure 360 games have some bugs but I don't have to worry about what hardware I have, are my drivers up to date, do I have the latest patches, and all the other crap that goes along with pc gaming. Plus, I know a year from now my 360 will still play all of the 360 games (unless it breaks of course) whereas with pc gaming, my hardware that I have today may not be able to play the latest and greatest a year from now, at least not with decent looking graphics with a good frame rate. Console gaming is cheaper, less of a hassle, and in some cases, a much better overall experience.
I have the Xbox 360 version and on Tuesday I bought the first DLC. I then spent nearly two hours trying to find the stupid thing because what I read online said to go west from the factory when in fact I only needed to go a short distance south. Had I not read that, I would have probably found it on my own in five or ten minutes.
That said, I've been more than happy with both the original game and the expansion. I don't feel that the expansion does the game justice as it's too linear and doesn't quite have the same feel, but I feel like they pull it off because it's a simulation of something else so it still fits. I've had the game lockup a few times and I've gotten stuck three times. The last time I was stuck happened within the expansion and it was when I cut the corner on a walkway and stepped off the beaten path. My character could turn around but could not jump nor move in any direction. I reloaded from my last save and all was fine. I've learned when playing Fallout 3 you need to save early and often and I do just that.
I realize from reading a lot of material concerning the game that there is literally a shitload of bugs in this game but I wonder if that has anything to do with the sheer size of the game. I've never played anything else that allows you so much freedom. Games like HL2 are nice and long but very linear. It has to be easier to test a linear game. In Fallout you have so many options, so many ways you can do things. Do you follow the guidebook and do things in order or do you just wander all over the place? And is there even really an order to it at all? You have so many sidequests and encounters that a huge number of variables need to be considered when testing the game.
Honestly I think the game rocks. It's immensely fun to play and I've logged close to 40 hours in game thus far. Are there bugs and problems? Sure. But don't you find that in nearly every game these days? Can Bethesda really be expected to find every single bug? They worked on this for years. It's massive. At some point they need to turn a profit to stay in business. How many testers and how many hours would it take to test every possible scenario? To do so would be crazy. They test most of it and hope they get all of the major bugs.
Yes, yes it did. You can however, find it avail online at the usual places, as a rip from a game that sounds a lot less crappy. Odd that the store bought version is the crappy one. I typically download all of my tunes and on occasion I grab something that is less than great. I then grab another copy from someone else. I was thinking everyone had a crap copy until I read the news that the actual master was shite. How can a band as large as Metallica make such an amateur mistake? If we want to crank things up in our tunes or overdrive our amps or whatever, we can do that after we buy the cd thank you very much. No need for you to muck things up in the studio.
Not that it's all that great of a cd anyway. They have a couple of slower parts that sound really great and then they go into the heavy stuff and I dunno... just doesn't feel right. Tis a shame. I think they have a lot of talent and I used to be a huge fan.
The desperate need something too. Isn't some job paying some wage better than nothing at all? Just because you are unemployed doesn't mean you qualify for any handouts. My wife just this week finally found a job after being unemployed for the past four months. Could we make it on just my income? Not quite. We had to miss a few payments on the car and had some other issues. She now has a job that pays decent but it's only temp and doesn't offer bennies. But so what? It allows us to get things back in order, get caught up on bills, and work toward something better/more permanent. The bottom of the barrel jobs can help people get through tough times. They aren't careers, but sometimes you just need something to get you from point a to point b.
As for companies offering only minimum wage and no bennies, in most cases when you find yourself or both you and your spouse suddenly unemployed, anything IS better than nothing. In my wife's case we knew she would be unemployed for a bit because we just moved to somwhere much cheaper than where we were living so it was not unexpected and we planned for it the best we could. However, I have a number of friends that were SUDDENLY and without warning let go. For some of them it was a same day deal. Show up to work and find out you no longer have a job. No advance warning at all. For some they had no idea the company was planning on downsizing at all.
