However, I then realized that digital distribution is rapidly coalescing into a handful of retailers like Steam and iTunes app store, and they're just as unlikely to carry boobs than their brick and mortar counterparts.
Age of Conan and Saints Row 2 are both on Steam and both have boobs (OK, SR2 requires a trivial hack to unpixelate them). I think Witcher does too.
So that's at least two and probably three Steam games with boobs, and I'm sure there are others.
Some of the highest-grossing movies were rated G. Like the annual Disney/Pixar animations.
The difference is that Pixar actually make _good_ movies, so the rating is irrelevant. When all your movie has to offer is explosions, car chases and tits, you don't want a G rating on the cover.
How does one "suffer" by having to enter in a keycode? It takes all of 5 seconds.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha... I don't remember which it was, but one game took me the best part of two days to install because the stupid sods used both B and 8 in the key (and similar easily-confused characters) and in the font they used they were almost identical. I must have entered a hundred different variations on the key until I found a post on the Internet explaining exactly how to work out which characters were which.
So yes, one has "suffered" from having to enter a stupid CD key to play a game that I've paid for.
Not many PC games support this use case because very few people have connected a gaming PC to a TV. I know of Trine, the first edition of SF4 (PCs aren't getting the Super edition due to low sales), and what else?
What do you think games need to support? I plug my laptop into the TV, and the games appear on the TV instead of the laptop LCD... it's also the same resolution so I don't even have to change that in the game settings; though the bastards who made the TV scale up the image to make it look horrible so I lose some pixels around the edges, and the gamma is different.
PC gamers already accept having to buy a separate copy of the game for the PCs used by players 2 and 4.
I wasn't talking about that. Some of my Steam games are installed on three different PCs, but I did that by copying the files between computers, not downloading the whole thing again. I couldn't do that with encrypted binaries tied to a CPU, nor I could I reinstall them when I upgrade a CPU or replace an old PC with a new one.
In most cases, yes. But some time last year, I was on a Ryan Air flight on which advertisements throughout the plane announced the availability of in-flight cellular services (at significant markup, of course). Out of curiosity, I switched my phone on at cruising altitude and, if memory serves me, got a text message welcoming me to the service. Out of frugality, I refrained from making any calls.
That's probably the system the guy I spoke to was working on; he said they use a bunch of tricks to push the cellphones into low transmit power mode to ensure they won't interfere with aircraft systems. If I remember what he said correctly, electronics interference from full power transmissions really isn't a problem on modern planes, but could be on older ones (ISTR that the first 747 to go into service was only retired a few years ago after about 40 years).
But the day I'm trapped with a self-important shouting jerk in a tin can is the day I go to jail for justifiable homicide.
Hate to worry you, but a couple of years back I was talking to a guy who's working with a company who want to put cellphone base stations on planes so that you'll be able to talk as much as you can afford all the way through the flight. I think he said they had some flying for tests at the time, no idea whether it's operational yet.
Absolutely agreed. That said, the regulations clearly aren't entirely logical - I forget when the first time I heard it was, but I tend to chuckle at the announcement that goes out after the plane hits the runway:
As other people have pointed out, that's primarily to minimise passenger distraction if something happens on the way that requires an evacuation. You probably won't have a hundred people making cellphone calls the moment you land, but you might have a hundred people listening to their ipods or opening up laptop computers that would get in the way if you have to get off the plane in a hurry.
This is why the PC game industry is waning, not for lack of consumer interest, but for lack of Content provider intelligence.
That and because 90% of new games are just crappy, buggy console ports anyway. If I wanted to play a crappy console game I'd buy a console.
Most of the games I bought in the Steam sale over Christmas were from indies, because the 'big name' games were either crappy console ports or infested with DRM on top of what Steam imposes. Admittedly some of the indy games were fairly crappy too, but at 5 games for $5 I don't really care so long as they're worth an hour or two of my time.
I do find it disappointing that I'm getting less value for my money today than I got 5+ years ago when many of those games were released, with the added loss of the physical media which has allowed me to continue playing many of those games long after the system they were originally played on was retired from day to day use.
What you're _not_ getting is DRM that requires you to jump through hoops to play those games, even if only to have that physical media in the drive when you want to play it. If you want 'physical media' you can burn a DVD for an extra few cents cost.
And while I agree that some of the GOG games are overpriced (which is why I mostly buy during their sales) I'd doubt that many of the games were on sale for $5 when they were released 5+ years ago, espcially not with physical manuals.
what good does that do when the executable is altered? nothing.
And if Intel put an encryption key in your CPU and then the game companies sell you a game that's encrypted so only your CPU can play it?
DRM hard-wired into the CPU is the only way it can really 'work'. Of course having to download a new copy of the game for every PC you want to run it on would also alienate most of the PC gamers in the world.
