Actually I believe this is incorrect, CS has (at least until recently, I haven't checked) been the number 1 game in the world. It may have been supplanted by WOW. The 95% DVD drive is actually really impressive, most lan houses and other places where there are low end computers don't have a need for a ROM drive at all.
Unlike the video card market (whih I think is what you were thinking of) hardcore gamers do make up a large part of the market (the PC market, which is what this survey relates to). Taking the pulse of the PC games market is pretty important, there hasn't been a major increase in performance since 2004/2005 (AMD XP and Pentium 4 systems)... Dual-Core simply doesn't affect gaming as much as it affects other areas and the graphics cards from that period (Nvidia 6xxx and radeon 8xx series) are still ABLE to run current games, valve pushes the envelope they want to be the game that you want to play but can't on your current hardware (nescessitating an upgrade in those who hold out as long as possible), they need to be very precise in how much of the market they want to put in such a position...
Especially important considering the arrival of DirectX10 hardware, especially considering how underpowered it is (ATI 2900XT and Nvidia 85/600 series have negligible performance gains, in the case of the new mid level nvidia lineup they show decreased performance).
Valve is debating pushing consumers upgrades into a crappy hardware environment, without serious sponsorship I imagine the answer will be no.
My favorite part about this is what if there is a specific site they want to attack now, instead of being able to send in a surgical strike they have to launch all their missiles because its an act of chance how many get through.
Instead of we're really pissed lets nuke a city it becomes we're really pissed but if we launch one and they intercept it they won't be scared anymore and they'll attack so we better send 300 nukes just to make sure we remind them how much this nuclear war thing sucks.
True, the U.S. has shown a total disregard for non-U.S. lives, freedoms, or economies. We need to remember that MAD is the only thing holding them back from treating Europe like they treat South America.
Political dissidents in the U.S. are talking about how free their media is. Noam Chomsky claims that he's being passively censored.
While I don't support Chomsky's political leanings (Anarchist Libertarian) his five filters on U.S. media are an important and coherent look at what I think many people have suspected for a long time, U.S. media is not a tool for examination of the government but rather a tool for directing the thoughts of the U.S. populance.
We made a business decision to not allow 3rd party extensibility in Express. The reason we're able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages.
Translation: "The only way people will buy our crap is if the one feature they need can't be had for free, and their whole product is already implemented using our IDE, making it harder to switch to some other product, perhaps a Free one."
Imagine if game companies launched demos and people built custom maps for them? People do it all the time anyway, I like demos and freeware (I know I can ALWAYS find a free tool for any minor task).
I love piracy but at some point people need to be able to differentiate their product.
Well online games with keys checked against an internet database have effectively reduced online game piracy to ~0%.
Considering WOW is making several million dollars a month they're probably pretty happy with their DRM scheme? The truth is it can work no matter how much we'd like it not to, and we need to legislate it out of commision before it does.
Right now they're pushing the DRM aspect, they're probably spending 10-15% of their revenue on it, considering the moral standpoint they've aquired I'm pretty worried where they'll turn next.
What's the performance penalty on this stuff? Is this something that I'd be interested in turning on as a default? I don't think Ubuntu or other linux distros do...
I'm assuming ram bandwidth isn't the major performance area (Just an educated guess) so with quad core (probably not dual core) and flash drives (Really fast access in parrelel across a big ass raid) will everyone have this on?
Fine you can also get all the old emulators (They're working on a ps1 emu right now but everything prior to that) All Xbox games, several PC ports....
My Xbox also rips DVDs which is nice (Pop it in it copies and encodes overnight.
If it had line in it would be the sickest media centre ever. It's still Big heavy and ugly and needs a physical mod (though there are soft mods I haven't seen anyone who has used one) and doesn't support HD-DVD (gasp) or DVD burning.
I actually thought most slashdotters had one already.
When Microsoft clones a linux application or a GPL (especially v3) feature will they try and act as though this liscense protects them from linux lawsuits?
This is a pretty interesting legal attack, one partner company is allowed to use certain resources and the other isn't (because one is the evil empire)... This move is going to create such a shitstorm no matter what they're trying to do.
Front page, no os options, second page choose model. Third page chosen laptop, two offers AMD vs Intel both advertising Vista compatibility, Thanks Dell you're the greatest!
Good point, but doesn't it seem that we occasionally overshoot? Not being allowed to discuss certain things or think certain things. Is the holocaust more likely to happen again if we discuss it? Surely.
