Ooh, the power of the ellipsis, suggesting so much, but saying so little! Unfortunately, it leaves you open for:
...building factories producing trans-atlantic cables (and the ships which will lay them) in order to reduce latency between NY and London. Building factories which will produce newer, faster chips which will drive faster network connections and churn through trading algorithms milliseconds faster. This race to be the fastest is benefitting us. It is a by-product, but it benefits us nevertheless.
For some more perspective, I recently heard about a man buying a Porsche Cayenne. I thought "this is amazing, think of the use it could have as a taxi!". Then, I read that it was a private car designed to shave a few minutes off of his daily commute. Just the shock that reached me when taking that in was...amazing. Such a waste of resources to the detriment of society.
The rights and wrongs of HFT aside....what an assinine and idiotic argument to try and prove that point! Seriously, are you 9 years old? "They add nothing to society! Apart from that time they spent millions and created work for hundreds of people by paying for a new trans-atlantic cable." You were hoping perhaps that they would pay for a new trans-atlantic cable, then let a few million WoWtards and Counterstrikers loose on it free of charge? Out of the goodness of their hearts? (Contact me off-list, I have a few bridges I can sell you.) Or is your objection that they have the money to spend on shaving milliseconds off their trade times?
This profitable (for them) arms race to get the lowest trade time has the capacity to drive technological innovation. That is a gain for society, no matter how incidental. And of course, whether that is enough to offset the negative effects of what they do is another thing but it's a wee bit disingenuous to say that they are mere leeches.
Is the news that we're in the middle of another bubble? To wit: some company I've never heard of that has nothing and produces nothing is supposedly worth $1bn + and has already convinced some chumps to pony up $112m.
For some perspective, there are quite a few places in the world (growing in number by the year) where there is no physical currency denomination that would allow you to pay the equivalent of US$0.01 for anything. Here in New Zealand, the smallest coin is a 10 cent piece, which is worth between 8 and 9 cents US. In the UK, the smallest denomination is 1p which is worth 1.6 cents. I frequently give such coins to my niece as play money...
So those who don't want to pay, but do want to play the games will most likely just pay the damn $0.01 because it's such a pathetically small amount. If anyone is so discouraged by the steep steep price of $0.01 that they don't buy the bundle, then they obviously didn't really want to play the games.
whereas the Windows and Mac guys are really just paying what they think the games are worth, which is honestly just a couple bucks.
Sorry, but no. Given the choice, they're cheap bastards. VVVVV is easily worth $5 on its own. The average Windows purchase price is $3.66. And Yet It Moves is easily worth $5 on its own. The average Windows purchase price is $3.66. Cogs is easily worth $5. The average Wind...well, you get the picture. I bought one bundle for more than the Linux average for my brother and bought another for myself. I paid less the second time round (but still more than the Windows average) as I've already bought all but one of those games on Steam. If anyone thinks those 5 games combined are not worth $5 they are either a lying prick or a stupid fuck.
I do almost all my gaming in Windows, and use Linux for work, and as much gaming as I can. I identified as a Linux user because given the choice, I'd like to play my games under Linux. Maybe Linux users without the option are desperate for games and want to make a statement, or maybe they're just more generous. Maybe most self-identifying windows users can't afford good games, or maybe they really are so ignorant that they think anything that isn't shat out onto a conveyor by EA once a year isn't worth more than they'd spend on a Big Mac. Who knows...
*ahem*. And what, pray tell, is on the other stalk? Windscreen wipers? Here's a hint, if the windscreen wipers come on/turn off, you're not indicating. Having moved to a country where almost every car has the indicator/windscreen controls on the "wrong" side, I share your pain, but it's hardly a safety issue.