You are buying a game made in 1990 and trying to run it on software made in 2009, almost two decades of hardware and software changes, and you don't think there might be a problem?
Uh, this is a PC game on a PC, built for a Microsoft OS running on a Microsoft OS; why should anyone expect it not to run? Microsoft has built its fortune on backwards compatibility.
And Dosbox is hardly the knight in shining armor come to save the day: it plays some games OK but others are either too slow to play or have corrupted video. Carmageddon, for example, won't run natively in Windows 7 x64, and has a corrupted display in Dosbox.
OMG the big bad government mandated that all internal documents have to be in a common format that is used by the majority of the corporate world!
LOL.
Every time someone sends me a.docx file at work I'm glad I run Linux with Open Office because the Windows PCs all have Office 2000 so they can't read it.
No OS can completely protect itself from dumb users installing trojans, though Linux can do that a heck of a lot better than Windows can (e.g. if you have SELinux configured so that the 'Natalie Portman Hot Grits Screensaver' can't access files that a screensaver shouldn't be able to).
so acutally there is malware for linux and mac, why do you keep saying there isn't?
Anyone can write malware for Linux: writing, say, a key-logger that looks for credit card numbers is essentially trivial.
The problem is getting it onto PCs you don't control, which is vastly simpler in Windows than Linux because Windows has vastly more security flaws by design.
That would put more parasite IP lawyers out of a job, and free up money to hire people who actually make stuff like scientists, engineers, and technicians.
So long as most laws are written by lawyers, they won't be queueing up to eliminate the laws that keep them in jobs just so that non-lawyers can make actual stuff that produces actual wealth without fear of being put out of business by a patent that should never have been issued.
why are all the major innovations breaking important barriers coming from sweden, a socialist heritage country with a whopass personal income tax and beyond-american-dream social security ?
Which 'major innovations' would those be? Ikea furniture?
This whole thing is a pipe-dream which won't go anywhere any time soon. Programming a computer to drive a car around a closed track following another vehicle is pretty much trivial compared to doing it safely in the real world.
Very glad to live in a society where people don't have or want that 'right', but leave it to law enforcement, and having murder by firearm and accedential death by firearm at a fraction of US rate (you have a few alternatives to pick from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate)
Most first-world countries have lower 'knife-related death rates' than America too.
Americans just kill each other far more often than most other first world countries, and most of those murders are fights between drug dealers. Guns are pretty much irrelevant to the murder rate, and someone who's determined to murder someone doesn't much care about gun laws anyway.
Plus I notice you picked 'death rate' rather than 'murder rate', which presumably includes sucides. Obviously people are more more likely to use a gun to kill themselves in countries where guns are readily available; hence, for example, the oft-repeated claim that American cops are far more likely to be killed with their own gun than use it to kill a criminal.
This is an absurd scheme to bolster the automobile and oil industries. Building a decent state-owned railway infrastructure makes much more sense.
Except railways are insanely expensive and suck at anything other than getting large numbers of people in and out of big cities at approximately the same time. They're a 19th century solution trying to solve 21st century problems.
Lately I've been thinking about a system of on-demand buses that could negotiate with passengers to take them directly from one place to another with minimal inconvenience.
We have them already. They're called 'taxis'.
And any car-sized vehicle that has to drive to where you are to pick you up is likely to be less efficient than just driving from where you are to where you want to be.
Also, this particular system is not finished. It's more of a demonstrator that "real" engineers can learn from when they make real products.
Any serious engineer is probably going to throw it away and start from scratch, not rely on something that's proven to kind of work on controlled roads with no hazards.
Making a car go around a track where there's nothing to hit is trivial compared to making it deal with the real world where things run out in front of you and cars in the middle of the 'train' break down or blow a tire or slam on the brakes. That's the difference between science and engineering.
This isn't even like an aircraft autopilot where when sometihng goes wrong it gives up and hands control back to the pilots; in this case it can't give up because you may be sleeping or reading and only have a couple of seconds to take over to avoid a massive pileup.
Also wasn't there a court case a while ago about Boeing getting the results of some industrial espionage into Airbus? Hasn't there been speculation that some of the Boeing problems were due to blind copying without knowing why parts of the most recent Airbus were designed that way?
Aren't the Dreamliner's problems largely due to the massive use of composites? If so, what would Boeing be learning from Airbus?
Slashdot Mirror
However, I then realized that digital distribution is rapidly coalescing into a handful of retailers like Steam and iTunes app store, and they're just as unlikely to carry boobs than their brick and mortar counterparts.
Age of Conan and Saints Row 2 are both on Steam and both have boobs (OK, SR2 requires a trivial hack to unpixelate them). I think Witcher does too.
