The problem I have with this is that they've taken away the option - you can't buy an account without these restrictions anymore; you can only get a "free" account.
So unless you already have purchased TF2, your friends who have will have an advantage over you. And depending on their playing style, they may not even welcome you, if they have to make special considerations for your limited account's abilities.
I'm all for the option of "free" play, but only as an option. I'd much rather buy a game with all the bells and whistles, and not having to bring out my wallet for DLC at all. If I can't have that choice, I'll go elsewhere.
Buying anything from the Mann Co. store removes these restrictions. I believe I already mentioned that.
And most of the items in said store are cheaper than the game is, but Valve has a minimum of $5 that can be added to the Steam wallet.
However, you can add $5 to your Steam wallet, buy a Rocket Jumper for $0.99 and have $3.99 left to spend on Steam daily sale games.
Of course, the way to "fix" this is to buy anything from the Mann Co. Store. That'd be easy... if it weren't for Valve having a $5 minimum on funds put into your Steam wallet.
These restrictions make sense, though. They are in place to prevent people from creating a whole bunch of Steam accounts to farm item drops.
Given that WOW is on a subscription model, and farming of items (or gold) still happens, I don't think a measley $5 is going to be much of a barrer for that.
Team Fortress 2 has no in-game currency, and the really valuable items can only be found if you buy keys (at $2.50 a piece) and get lucky when opening a crate with said key.
They've also made it so new accounts have limits, such as: No random cosmetic item drops. Can receive items in trades but not send them. Cannot gift items to other players 50-slot backpack (as opposed to 300-slot for normal accounts) Limited crafting recipes.
Of course, the way to "fix" this is to buy anything from the Mann Co. Store. That'd be easy... if it weren't for Valve having a $5 minimum on funds put into your Steam wallet.
These restrictions make sense, though. They are in place to prevent people from creating a whole bunch of Steam accounts to farm item drops.
Google properties now use features that only work in Chrome.
Google uses web standards that have been implemented in Chrome. The only thing keeping other browsers from implementing the same standards is their slow release cycle. Nobody is calling into proprietary Chrome APIs.
...including web "standards" that they wrote, such as SPDY.
Oh, and did I mention those were massive sarcasm quotes?
And that doesn't even consider how this crap breaks plugins... Literally half the plugins I currently run, I had to edit the install.rdf just to get around the damned version check (after which, they all work just fine of course).
And that's because Mozilla requires a max version in the addon.rdf file, and they also say this:
Then don't redistribute software that is GPL-licensed.
What if you consider that might makes right?
Then the courts will properly and forcefully correct you and bar the distribution of your products until you comply with the license you accepted or make a new version that doesn't use someone else's work.
To imply that not following a software licence is unethical per se suggests a worrying level of conformity.
It's not like someone told them "YOU MUST USE LINUX ON YOUR ROUTER OR I'LL KILL YOU." The consciously made the choice to use Linux in their router system, and are now breaking its license terms.
They could just as easily gone with a BSD, or paid money to someone to license a commercial OS, or designed their own OS. They chose to do none of the above, and are thus bound by the GPLv2.
In Java there's no way to automate this process (no equivalent to C++ stack unwinding) so every time you use a non-RAM resource you have to type out a load of try... finally blocks by hand.
And this is precisely why Microsoft's (former) Java clone, C#, has a using block which automatically frees the object you create at the start of the block.
Microsoft, for all its faults, recognized this eons ago with directx.
There's a certain irony here, as from what I remember, DirectX was introduced to make it so you could run the same programs on Windows 95 and Windows NT4 without running into compatibility issues.
Then apparently Microsoft realized they weren't limited to just application stuff, and thus Direct3D was added in DirectX 2.0. Unfortunately, it was inferior to OpenGL until at least DirectX 6, which is likely why most games you run into don't support DirectX less than 7.
Steam brings the ability that, on the off chance you do decide to buy something in the game, you pay someone you (theoretically) already trust rather than a whole bunch of other entities.
The fact that you no longer have separate logins for these games is a plus, too... or at least you don't for Spiral Knights, the only one I've tried.
With licensable engines from people who know what they are doing(the Unreal engine, whatever ID is calling theirs these days, maybe lithtech, if they are still around), I could understand if they just licensed one of those, shovelled some half-assed art assets and crude humor into it and called it a day; but at least that would have run properly.
They did use an engine from people who knew what they were doing; specifically the Unreal 2.5 engine (the same one games like Killing Floor use).
Nope they can't handle it. Its a free market and once they are free to get big enough they are free to rape you while financially supporting your elected officials to elsablish laws that support corporate rape of you.
No they aren't, they're a monopoly mandated by the government because the govt doesn't want more than one telecom of each type laying lines in their area.
To bad, I say. The Java platform had so much potential that will go to waste. It would have been hard enough for Java to complete if the CLR wasn't superior technology, but it is. The future looks fairly bleak for Linux on the server side without a competitive virtual machine.
Then take OpenJDK and fork it! Except that you can't relicense it because it's GPLv2, and GPL isn't compatible with anything other than GPL.
Wait, you mean 7 ratchet and clanks, they didn't make Size Matters.