This is the greatest thing in the entire world. It means I can move to a sparsely populated backwater country and not feel like I suck quite so much! Couple that with a game like Audiosurf that procedurally generates levels based on music and I can be the BEST! (At Todd Rundgren's Utopia Theme (In New Zealand));)
Hear, hear. I don't pirate games, but this is exactly my experience with Steam. Anything that costs $30+, goes on my wishlist, and I think long and hard before buying it, I read reviews, play the free demo etc. For $15-$30, I'll still play the demo and maybe read a review or two. For $15 or less? Check out the trailer and if it looks like something I'll enjoy, I'll get it. Everyone has a price at which they say, "what the hell" and just grab it on the off-chance, like an impulse buy at the supermarket*. And if it's a game that I want, on sale at <$15, fuhgeddaboudit.
*In fact I did exactly that with a Wii game once at the supermarket. It was a standard C+ party-games compilation but it cost less than the bottle of wine in my basket. (I wouldn't be surprised if the price someone's willing to spend on a bottle of wine is actually a good rule of thumb for finding their game/dvd impulse-buying sweetspot.)
Hi, I have a tiger-repellent rock you can buy for $1000. If you buy this rock, I promise you that you will never be attacked by a tiger. I'm also doing a special 2 for 1 offer on alien-repellent cravats, only $8000. One for you and one for the wife.
You placed emphasis on the wrong part of the quote.
That article is way too long. Here's my observation: People pick passwords that are easy to remember, easy to type and or something they think is clever.
FTFY E.g. 6969 is not a clever password, but someone may think it is.
Perhaps these people need to sit down, take a look at what people are enjoying playing and why they enjoy it, and get back in touch with their market.
Never going to happen. EA will carry on churning Year+1 sports games, id will keep churning out pretty tech demos, etc.. and the indie game developers will continue to produce exceedingly fun games at unfairly low prices. It's like warfare, the big army will throw out tanks, destroyers and attack helicopters to dominate the land, sea and air while the small guerilla insurgency runs around the streets taking potshots with antique AKs and RPGs, taking out a chopper every now and again. You can be big and mighty and hold the big piece of the pie, as long as you appreciate that the under-powered but manoeuvrable force will pick away at the edges. Big studios can't afford to take chances, so they continue to produce bankable sequels to existing franchises. Indie developers have generally lower overheads, less invested, and can afford to release their quirky puzzle/platformer, or interesting physics sandbox game without having to worry so much about shareholders, approval from corporate or whatever.
The reporter, as noted in another comment, stated that Rebekah Brooks knew full well what was going on. His "exposé" may be lacking when held up against heavyweight investigative journalism, but I don't think it's to be sniffed at.
Secondly, saying "they more or less got away with [it]" is a little disingenuous. Firstly, it's not over. Secondly, there's been an ongoing investigation into the phone-hacking charges and these things take time. Now, barring a criminal conviction, you're right, I suspect Rebekah Brooks will keep her job at News International but ask the 100s of employees of the NotW if they feel like they've "gotten away with it".
The key is, get chummy with the future PM and the most powerful media magnate in the world and you have job security for life. Do what your told by your mad, King Charles coiffed harridan of an editor and expect to get shit-canned as soon as the wind-changes.
Hear hear. I would never hire someone if my googling uncovered pictures of them dribbling mushy apple rice pudding down their chin or, even worse, rolling over onto their belly and trying to crawl. Honestly, I agree with you up to a point, but the time to worry about that sort of thing is not now, when your child isn't even out of the womb. Secondly, your friends and family are the least of your worries. Or do you have a crazy Uncle Bill who'll be smoking pot with your impending son or daughter at their 1st birthday party?
There are ways to mitigate long waits at roundabouts though. E.g. by having dedicated lanes. There's also no reason why you can't control traffic onto, or on the roundabout with lights, e.g. Junction 7(?) of the M25 at Godstone or the M23 junction that shoots off to Gatwick Airport. This can be done at peak traffic hours, or all the time. Basically, if almost all of the traffic is going in a single direction, and you end up waiting for long periods, then the design or placement of the roundabout is wrong.