However as an earlier poster pointed out the concept of Holocaust is so strongly associated with Jews that the real mentality behind it and any discussion of the reasons for its horrors has been lost. People are still trying to genocidally attack jews in the middle east (Though this seems to be mainly a land issue not a religious one) and genocides are taking place everywhere, partially because the Holocaust is not taught as a real lesson with "if you start here you'll feel like crap when you get to here" but as "people are monsters who hate Jews, if you don't hate Jews you won't be a monster."
We're nerds and a documentary on the subject has been directed at us, check out "Mr.Death" by Errol Morris (The best documentarian I've ever seen, his film "Fog of War" conflicted strongly with my liberalism and pacifism but was very enlightening).
All game reviews need to list the old stuff to establish "Geek Cred."
But the Atari Controller depicted REALLY hurts the hands, it had no thought of ergonomics. I hated the gamecube controller so the best controller of the last generation for me was the Dreamcast controller, it was BIG but light and comfortable and the vmu spots were a great feature.
I've got bad news for you, he's not a person, he's a bot. Probably looks on Alexa or some other web traffic monitoring sites and registers based on hits.
The whole idea of ranking pages based on popularity is flawed, move back to ranking them based on blogs and user comments and make it illegal to automate those or to hire workers for the purpose of manipulating them, simple. People shouldn't be allowed to run around knowingly spreading false information anyway, the fact that it hurts everyone a little bit instead of one person directly shouldn't be a mitigating factor.
One onerous requirement might be for a patent holder to maintain a credible product in commercial production in order to sue others for royalties.
This will remove the original purpose of patents, to allow individual inventors to try and get funding for their inventions.
But if we look at many of the curent elements of business we see that this isn't working, too many market segments have monopolies or oligopolies that don't look outside the company to individual inventors. They may liscense it from other companies but they won't pay individual inventors. Look at Space Ship one, DWave etc. It's cheaper to either pay them a couple million or to wait till they have no money and buy it for a pittance than to acknowledge the value of invention (You'd need to pay your R&D teams more than your marketting teams OH NOES.
I'm going to put out food with "eat me" signs and sue, I'll make millions.
FKa(pronounced Fuka) the public domain.
I have 3M Cable, brought only my 10G (Windows or Linux) partition laptop, so I have many many times more bandwidth than I need, if I REALLY need more I can connect to my router and ban people... so I share I have records of the Macs that connect and though they can sniff my packets I use SSH and am not terribly concerned.
Is capitalism totally opposed to the concept of sharing? If we can secure ourselves and don't care about what they use to access the internet does it really matter? There are millions of places they can get free internet access for child porn or whatever and I know my neighbors.
For those of you saying that sharing is unesesary, what happens when your internet goes out? I'd like to have a backup, when I'm on the road and lost I like being able to pull over in a quiet neighborhood and use google maps. Someday I'd like to have a free Wi-Fi Voip cell phone that would be totally free, all legitimate and free uses and all of which TAKE MONEY FROM THE POCKETS OF CORPORATIONS. That's what this is about, I hope all of you can secure your personal connections and share your access so others can benefit, yes sharing takes effort but it will more than be made up for if the reciprocity helps you find a party when you're lost or make a call when you're stuck in the road.
Steam, I said I'd never buy a game which used steam and I never have. I'm an FPS junky I loved HL and CS and it would have pained me sooo much to do it but I stuck with my guns. Then I got HL2 from a friend (ATI deal back in the day) so I can review steam.
Pros: Updates, Security is simple, some kind of centralized download service.
Cons: Fewer anti-cheat services (They don't work, this leads to cheaters ruining games and me getting banned for "cheating." Super), crappy browser and friends service (people are using x-fire but the best ever AllSeeingEye is constantly broken and seems to be going out of business while GamespyArcade is growing, a crappy product), goes down OFTEN and you can't get online, purchasing system doesn't seem to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I believe this is incorrect, CS has (at least until recently, I haven't checked) been the number 1 game in the world. It may have been supplanted by WOW. The 95% DVD drive is actually really impressive, most lan houses and other places where there are low end computers don't have a need for a ROM drive at all.