I think a large part of what is making the current crisis so bad is how quickly some of this has been happening. And of course how widespread the problem is isn't helping matters. I've always been able to find a job by just asking around among friends and someone always knew some company that was hiring. Not anymore.
Your ideas intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your militia.
My first thought was WoW as well. How the hell could any game beat WoW with so many people paying every single month. I don't believe for a second that GH has beaten it. Then again, if we are talking just console games... I don't think WoW is avail on console is it? I've never played it so I dunno... just know that I'm in the minority as it seems to be the most popular game there is.
And IIRC those new HDTVs that claim to do 120 don't actually do it they just generates a frame that links the other two. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that though
You are wrong. The whole point of the tv's that that do 120 is that they don't have to add any frames. Film is usually 24 fps. At 120 hz you show the same frame 5 times and everything is peachy. At 60hz you have an issue. You show it twice and you are at 48... so you need to make up the difference somehow. That said, from what I've read, 120hz on it's own doesn't make much of a noticeable difference, however other things like smoothing, anti-judder (or whatever it's called... that's what it was called in a cnet article) can make a big difference.
your local bittorrent tracker
umm... what? For some reason this made me think of unions... where did you get the torrent for (whatever)? Oh, I hit up tracker local 142. It's got all the goods! lol
Your point though remains and I download most tv shows and movies that I want to see. For tv shows I can get the wide screen version without commercials. Sometimes I even get episodes before they air. Weeds had the first four or five eps posted online about a month before the season started. Was great until I had to wait so long for the next episode after watching them all back to back in one sitting.
I know it's not an online game but it is an rpg and similar in many respects. This is a genre I've never gotten into before due to the learning curve. I normally stick to run and gun shooters like Halo, Gears, etc. Fallout 3 starts off with a nice tutorial that doesn't seem like just a tutorial. You don't have someone saying look up, look down, look left, now right like in some games. It starts with the story, with your birth, and then you have to do simple stuff that progresses the story and teaches you the basic controls at the same time. I didn't have to stop and think about how to do something or check the control mapping before proceeding. I found it to be quite intuitive.
Brighthouse had some failure a couple weeks back and cable tv service was out for 8 to 20 hours depending on where you lived. Happened right when two big sports games were on tv so a lot of people were pissed. Brighthouse is doing pro-rated refunds for that time period. They also sent a coupon for a free pay per view movie and a letter of apology. A coupon for a free pay per view event, wrestling, boxing, whatever, would have been much nicer as I've already seen all of the pay per movies that I want to see right now. I thought it was a nice gesture though.
Yea yea, blah blah. Make your own god damn films if you feel so strongly! No seriously. Make some films so we have something better to watch then the current batch of horse shit. You can't. Neither can I. Nor can anyone else. That is why we get the same shit recycled over and over. That's not always a bad thing. For example, I thought Rob Zombie did a good job with Halloween. To me he proved himself with his first couple of films and then he took on the remaking of a masterpiece. As far as slasher films go, you've gotta give props to the original Halloween. It paved the way for Jason and Freddie and everyone else. That's not to say it's one of the greatest films of all time, but in the horror genre, I think you've gotta put it in the top 10 or 20.
That said, if you could find the funding to make a really great non-recycled-horse-shit movie, how many people would ever get the chance to see it? There are a lot of great indie films but they don't get shown on every screen everywhere like the shit Hollywood churns out month after month and until society wises up and says fuck this, I want quality or I'm not going to spend my money anymore, nothing will change.
Then again, I like a lot of what Hollywood has been putting out lately. Vantage Point, Strangers, and Alphabet Murders are three movies I watched last night that I thought were decent.
Thank you for clearing that up. I'll admit, I was one of the confused.
New rule: confusing shit is not to be posted until mid-afternoon so that we may have a chance to get enough caffeine into our weary bodies that we just might notice the slight difference in the name. Or, if that's too much to ask, pertinent info such as this could be included in the fucking summary.