No, I mean 8: Ratchet & Clank Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal Ratchet: Deadlocked Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty Ratchet & Clank Future: Crack in Time Ratchet & Clank Future: All 4 One
I can't believe that someone from Insomniac Games, who has worked on what... 3 series (total) over their 15 year existence... is commenting on innovation.
They were the developer of the first 3 Spyro the Dragon for the PlayStation, 8 of the Ratchet & Clank titles (the eighth being All 4 One, due out this year), and 3 Resistance games (number 3 due out this year or next year).
I don't know about Resistance, but the other two series are notable for introducing 1-2 new gimmicks in each new game rather than real innovation.
I don't know about the Microsoft numbers, but I don't trust that chart simply because of Sony's numbers.
Seriously, since the PS3 is the worst-selling of the three console systems. Even with this year-old data, Sony should be doing much worse than that chart shows... unless they're doing creative bookkeeping between the PlayStation and Consumer Electronics divisions (read: TVs, radios, Blu-Ray players, etc...)
Well, considering cyber attack is now an act of war, HBGary, an unrelated 3rd party, attacks the privacy of Anonymous, they have every right to retaliate.
You use the term "unrelated" but were they?
My understanding is that Bank of America hired FBGary after Anonymous was causing them problems. This makes them a related third party.
A DX2-66 might have gotten 60FPS on a PCI or VLB videocard. I highly doubt a SX (no co-processor) could do it, since that kind of machine probably had an ISA videocard.
You're probably right.
This was 18 years ago, you can't expect me to remember everything about it.:P
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't work that way. You need to purchase $5 worth of items in TF2.
Yes, it does work that way. The Steam Wallet is not-TF2 specific.
The problem I have with this is that they've taken away the option - you can't buy an account without these restrictions anymore; you can only get a "free" account.
So unless you already have purchased TF2, your friends who have will have an advantage over you. And depending on their playing style, they may not even welcome you, if they have to make special considerations for your limited account's abilities.
I'm all for the option of "free" play, but only as an option. I'd much rather buy a game with all the bells and whistles, and not having to bring out my wallet for DLC at all. If I can't have that choice, I'll go elsewhere.
Buying anything from the Mann Co. store removes these restrictions. I believe I already mentioned that.
And most of the items in said store are cheaper than the game is, but Valve has a minimum of $5 that can be added to the Steam wallet.
However, you can add $5 to your Steam wallet, buy a Rocket Jumper for $0.99 and have $3.99 left to spend on Steam daily sale games.
Of course, the way to "fix" this is to buy anything from the Mann Co. Store. That'd be easy... if it weren't for Valve having a $5 minimum on funds put into your Steam wallet.
These restrictions make sense, though. They are in place to prevent people from creating a whole bunch of Steam accounts to farm item drops.
Given that WOW is on a subscription model, and farming of items (or gold) still happens, I don't think a measley $5 is going to be much of a barrer for that.
Team Fortress 2 has no in-game currency, and the really valuable items can only be found if you buy keys (at $2.50 a piece) and get lucky when opening a crate with said key.
They've also made it so new accounts have limits, such as:
No random cosmetic item drops.
Can receive items in trades but not send them.
Cannot gift items to other players
50-slot backpack (as opposed to 300-slot for normal accounts)
Limited crafting recipes.
Of course, the way to "fix" this is to buy anything from the Mann Co. Store. That'd be easy... if it weren't for Valve having a $5 minimum on funds put into your Steam wallet.
These restrictions make sense, though. They are in place to prevent people from creating a whole bunch of Steam accounts to farm item drops.
Google properties now use features that only work in Chrome.
Google uses web standards that have been implemented in Chrome. The only thing keeping other browsers from implementing the same standards is their slow release cycle. Nobody is calling into proprietary Chrome APIs.
...including web "standards" that they wrote, such as SPDY.
Oh, and did I mention those were massive sarcasm quotes?
And that doesn't even consider how this crap breaks plugins... Literally half the plugins I currently run, I had to edit the install.rdf just to get around the damned version check (after which, they all work just fine of course).
And that's because Mozilla requires a max version in the addon .rdf file, and they also say this:
This number needs to be less than or equal to an announced version of Firefox.
At the moment, the highest on that page is Firefox 7.
What if you consider the GPL unethical?
Then don't redistribute software that is GPL-licensed.
What if you consider that might makes right?
Then the courts will properly and forcefully correct you and bar the distribution of your products until you comply with the license you accepted or make a new version that doesn't use someone else's work.
To imply that not following a software licence is unethical per se suggests a worrying level of conformity.
It's not like someone told them "YOU MUST USE LINUX ON YOUR ROUTER OR I'LL KILL YOU." The consciously made the choice to use Linux in their router system, and are now breaking its license terms.
They could just as easily gone with a BSD, or paid money to someone to license a commercial OS, or designed their own OS. They chose to do none of the above, and are thus bound by the GPLv2.
Well, just look at it.
Can't, steampowered.com is blocked where I work.
They aren't legally responsible for updating out of date boxes at retail vendors now.
This has a corollary: they are legally responsible for updating the description on digital game stores that they publish on.