Unlike the video card market (whih I think is what you were thinking of) hardcore gamers do make up a large part of the market (the PC market, which is what this survey relates to). Taking the pulse of the PC games market is pretty important, there hasn't been a major increase in performance since 2004/2005 (AMD XP and Pentium 4 systems)... Dual-Core simply doesn't affect gaming as much as it affects other areas and the graphics cards from that period (Nvidia 6xxx and radeon 8xx series) are still ABLE to run current games, valve pushes the envelope they want to be the game that you want to play but can't on your current hardware (nescessitating an upgrade in those who hold out as long as possible), they need to be very precise in how much of the market they want to put in such a position...
Especially important considering the arrival of DirectX10 hardware, especially considering how underpowered it is (ATI 2900XT and Nvidia 85/600 series have negligible performance gains, in the case of the new mid level nvidia lineup they show decreased performance).
Valve is debating pushing consumers upgrades into a crappy hardware environment, without serious sponsorship I imagine the answer will be no.
My favorite part about this is what if there is a specific site they want to attack now, instead of being able to send in a surgical strike they have to launch all their missiles because its an act of chance how many get through.
Instead of we're really pissed lets nuke a city it becomes we're really pissed but if we launch one and they intercept it they won't be scared anymore and they'll attack so we better send 300 nukes just to make sure we remind them how much this nuclear war thing sucks.
True, the U.S. has shown a total disregard for non-U.S. lives, freedoms, or economies. We need to remember that MAD is the only thing holding them back from treating Europe like they treat South America.
Political dissidents in the U.S. are talking about how free their media is. Noam Chomsky claims that he's being passively censored.
While I don't support Chomsky's political leanings (Anarchist Libertarian) his five filters on U.S. media are an important and coherent look at what I think many people have suspected for a long time, U.S. media is not a tool for examination of the government but rather a tool for directing the thoughts of the U.S. populance.
Robert Hansen
Major U.S. software companies should really consider nuking Scandinavia?
We made a business decision to not allow 3rd party extensibility in Express. The reason we're able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages.
Translation: "The only way people will buy our crap is if the one feature they need can't be had for free, and their whole product is already implemented using our IDE, making it harder to switch to some other product, perhaps a Free one."
Imagine if game companies launched demos and people built custom maps for them? People do it all the time anyway, I like demos and freeware (I know I can ALWAYS find a free tool for any minor task).
I love piracy but at some point people need to be able to differentiate their product.
Well online games with keys checked against an internet database have effectively reduced online game piracy to ~0%.
Considering WOW is making several million dollars a month they're probably pretty happy with their DRM scheme? The truth is it can work no matter how much we'd like it not to, and we need to legislate it out of commision before it does.
Right now they're pushing the DRM aspect, they're probably spending 10-15% of their revenue on it, considering the moral standpoint they've aquired I'm pretty worried where they'll turn next.
What's the performance penalty on this stuff? Is this something that I'd be interested in turning on as a default? I don't think Ubuntu or other linux distros do...
I'm assuming ram bandwidth isn't the major performance area (Just an educated guess) so with quad core (probably not dual core) and flash drives (Really fast access in parrelel across a big ass raid) will everyone have this on?
You're in a game running along, there's someone beside you... Then you look at him, and he looks back, but there's nothing inside there...
Playing with bots and people, REALLY unpleasant.
Don't tell people about it!...
Fine you can also get all the old emulators (They're working on a ps1 emu right now but everything prior to that) All Xbox games, several PC ports....
My Xbox also rips DVDs which is nice (Pop it in it copies and encodes overnight.
If it had line in it would be the sickest media centre ever. It's still Big heavy and ugly and needs a physical mod (though there are soft mods I haven't seen anyone who has used one) and doesn't support HD-DVD (gasp) or DVD burning.
I actually thought most slashdotters had one already.
When Microsoft clones a linux application or a GPL (especially v3) feature will they try and act as though this liscense protects them from linux lawsuits?
This is a pretty interesting legal attack, one partner company is allowed to use certain resources and the other isn't (because one is the evil empire)... This move is going to create such a shitstorm no matter what they're trying to do.
My understanding is you can't short crappy stocks, someone needs to accept that you're shorting and with such crap no one will accept it.
opera:config
Ah but the U.S.'s definition of everything is "Whatever gives us the most".
So there's no conflict!
Front page, no os options, second page choose model. Third page chosen laptop, two offers AMD vs Intel both advertising Vista compatibility, Thanks Dell you're the greatest!
Under Chomsky's news for nerds, see sig.
Good point, but doesn't it seem that we occasionally overshoot? Not being allowed to discuss certain things or think certain things. Is the holocaust more likely to happen again if we discuss it? Surely.