I don't see how making a roundabout out of a 5-way intersection would be confusing. At all. Roundabouts are the most incredibly simple thing to navigate. You only need 2 "rules", try and get in the right lane and give way to traffic coming from the right/left (depending on country). There's a 5 way junction in Christchurch, NZ that is utterly confusing and if you want or need to turn right (an acute angle back on yourself, but the road curves round to the left after the junction IIRC), you have to wait until you're the first or second car, and hope that traffic coming from the left is not too heavy. Every time I go there, I just want to scream "ROUNDABOUT". When I look at overhead views of those monstrous clover-leaf freeway ramps of yours I weep.
I mean seriously, do you also have an opinion on the 'best' number or colour ?
The best number is 73. Why? 73 is the 21st prime number. Its mirror (37) is the 12th and its mirror (21) is the product of multiplying, hang on to your hats, 7 and 3.... In binary, 73 is a palindrome, 1001001 which backwards is 1001001. - Dr. Sheldon Cooper
And everyone knows that red is the best colour, because red wunz go fasta.
Career:a person's progress or general course of action through life or through a phase of life, as in some profession or undertaking
This isn't 1950. The average American may change "jobs"/"job categories" every 2.6 years in their 20s and 30s but why is that relevant? If you're going to reply with such unprovoked enmity, why not take longer to consider the meaning of the word that you're taking issue with? What percentage of graduates move between jobs driving trucks/laying bricks/decorating cakes? It's odd, because you seem to understand that there's a difference between a career and a job, but you're still clinging to an incredibly narrow definition of what constitutes any particular career.
As others have pointed out, it's not hard to imagine this scenario..."Ok, it's been Z years - z months and we know you're nearly done, but we *need* to change requirements A, B and C. We need these changes so badly that we're willing to pay an additional $y million and for the project to run for another Z years." Also, some of the people involved have been siphoning millions off the project. I don't know if they used that to pay for hookers and blow.
The most valuable item I received was a popular piece of office productivity software.
I have no moral issue with receiving these items. It's the same as sending review items to book reviewers, bloggers, journalists, etc.
I don't get it, you have no moral issue receiving items for free and reviewing them in a place where people are just One-Click(tm) from buying it, and yet you felt the need to self-censor the name of the "popular piece of office productivity software" here?
Today, the techniques are far more sophisticated, to the point where it is pretty much impossible to resist.
Surely a statement that bold requires a source or study.
He quite reasonably asked you to cite a source or a study, and you replied with a lot of flim-flam and bluster, to wit:
If we could talk face to face for about ten minutes, I could identify a dozen ways your tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes, political opinions, even specific sexual preferences have been affected by marketing.
That's never going to happen so your claim will go untested. If we could talk face to face for about ten minutes, I could prove you are harbouring psychotic and homocidal thoughts towards Brad Pitt. Oh look, that proves that you have psychotic and homocidal thoughts towards Brad Pitt, right? Right?
Advertising is one of the most researched fields in human history.
Source?
The technology currently in use is mil-spec.
Source?
You can't resist advertising any more than you could resist a unit of Army Rangers.
Bullshit. Source?
There are a lot of people who, like you, find it hard to accept that it's just more powerful than you are. It seems to be a macho thing
Out of interest, exactly why do you feel the need to ram down everyones' throats just how controlled by marketing they are?
I'd go so far as to say even your desire to display an invulnerability to advertising makes you particularly vulnerable to marketing designed for people who like to view themselves as invulnerable to advertising.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe he was just refuting your assertion that today's marketing techniques are "pretty much impossible to resist"? For all your bullshit carnival-hawker bluster, you've failed to back up your assertion with a shred of proof. No doubt he is affected by some advertising, that doesn't prove that he is incapable of resisting any and all advertising.
There's probably an entire department at the biggest agencies that target the macho geek demographic so they can sell them Leatherman multi-tools.
Beat level 3 with cheats, and you don't get the achievement for beating level 3. Turn off cheats and beat levels 4, 5, and 6, and you get the achievement for beating level 6 without having legitimately beaten level 3.
So? That's an entirely accurate picture of what happened. No achievement for level 3 (not beaten fairly), achivements for levels 4, 5 and 6 (beaten fairly). I fail to see why that's a problem. If a game has a level 3 which isn't any fun because it's too hard, or tedious, then it's the least the developer can do to allow some way to skip past it. World of Goo did this well.