Anyone know if the Steam game page for this game is advertising multiplayer?
Why is the minimum req. a beefy dual core processor?
The X-box has nowhere near that amount of power - why keep this technology away from smaller and less power-hungry platforms?
Yes it does. The Xbox 360 has a triple-core PowerPC-based processor clocked at 3.2Ghz.
The Kinect SDK requires a dual-core processor running at 2.66Ghz.
Heck, even my 4-year old desktop PC is running a Quad core 2.4Ghz processor (Intel Core 2 Q6600)
The value of WOW gold -or Elbonian Dingbats - is more relevant to the vast majority of humanity, or even the subsection that infests Slashdot.
QUICK! What's the exchange rate of WOW gold to Elbonian Dingbats! I must know!
42 WoW gold per Elbonian Dingbat.
Unless it's an Elbonian Vampire Dingbat, in which case, it's worth far more WoW gold because they're rarer.
In Java there's no way to automate this process (no equivalent to C++ stack unwinding) so every time you use a non-RAM resource you have to type out a load of try ... finally blocks by hand.
And this is precisely why Microsoft's (former) Java clone, C#, has a using block which automatically frees the object you create at the start of the block.
Microsoft, for all its faults, recognized this eons ago with directx.
There's a certain irony here, as from what I remember, DirectX was introduced to make it so you could run the same programs on Windows 95 and Windows NT4 without running into compatibility issues.
Then apparently Microsoft realized they weren't limited to just application stuff, and thus Direct3D was added in DirectX 2.0. Unfortunately, it was inferior to OpenGL until at least DirectX 6, which is likely why most games you run into don't support DirectX less than 7.
Steam brings the ability that, on the off chance you do decide to buy something in the game, you pay someone you (theoretically) already trust rather than a whole bunch of other entities.
The fact that you no longer have separate logins for these games is a plus, too... or at least you don't for Spiral Knights, the only one I've tried.
Then they could do a reboot: Duke Nukem Begins, followed by The Duke Knight.
Even with natural monopolies, you'd at least have competitions in some areas between providers.
Instead, due to government regulation, I'm stuck with Broadstripe Cable because Comcast's coverage area ends 1/2 mile away.
And trust me, if you thought Comcast was bad, you have seen anything yet.
With licensable engines from people who know what they are doing(the Unreal engine, whatever ID is calling theirs these days, maybe lithtech, if they are still around), I could understand if they just licensed one of those, shovelled some half-assed art assets and crude humor into it and called it a day; but at least that would have run properly.
They did use an engine from people who knew what they were doing; specifically the Unreal 2.5 engine (the same one games like Killing Floor use).
Nope they can't handle it. Its a free market and once they are free to get big enough they are free to rape you while financially supporting your elected officials to elsablish laws that support corporate rape of you.
No they aren't, they're a monopoly mandated by the government because the govt doesn't want more than one telecom of each type laying lines in their area.
To bad, I say. The Java platform had so much potential that will go to waste. It would have been hard enough for Java to complete if the CLR wasn't superior technology, but it is. The future looks fairly bleak for Linux on the server side without a competitive virtual machine.
Then take OpenJDK and fork it! Except that you can't relicense it because it's GPLv2, and GPL isn't compatible with anything other than GPL.
Wait, you mean 7 ratchet and clanks, they didn't make Size Matters.
No, I mean 8:
Ratchet & Clank
Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando
Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal
Ratchet: Deadlocked
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
Ratchet & Clank Future: Crack in Time
Ratchet & Clank Future: All 4 One
I can't believe that someone from Insomniac Games, who has worked on what... 3 series (total) over their 15 year existence... is commenting on innovation.
They were the developer of the first 3 Spyro the Dragon for the PlayStation, 8 of the Ratchet & Clank titles (the eighth being All 4 One, due out this year), and 3 Resistance games (number 3 due out this year or next year).
I don't know about Resistance, but the other two series are notable for introducing 1-2 new gimmicks in each new game rather than real innovation.
...regulated rates...
...free market...
That term...I don't think it means what you think it means. To be fair, though, it would be better than what we have now.
Yes it does. regulating the infrastructure side would make the service provider side a free market.
At the moment, the infrastructure and service provider are the same entity, and since they (ab)use this monopoly position...
I don't know about the Microsoft numbers, but I don't trust that chart simply because of Sony's numbers.
Seriously, since the PS3 is the worst-selling of the three console systems. Even with this year-old data, Sony should be doing much worse than that chart shows... unless they're doing creative bookkeeping between the PlayStation and Consumer Electronics divisions (read: TVs, radios, Blu-Ray players, etc...)
Well, considering cyber attack is now an act of war, HBGary, an unrelated 3rd party, attacks the privacy of Anonymous, they have every right to retaliate.
You use the term "unrelated" but were they?
My understanding is that Bank of America hired FBGary after Anonymous was causing them problems. This makes them a related third party.
A DX2-66 might have gotten 60FPS on a PCI or VLB videocard. I highly doubt a SX (no co-processor) could do it, since that kind of machine probably had an ISA videocard.
You're probably right.
This was 18 years ago, you can't expect me to remember everything about it. :P