So that's at least two and probably three Steam games with boobs, and I'm sure there are others.
Some of the highest-grossing movies were rated G. Like the annual Disney/Pixar animations.
The difference is that Pixar actually make _good_ movies, so the rating is irrelevant. When all your movie has to offer is explosions, car chases and tits, you don't want a G rating on the cover.
Encrypt your config folders and/or files so that the files aren't intelligible to anything else.
And, uh, how are you going to store the encryption key so that Firefox can get it but some random installer running with admin privileges can't?
Why is the Mozilla configuration writable to the Skype installer?
Because the installer requires admin privileges, which means it can write to pretty much any file on the machine? On Windows, anyway.
If you give a random program root privileges you shouldn't be too surprised when it trashes your system.
How does one "suffer" by having to enter in a keycode? It takes all of 5 seconds.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha... I don't remember which it was, but one game took me the best part of two days to install because the stupid sods used both B and 8 in the key (and similar easily-confused characters) and in the font they used they were almost identical. I must have entered a hundred different variations on the key until I found a post on the Internet explaining exactly how to work out which characters were which.
So yes, one has "suffered" from having to enter a stupid CD key to play a game that I've paid for.
Not many PC games support this use case because very few people have connected a gaming PC to a TV. I know of Trine, the first edition of SF4 (PCs aren't getting the Super edition due to low sales), and what else?
What do you think games need to support? I plug my laptop into the TV, and the games appear on the TV instead of the laptop LCD... it's also the same resolution so I don't even have to change that in the game settings; though the bastards who made the TV scale up the image to make it look horrible so I lose some pixels around the edges, and the gamma is different.
PC gamers already accept having to buy a separate copy of the game for the PCs used by players 2 and 4.
I wasn't talking about that. Some of my Steam games are installed on three different PCs, but I did that by copying the files between computers, not downloading the whole thing again. I couldn't do that with encrypted binaries tied to a CPU, nor I could I reinstall them when I upgrade a CPU or replace an old PC with a new one.
In most cases, yes. But some time last year, I was on a Ryan Air flight on which advertisements throughout the plane announced the availability of in-flight cellular services (at significant markup, of course). Out of curiosity, I switched my phone on at cruising altitude and, if memory serves me, got a text message welcoming me to the service. Out of frugality, I refrained from making any calls.
That's probably the system the guy I spoke to was working on; he said they use a bunch of tricks to push the cellphones into low transmit power mode to ensure they won't interfere with aircraft systems. If I remember what he said correctly, electronics interference from full power transmissions really isn't a problem on modern planes, but could be on older ones (ISTR that the first 747 to go into service was only retired a few years ago after about 40 years).
But the day I'm trapped with a self-important shouting jerk in a tin can is the day I go to jail for justifiable homicide.
Hate to worry you, but a couple of years back I was talking to a guy who's working with a company who want to put cellphone base stations on planes so that you'll be able to talk as much as you can afford all the way through the flight. I think he said they had some flying for tests at the time, no idea whether it's operational yet.
Absolutely agreed. That said, the regulations clearly aren't entirely logical - I forget when the first time I heard it was, but I tend to chuckle at the announcement that goes out after the plane hits the runway:
As other people have pointed out, that's primarily to minimise passenger distraction if something happens on the way that requires an evacuation. You probably won't have a hundred people making cellphone calls the moment you land, but you might have a hundred people listening to their ipods or opening up laptop computers that would get in the way if you have to get off the plane in a hurry.
slowly choking doesn't really show the current status of pc gaming. it's at it's highest _ever_.
How much of that is down to WoW? I'm sure I read somewhere that Blizzard make more money than all the console companies combined?
This is why the PC game industry is waning, not for lack of consumer interest, but for lack of Content provider intelligence.
That and because 90% of new games are just crappy, buggy console ports anyway. If I wanted to play a crappy console game I'd buy a console.
Most of the games I bought in the Steam sale over Christmas were from indies, because the 'big name' games were either crappy console ports or infested with DRM on top of what Steam imposes. Admittedly some of the indy games were fairly crappy too, but at 5 games for $5 I don't really care so long as they're worth an hour or two of my time.
I do find it disappointing that I'm getting less value for my money today than I got 5+ years ago when many of those games were released, with the added loss of the physical media which has allowed me to continue playing many of those games long after the system they were originally played on was retired from day to day use.
What you're _not_ getting is DRM that requires you to jump through hoops to play those games, even if only to have that physical media in the drive when you want to play it. If you want 'physical media' you can burn a DVD for an extra few cents cost.
And while I agree that some of the GOG games are overpriced (which is why I mostly buy during their sales) I'd doubt that many of the games were on sale for $5 when they were released 5+ years ago, espcially not with physical manuals.
what good does that do when the executable is altered? nothing.