I can understand efforts to prevent multiplayer cheating, and to try and stop achievements accruing while cheating, but at the end of the day if it's a single-player game, why the hell does it matter? Can achievements be sold for cash? No. Are they highly prized for their aphrodisiac qualities? No. If I unlocked every Counter-Strike achievement by cheating on private servers with bots and friends, then went on a public server would I be better than everyone there? Would I defeat all-comers in a trice? Would they hold me aloft on their shoulders and carry me down the street singing songs of joy and submission? No.
Cheat codes wouldn't be compatible with the practice of reporting the player's achievements to a central server, which became common in 2006 after the Xbox 360 was released. Perhaps the game could just disable achievements on a save file once the player has used a cheat.
Exactly! Achievements are important because they are an accurate indication of a person's worth. I proudly state on my resumé that I have unlocked "Mustache Mode" on Plants vs. Zombies and "Good Shepherd" on Counter-strike. I'd be absolutely sick if I missed out on a job interview or a mortgage application to someone else who had fraudulently gotten the "Master at Arms" achievement!;)
Except people pay real money for these games. If I want to stop in the middle of a climactic battle to go pick my wife up from work or just have a breather, why the hell shouldn't I be able to quick-save and quit? I bought Dead Space on sale recently and if I want to stop playing, I have to go find a "save-point" to save my progress. Why? I don't give a shit about "pacing" then, I just want to save, quit and go to bed. And so what if I want to bind "quicksave" to my left mouse button? (I don't) I paid for the game and if I feel like quick-saving before every enemy encounter (I don't), that's my business, and I don't care if you think it's cheating. It's a single player game, if I want to "cheat", I'm only cheating myself.
Games like Half Life 2 have auto-saves as well as the ability to save your game at any point. If someone wants to honour Valve's "vision" and are happy with their "pacing" then they are quite welcome to have the game auto-save for them. Others, however, prefer the ability to save whenever they feel like it. Not including the ability to save wherever the player feels like it would not change the experience for the former group, and negatively affect the experience of the latter group, so why, oh why, oh why not allow it?
Slashdot Mirror
meanwhile, others are building factories...
Ooh, the power of the ellipsis, suggesting so much, but saying so little! Unfortunately, it leaves you open for:
...building factories producing trans-atlantic cables (and the ships which will lay them) in order to reduce latency between NY and London. Building factories which will produce newer, faster chips which will drive faster network connections and churn through trading algorithms milliseconds faster. This race to be the fastest is benefitting us. It is a by-product, but it benefits us nevertheless.
For some more perspective, I recently heard about a man buying a Porsche Cayenne. I thought "this is amazing, think of the use it could have as a taxi!". Then, I read that it was a private car designed to shave a few minutes off of his daily commute. Just the shock that reached me when taking that in was...amazing. Such a waste of resources to the detriment of society.
The rights and wrongs of HFT aside....what an assinine and idiotic argument to try and prove that point! Seriously, are you 9 years old? "They add nothing to society! Apart from that time they spent millions and created work for hundreds of people by paying for a new trans-atlantic cable." You were hoping perhaps that they would pay for a new trans-atlantic cable, then let a few million WoWtards and Counterstrikers loose on it free of charge? Out of the goodness of their hearts? (Contact me off-list, I have a few bridges I can sell you.) Or is your objection that they have the money to spend on shaving milliseconds off their trade times?
This profitable (for them) arms race to get the lowest trade time has the capacity to drive technological innovation. That is a gain for society, no matter how incidental. And of course, whether that is enough to offset the negative effects of what they do is another thing but it's a wee bit disingenuous to say that they are mere leeches.
Is the news that we're in the middle of another bubble? To wit: some company I've never heard of that has nothing and produces nothing is supposedly worth $1bn + and has already convinced some chumps to pony up $112m.
As someone who already owned both, these two games alone are worth at least $10. Don't be stingy.