However as an earlier poster pointed out the concept of Holocaust is so strongly associated with Jews that the real mentality behind it and any discussion of the reasons for its horrors has been lost. People are still trying to genocidally attack jews in the middle east (Though this seems to be mainly a land issue not a religious one) and genocides are taking place everywhere, partially because the Holocaust is not taught as a real lesson with "if you start here you'll feel like crap when you get to here" but as "people are monsters who hate Jews, if you don't hate Jews you won't be a monster."
We're nerds and a documentary on the subject has been directed at us, check out "Mr.Death" by Errol Morris (The best documentarian I've ever seen, his film "Fog of War" conflicted strongly with my liberalism and pacifism but was very enlightening).
All game reviews need to list the old stuff to establish "Geek Cred."
But the Atari Controller depicted REALLY hurts the hands, it had no thought of ergonomics. I hated the gamecube controller so the best controller of the last generation for me was the Dreamcast controller, it was BIG but light and comfortable and the vmu spots were a great feature.
I've got bad news for you, he's not a person, he's a bot. Probably looks on Alexa or some other web traffic monitoring sites and registers based on hits.
The whole idea of ranking pages based on popularity is flawed, move back to ranking them based on blogs and user comments and make it illegal to automate those or to hire workers for the purpose of manipulating them, simple. People shouldn't be allowed to run around knowingly spreading false information anyway, the fact that it hurts everyone a little bit instead of one person directly shouldn't be a mitigating factor.
Wait until the benchmarks come out showing its 20% slower(Note this is a guestimate, don't get upset... yet).
One onerous requirement might be for a patent holder to maintain a credible product in commercial production in order to sue others for royalties.
This will remove the original purpose of patents, to allow individual inventors to try and get funding for their inventions.
But if we look at many of the curent elements of business we see that this isn't working, too many market segments have monopolies or oligopolies that don't look outside the company to individual inventors. They may liscense it from other companies but they won't pay individual inventors. Look at Space Ship one, DWave etc. It's cheaper to either pay them a couple million or to wait till they have no money and buy it for a pittance than to acknowledge the value of invention (You'd need to pay your R&D teams more than your marketting teams OH NOES.
I'm going to put out food with "eat me" signs and sue, I'll make millions.
FKa(pronounced Fuka) the public domain.
I have 3M Cable, brought only my 10G (Windows or Linux) partition laptop, so I have many many times more bandwidth than I need, if I REALLY need more I can connect to my router and ban people... so I share I have records of the Macs that connect and though they can sniff my packets I use SSH and am not terribly concerned.
Is capitalism totally opposed to the concept of sharing? If we can secure ourselves and don't care about what they use to access the internet does it really matter? There are millions of places they can get free internet access for child porn or whatever and I know my neighbors.
For those of you saying that sharing is unesesary, what happens when your internet goes out? I'd like to have a backup, when I'm on the road and lost I like being able to pull over in a quiet neighborhood and use google maps. Someday I'd like to have a free Wi-Fi Voip cell phone that would be totally free, all legitimate and free uses and all of which TAKE MONEY FROM THE POCKETS OF CORPORATIONS. That's what this is about, I hope all of you can secure your personal connections and share your access so others can benefit, yes sharing takes effort but it will more than be made up for if the reciprocity helps you find a party when you're lost or make a call when you're stuck in the road.
Maybe because macs are pretty and white.
Or maybe because they have ONE fking button!
Steam, I said I'd never buy a game which used steam and I never have. I'm an FPS junky I loved HL and CS and it would have pained me sooo much to do it but I stuck with my guns. Then I got HL2 from a friend (ATI deal back in the day) so I can review steam.
Pros: Updates, Security is simple, some kind of centralized download service.
Cons: Fewer anti-cheat services (They don't work, this leads to cheaters ruining games and me getting banned for "cheating." Super), crappy browser and friends service (people are using x-fire but the best ever AllSeeingEye is constantly broken and seems to be going out of business while GamespyArcade is growing, a crappy product), goes down OFTEN and you can't get online, purchasing system doesn't seem to work.
Overall things have gotten worse,
Ah, but then who will tell the world that American products are cooler, or that they have 12 inches, freedom, Farraris, etc.
Who will make everyone feel how impovrished they are... who will fight communism!
Support the RIAA, think of the children!
Don't they buy syncronous links and sell the upstream to web providers and business?
Doesn't this make sense? Can anyone confirm how common this practice is?