And if Intel put an encryption key in your CPU and then the game companies sell you a game that's encrypted so only your CPU can play it?
DRM hard-wired into the CPU is the only way it can really 'work'. Of course having to download a new copy of the game for every PC you want to run it on would also alienate most of the PC gamers in the world.
You are buying a game made in 1990 and trying to run it on software made in 2009, almost two decades of hardware and software changes, and you don't think there might be a problem?
Uh, this is a PC game on a PC, built for a Microsoft OS running on a Microsoft OS; why should anyone expect it not to run? Microsoft has built its fortune on backwards compatibility.
And Dosbox is hardly the knight in shining armor come to save the day: it plays some games OK but others are either too slow to play or have corrupted video. Carmageddon, for example, won't run natively in Windows 7 x64, and has a corrupted display in Dosbox.
OMG the big bad government mandated that all internal documents have to be in a common format that is used by the majority of the corporate world!
LOL.
Every time someone sends me a .docx file at work I'm glad I run Linux with Open Office because the Windows PCs all have Office 2000 so they can't read it.
ANDROID TROJAN
No OS can completely protect itself from dumb users installing trojans, though Linux can do that a heck of a lot better than Windows can (e.g. if you have SELinux configured so that the 'Natalie Portman Hot Grits Screensaver' can't access files that a screensaver shouldn't be able to).
so acutally there is malware for linux and mac, why do you keep saying there isn't?
Anyone can write malware for Linux: writing, say, a key-logger that looks for credit card numbers is essentially trivial.
The problem is getting it onto PCs you don't control, which is vastly simpler in Windows than Linux because Windows has vastly more security flaws by design.
That would put more parasite IP lawyers out of a job, and free up money to hire people who actually make stuff like scientists, engineers, and technicians.
So long as most laws are written by lawyers, they won't be queueing up to eliminate the laws that keep them in jobs just so that non-lawyers can make actual stuff that produces actual wealth without fear of being put out of business by a patent that should never have been issued.
why are all the major innovations breaking important barriers coming from sweden, a socialist heritage country with a whopass personal income tax and beyond-american-dream social security ?
Which 'major innovations' would those be? Ikea furniture?
This whole thing is a pipe-dream which won't go anywhere any time soon. Programming a computer to drive a car around a closed track following another vehicle is pretty much trivial compared to doing it safely in the real world.
Very glad to live in a society where people don't have or want that 'right', but leave it to law enforcement, and having murder by firearm and accedential death by firearm at a fraction of US rate (you have a few alternatives to pick from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate)
Most first-world countries have lower 'knife-related death rates' than America too.
Americans just kill each other far more often than most other first world countries, and most of those murders are fights between drug dealers. Guns are pretty much irrelevant to the murder rate, and someone who's determined to murder someone doesn't much care about gun laws anyway.
Plus I notice you picked 'death rate' rather than 'murder rate', which presumably includes sucides. Obviously people are more more likely to use a gun to kill themselves in countries where guns are readily available; hence, for example, the oft-repeated claim that American cops are far more likely to be killed with their own gun than use it to kill a criminal.
This is an absurd scheme to bolster the automobile and oil industries. Building a decent state-owned railway infrastructure makes much more sense.
Except railways are insanely expensive and suck at anything other than getting large numbers of people in and out of big cities at approximately the same time. They're a 19th century solution trying to solve 21st century problems.
Lately I've been thinking about a system of on-demand buses that could negotiate with passengers to take them directly from one place to another with minimal inconvenience.
We have them already. They're called 'taxis'.
And any car-sized vehicle that has to drive to where you are to pick you up is likely to be less efficient than just driving from where you are to where you want to be.
Also, this particular system is not finished. It's more of a demonstrator that "real" engineers can learn from when they make real products.
Any serious engineer is probably going to throw it away and start from scratch, not rely on something that's proven to kind of work on controlled roads with no hazards.
Making a car go around a track where there's nothing to hit is trivial compared to making it deal with the real world where things run out in front of you and cars in the middle of the 'train' break down or blow a tire or slam on the brakes. That's the difference between science and engineering.
This isn't even like an aircraft autopilot where when sometihng goes wrong it gives up and hands control back to the pilots; in this case it can't give up because you may be sleeping or reading and only have a couple of seconds to take over to avoid a massive pileup.
Also wasn't there a court case a while ago about Boeing getting the results of some industrial espionage into Airbus? Hasn't there been speculation that some of the Boeing problems were due to blind copying without knowing why parts of the most recent Airbus were designed that way?
Aren't the Dreamliner's problems largely due to the massive use of composites? If so, what would Boeing be learning from Airbus?