For some perspective, there are quite a few places in the world (growing in number by the year) where there is no physical currency denomination that would allow you to pay the equivalent of US$0.01 for anything. Here in New Zealand, the smallest coin is a 10 cent piece, which is worth between 8 and 9 cents US. In the UK, the smallest denomination is 1p which is worth 1.6 cents. I frequently give such coins to my niece as play money...
So those who don't want to pay, but do want to play the games will most likely just pay the damn $0.01 because it's such a pathetically small amount. If anyone is so discouraged by the steep steep price of $0.01 that they don't buy the bundle, then they obviously didn't really want to play the games.
whereas the Windows and Mac guys are really just paying what they think the games are worth, which is honestly just a couple bucks.
Sorry, but no. Given the choice, they're cheap bastards. VVVVV is easily worth $5 on its own. The average Windows purchase price is $3.66. And Yet It Moves is easily worth $5 on its own. The average Windows purchase price is $3.66. Cogs is easily worth $5. The average Wind...well, you get the picture. I bought one bundle for more than the Linux average for my brother and bought another for myself. I paid less the second time round (but still more than the Windows average) as I've already bought all but one of those games on Steam. If anyone thinks those 5 games combined are not worth $5 they are either a lying prick or a stupid fuck.
I do almost all my gaming in Windows, and use Linux for work, and as much gaming as I can. I identified as a Linux user because given the choice, I'd like to play my games under Linux. Maybe Linux users without the option are desperate for games and want to make a statement, or maybe they're just more generous. Maybe most self-identifying windows users can't afford good games, or maybe they really are so ignorant that they think anything that isn't shat out onto a conveyor by EA once a year isn't worth more than they'd spend on a Big Mac. Who knows...
*ahem*. And what, pray tell, is on the other stalk? Windscreen wipers? Here's a hint, if the windscreen wipers come on/turn off, you're not indicating. Having moved to a country where almost every car has the indicator/windscreen controls on the "wrong" side, I share your pain, but it's hardly a safety issue.
This is the greatest thing in the entire world. It means I can move to a sparsely populated backwater country and not feel like I suck quite so much! Couple that with a game like Audiosurf that procedurally generates levels based on music and I can be the BEST! (At Todd Rundgren's Utopia Theme (In New Zealand)) ;)
Hear, hear. I don't pirate games, but this is exactly my experience with Steam. Anything that costs $30+, goes on my wishlist, and I think long and hard before buying it, I read reviews, play the free demo etc. For $15-$30, I'll still play the demo and maybe read a review or two. For $15 or less? Check out the trailer and if it looks like something I'll enjoy, I'll get it. Everyone has a price at which they say, "what the hell" and just grab it on the off-chance, like an impulse buy at the supermarket*. And if it's a game that I want, on sale at <$15, fuhgeddaboudit.
*In fact I did exactly that with a Wii game once at the supermarket. It was a standard C+ party-games compilation but it cost less than the bottle of wine in my basket. (I wouldn't be surprised if the price someone's willing to spend on a bottle of wine is actually a good rule of thumb for finding their game/dvd impulse-buying sweetspot.)
Hi, I have a tiger-repellent rock you can buy for $1000. If you buy this rock, I promise you that you will never be attacked by a tiger. I'm also doing a special 2 for 1 offer on alien-repellent cravats, only $8000. One for you and one for the wife.
That article is way too long. Here's my observation: People pick passwords that are easy to remember, easy to type and or something they think is clever.
FTFY E.g. 6969 is not a clever password, but someone may think it is.
Perhaps these people need to sit down, take a look at what people are enjoying playing and why they enjoy it, and get back in touch with their market.
Never going to happen. EA will carry on churning Year+1 sports games, id will keep churning out pretty tech demos, etc .. and the indie game developers will continue to produce exceedingly fun games at unfairly low prices. It's like warfare, the big army will throw out tanks, destroyers and attack helicopters to dominate the land, sea and air while the small guerilla insurgency runs around the streets taking potshots with antique AKs and RPGs, taking out a chopper every now and again. You can be big and mighty and hold the big piece of the pie, as long as you appreciate that the under-powered but manoeuvrable force will pick away at the edges. Big studios can't afford to take chances, so they continue to produce bankable sequels to existing franchises. Indie developers have generally lower overheads, less invested, and can afford to release their quirky puzzle/platformer, or interesting physics sandbox game without having to worry so much about shareholders, approval from corporate or whatever.