It's amazing the company survived after producing these turds. The funny thing is that other computers at the time also had their share of problems. My brother-in-law bought a scanner for his Windows machine and couldn't get it to work at all. I bought a scanner for my Performa after he'd fiddled with hsi for 2 or three weeks with no success and mine was working in a half hour. Of course the whole machine would lock up occasionally, or do really odd things, but when it was working, it worked better than his.
The world is a much different place these days. Now owning a Mac is "cool" and I wouldn't be surprised to see companies like Dell making clones if Mac clones were to make a comeback. Jobs isn't going to let that happen if there is anything he can do to stop it however. I don't recall him EVER having anything nice to say about cloning and I know that due to some of the clones being better than what Apple was shipping, at least on paper, it was causing Apple to lose money and didn't do much to expand the user base which had been the whole point. When you are looking at a catalog and see one computer offers xyz for $$$ and another offers something that looks like it has xyz and abc for only $$, you might just buy that one. I don't disagree that the clones may have been inferior, but first time buyers often have no idea what quality to expect and if their only experience is the clone, they'll have a bad opinion of Apple in general.
That said, I had an Apple Performa 6360 and I don't know if a clone company could have made anything worse that that piece of crap. The OS which was 7.5.3 was crap. The hardware had issues. An Apple guy had to come to my house and replace all of the innards because there was a defect that caused it to crash often. Service was prompt however and he arrived the very next day after I was on the phone with Apple for a couple hours. Thankfully Apple got things turned around and make really great computers these days.
I think the point everyone seems to be forgetting is Google's promise that when their plans for taking over the world are complete, their employees deaths will be quick and painless while the rest of us will be made to suffer for quite some time.
Don't forget we'll also need a way to launch it. And how do we decide who gets to fly first? It holds what, 7 people at a time? 500,000 co-owners... knowing my luck I'd be in the one of the last groups... I'd die of old age before I ever got a turn. And lets not even consider how much it would cost to launch it... nor the logistics of the whole thing. Sure, having a shuttle would be damn cool, but getting to fly the shuttle you just paid mega bucks for would be freakin amazing!!!
It depends on what you are offering. Google seems to be quite good at breaking into existing markets. I've used Gmail for a long time now and most people I know also use it. Even people who before handled email themselves have switched to Gmail. I did just for the spam filtering because no matter how many hours I spent working on it, I could never get filters setup just right on my own servers. A quick signup with Google and a few minutes changing dns and now email for my domains runs through Gmail. I can still access it with whatever program and my phone, plus I have a nice reliable web interface that I didn't have when I did my own email. Yahoo and Hotmail used to dominate and I'm sure they probably still have the majority of the market, either one, but Gmail has grown by leaps and bounds and continues to get larger.
And then there is Google itself. It dominates and has for years.
The iPod and iPhone are two prime examples of taking over markets. If I read the article correctly a week or so ago, the iPhone either has or is about to pass up Blackberry for sales.
What would it take to become larger than eBay? I dunno. Amazon used to have auctions, and maybe they still do, but the couple of times I visited years ago the place was dead. The hot action was on eBay. If a behemoth like Amazon can't pull it off... then again, eBay has continued to piss people off. But so has PayPal, for a lot longer and they are still going strong. Maybe you can treat your customers like shite and get away with it because you are just so large.
Use a proxy? If you are sophisticated enough to write a bot for this sort of thing, you surely know about using proxies and most likely have some at your disposal. Or maybe your mom hates you and won't let you get broadband to the basement so you are still on dial-up. Each time you dial in, you get a different ip address. But then again, how are you possibly running a bot that needs to make a lot of connections on dial-up? lol
Ah, rifles... I was thinking shotguns and couldn't find anything about one that large. The 4 bore... 4 gauge... whatever, looks mighty impressive next to a the .30-06 shell. Good God that's a monster.