The reporter, as noted in another comment, stated that Rebekah Brooks knew full well what was going on. His "exposé" may be lacking when held up against heavyweight investigative journalism, but I don't think it's to be sniffed at.
Secondly, saying "they more or less got away with [it]" is a little disingenuous. Firstly, it's not over. Secondly, there's been an ongoing investigation into the phone-hacking charges and these things take time. Now, barring a criminal conviction, you're right, I suspect Rebekah Brooks will keep her job at News International but ask the 100s of employees of the NotW if they feel like they've "gotten away with it".
The key is, get chummy with the future PM and the most powerful media magnate in the world and you have job security for life. Do what your told by your mad, King Charles coiffed harridan of an editor and expect to get shit-canned as soon as the wind-changes.
Hear hear. I would never hire someone if my googling uncovered pictures of them dribbling mushy apple rice pudding down their chin or, even worse, rolling over onto their belly and trying to crawl. Honestly, I agree with you up to a point, but the time to worry about that sort of thing is not now, when your child isn't even out of the womb. Secondly, your friends and family are the least of your worries. Or do you have a crazy Uncle Bill who'll be smoking pot with your impending son or daughter at their 1st birthday party?
There are ways to mitigate long waits at roundabouts though. E.g. by having dedicated lanes. There's also no reason why you can't control traffic onto, or on the roundabout with lights, e.g. Junction 7(?) of the M25 at Godstone or the M23 junction that shoots off to Gatwick Airport. This can be done at peak traffic hours, or all the time. Basically, if almost all of the traffic is going in a single direction, and you end up waiting for long periods, then the design or placement of the roundabout is wrong.
I don't see how making a roundabout out of a 5-way intersection would be confusing. At all. Roundabouts are the most incredibly simple thing to navigate. You only need 2 "rules", try and get in the right lane and give way to traffic coming from the right/left (depending on country). There's a 5 way junction in Christchurch, NZ that is utterly confusing and if you want or need to turn right (an acute angle back on yourself, but the road curves round to the left after the junction IIRC), you have to wait until you're the first or second car, and hope that traffic coming from the left is not too heavy. Every time I go there, I just want to scream "ROUNDABOUT". When I look at overhead views of those monstrous clover-leaf freeway ramps of yours I weep.
And everyone knows that red is the best colour, because red wunz go fasta.
Career: a person's progress or general course of action through life or through a phase of life, as in some profession or undertaking
This isn't 1950. The average American may change "jobs"/"job categories" every 2.6 years in their 20s and 30s but why is that relevant? If you're going to reply with such unprovoked enmity, why not take longer to consider the meaning of the word that you're taking issue with? What percentage of graduates move between jobs driving trucks/laying bricks/decorating cakes? It's odd, because you seem to understand that there's a difference between a career and a job, but you're still clinging to an incredibly narrow definition of what constitutes any particular career.
As others have pointed out, it's not hard to imagine this scenario..."Ok, it's been Z years - z months and we know you're nearly done, but we *need* to change requirements A, B and C. We need these changes so badly that we're willing to pay an additional $y million and for the project to run for another Z years." Also, some of the people involved have been siphoning millions off the project. I don't know if they used that to pay for hookers and blow.
I don't get it, you have no moral issue receiving items for free and reviewing them in a place where people are just One-Click(tm) from buying it, and yet you felt the need to self-censor the name of the "popular piece of office productivity software" here?
What he's saying is that when the president does it, it's not illegal.
Today, the techniques are far more sophisticated, to the point where it is pretty much impossible to resist.
Surely a statement that bold requires a source or study.
He quite reasonably asked you to cite a source or a study, and you replied with a lot of flim-flam and bluster, to wit:
If we could talk face to face for about ten minutes, I could identify a dozen ways your tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes, political opinions, even specific sexual preferences have been affected by marketing.
That's never going to happen so your claim will go untested. If we could talk face to face for about ten minutes, I could prove you are harbouring psychotic and homocidal thoughts towards Brad Pitt. Oh look, that proves that you have psychotic and homocidal thoughts towards Brad Pitt, right? Right?
Advertising is one of the most researched fields in human history.
Source?
The technology currently in use is mil-spec.
Source?
You can't resist advertising any more than you could resist a unit of Army Rangers.
Bullshit. Source?
There are a lot of people who, like you, find it hard to accept that it's just more powerful than you are. It seems to be a macho thing
Out of interest, exactly why do you feel the need to ram down everyones' throats just how controlled by marketing they are?
I'd go so far as to say even your desire to display an invulnerability to advertising makes you particularly vulnerable to marketing designed for people who like to view themselves as invulnerable to advertising.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe he was just refuting your assertion that today's marketing techniques are "pretty much impossible to resist"? For all your bullshit carnival-hawker bluster, you've failed to back up your assertion with a shred of proof. No doubt he is affected by some advertising, that doesn't prove that he is incapable of resisting any and all advertising.
There's probably an entire department at the biggest agencies that target the macho geek demographic so they can sell them Leatherman multi-tools.
No fucking doubt. And?
"I'm wheelchair-bound/on crutches/have chronic asthma you insensitve clod/clodette."
Beat level 3 with cheats, and you don't get the achievement for beating level 3. Turn off cheats and beat levels 4, 5, and 6, and you get the achievement for beating level 6 without having legitimately beaten level 3.
So? That's an entirely accurate picture of what happened. No achievement for level 3 (not beaten fairly), achivements for levels 4, 5 and 6 (beaten fairly). I fail to see why that's a problem. If a game has a level 3 which isn't any fun because it's too hard, or tedious, then it's the least the developer can do to allow some way to skip past it. World of Goo did this well.
I can understand efforts to prevent multiplayer cheating, and to try and stop achievements accruing while cheating, but at the end of the day if it's a single-player game, why the hell does it matter? Can achievements be sold for cash? No. Are they highly prized for their aphrodisiac qualities? No. If I unlocked every Counter-Strike achievement by cheating on private servers with bots and friends, then went on a public server would I be better than everyone there? Would I defeat all-comers in a trice? Would they hold me aloft on their shoulders and carry me down the street singing songs of joy and submission? No.
So why is it such a big deal?
Cheat codes wouldn't be compatible with the practice of reporting the player's achievements to a central server, which became common in 2006 after the Xbox 360 was released. Perhaps the game could just disable achievements on a save file once the player has used a cheat.
Exactly! Achievements are important because they are an accurate indication of a person's worth. I proudly state on my resumé that I have unlocked "Mustache Mode" on Plants vs. Zombies and "Good Shepherd" on Counter-strike. I'd be absolutely sick if I missed out on a job interview or a mortgage application to someone else who had fraudulently gotten the "Master at Arms" achievement! ;)
Except people pay real money for these games. If I want to stop in the middle of a climactic battle to go pick my wife up from work or just have a breather, why the hell shouldn't I be able to quick-save and quit? I bought Dead Space on sale recently and if I want to stop playing, I have to go find a "save-point" to save my progress. Why? I don't give a shit about "pacing" then, I just want to save, quit and go to bed. And so what if I want to bind "quicksave" to my left mouse button? (I don't) I paid for the game and if I feel like quick-saving before every enemy encounter (I don't), that's my business, and I don't care if you think it's cheating. It's a single player game, if I want to "cheat", I'm only cheating myself.
Games like Half Life 2 have auto-saves as well as the ability to save your game at any point. If someone wants to honour Valve's "vision" and are happy with their "pacing" then they are quite welcome to have the game auto-save for them. Others, however, prefer the ability to save whenever they feel like it. Not including the ability to save wherever the player feels like it would not change the experience for the former group, and negatively affect the experience of the latter group, so why, oh why, oh why not allow it?