Now, if they'd only start to drop their affiliation with that fraudster who runs Rip Off Reports. The guy who allows anyone to anonymously complain about any company or even any *individual* with private personal information and no validity to their complaints (say, they're just a bitter ex) and will only address the issue if you pay money to be part of the service as a "business" (thousands of dollars, if I recall). And, somehow, they are always magically weighted to the top of Google. (You can do a search for plenty of well known tech personalities and others who have had problems with this guy's blackmail service hiding as a legitimate consumer advocacy service).
Yahoo and others have not weighted them the same way that Google has prioritized the results.
It's amusing that people are concerned about the price of a Bluray, yet they still are willing to pay $20 for a DVD. Either way, you're paying a lot for something that there's no point to watching more than once. When you realize how much you're paying *either way* for a bunch of stuff that will just take up shelf space and never be used, it's still a rip off.
Exactly. I have only owned HDTVs (and 55" or larger) since 2000. I know people in 2011 who still have 32" CRTs and say that they can't see any reason they'd need anything else. These are even people who are heavy film and pop culture buffs. And not old, either. In their 30s. They're content with regular DVDs and with streaming netflix on standard def. They even play their XBOX 360 on them. It's kind of baffling, but I guess there must have been holdouts when color television came out, who insisted their black and white was more than anyone would need for a couple decades afterward.
Then, you also have the fact that a Bluray is still $20 to $30 and it's not worth that much for a movie that I'm only going to ever watch once (twice, maybe, for the extremely amazing greatest movies of all time). Especially when I can get access to like 9,000,000 songs from a streaming service like MOG for $5/mo and more movies and television than I could ever watch in a life time from a streaming service like Netflix for $8/mo.
Even when you push aside the people who are satisfied with 1980s technology and the people like myself who don't want to "collect" videos, the remaining people simply don't see a point in the investment in a format that is being replaced by streaming/downloads over time. They figure they can just skip this generation's media format and jump back in when we've settled on digital downloads as the ultimate option.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
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· Score: 1
No, it's more probably a plot to demean the word "sugar" so that, eventually, they can package corn based processed sugars as "real sugar" rather than having to identify it as not exactly "real sugar" as we think of it.
Homefront is an awful game with a couple of very exciting set-piece moments, like a confrontation on the Golden Gate Bridge that is kind of mind-blowing.
Unfortunately, it was touted for being story-driven (written by the guy from Red Dawn and apparently Apocolypse Now), while there is nearly no story at all. Here's the story: The resistance needs pilots. You are a pilot. They need to get you from Colorado to San Francisco. That's it. You do fly a helicopter once, for a brief time. But despite being a pilot, you're actually spending the whole time doing the "go from point A to point B while blowing the shit out of everything along the way". Because, of course, if a pilot is such a precious resource, the one thing you're going to do is throw him on the front line with a machine gun. That's it. There is no story other than "You are pilot going from point A to point B . . . on foot".
It looks fairly dated. Has a very "Half Life 2" feel to the presentation. And the whole "this is something new and you'll be amazed by the deep and thoughtful experience!" thing that they tried to push with their advertising campaign was betrayed by the first couple of minutes of game play, where the guy who fights along side you for awhile hands you a gun and says "shoot everything in the head". Oh, wow. Golly. That's new. I don't do that in EVERY OTHER FPS.
There's no survival aspect to it. No gripping story. The best thing about Homefront is the potential of what it *could* have been. That's pretty meaningless, since the finished product achieves none of that aspiration, at all.
Also, the article is making it up. There is no "controversy" over Homefront. That's just ridiculous.
Business accounts have a limit. It just isn't acknowledged as any specific limit. You can easily use a terabyte or maybe even two without running into problems. After a certain point, they're likely to want to speak with you about signing up for a more dedicated service at a higher cost.
It's interesting, however, that in the same physical location, they can't afford more than 250gb/mo, because it is consuming all of their precious resources. Pay them an extra $40, however, and that same location and network can suddenly handle six or eight times that much bandwidth. Of course, the other important reason to get their business service is that you can get 5, 10, or even 50 mbps *up*, instead of 768kbps.
You're right. Mistaken identity. There's no story here, whatsoever. It's not like it also contained something about targeting someone for an incident of anti-social behavior or anything.
After they acquire enough significant sponsorship, I wouldn't be surprised to see it become free. Most of us may not desire that, because if you can afford $114 for an e-reader, you can probably afford $139. On the other hand, if you can't afford anything near that price, then ad consumption in return for a device could mean the difference between having and not having one at all. It would make it available to an entire range of people who may otherwise not be able to benefit from a device so many of us take for granted (whether or not we own or use them).
Of course, the real appeal for this will be that when it becomes free, it'll surely be given to every student in every public school and they'll receive a special stream of advertisements not only as currently described in the press release by Amazon, but on a more granular basis. I can just see students opening their textbook and hearing/seeing "Remember, this Earth Sciences textbook is brought to you by Monsanto Growth for a Better World! or a five and ten second pre-rolls for every test question.
Scientific and free-thinking communities generally don't adhere to the same bullshit "THERE IS OUR ENEMY!" rhetoric as politicians and the ignorant masses they lead.
Homefront was $60 and took less than four hours. Bulletstorm was $60 and took six or seven hours. There's a Battle for LA game that sells for $10 on Steam and takes about 30-45 minutes.
And, when you look at conversations on gaming websites about length and price of games, they tend to react favorably. Often, the comment is "I have a busy life, so I don't get much time to play games, so I don't want to pay $60 for a game that I don't have time to finish". It's kind of baffling to me. It's like saying that long books are stupid, because they take too much time to read, so you'd rather pay full price for cliff notes.
Of course, plenty of games sputter out by the end of just a few hours, so you wouldn't want a lot more game that is nothing but repetition or padding. And worse, most current games that are more than eight or ten hours are only that long, because they have added two hours of collecting flags, an hour of collecting orbs, and three hours of kicking a guy in the balls 30,000 times to get an achievement. Not actual value-added game play. Just trivial bullshit to substitute for content. But they wouldn't dare consider selling a shorter game of good quality at lower price, so a game that you can sink hundreds of hours into is $60 and a game that takes four hours is $60. Go figure.
Getting dozens of hours of play out of a game is pretty rare, these days. The length of most games tend to be somewhere in the four to eight hour range, for $60 (plus tax). On the PC, some games are still $50, but that's becoming uncommon.
For $8/mo, I can get all the movies and television shows I could ever want on almost any device, through Netflix. For $5/mo, I can get almost all the music I'd ever want through through MOG. For $65, I can get a videogame with five to eight hours of gameplay and maybe some shitty tacked-on mulitiplayer that requires me to jump through countless hoops just to enjoy something I legitimately own.
It's not only DRM. It's the whole process of DLC and registrations, too. Buying and installing and playing a game from Bioware on Steam is fucking ridiculous. First, Steam is supposed to have the whole "security" part covered. One reason developers and publishers choose to distribute through them. For the user, the benefit is supposed to be consistency, ease, and being able to play the game anywhere you wish any time you wish as long as you're signed into your account.
Instead, even after you download and install these games, you may have to register with the developer or publisher on their website. Then do the whole "click on email activation link" thing. Then login to their website. Then enter serials and registrations so they're tied to your account. Then you finally have access to DLC (that you have to pay for and download and access through their external non-Steam website). Then, if you want higher resolutions (since, you know, you're playing on a modern computer and not a piece of console hardware that was $300 six years ago), you have to download and install a high res texture pack (over a gigabyte and only available once you have logged into your EA/Bioware account and provided serial/registration information). Then, you have to be logged in to EA when you play the game. Then there's the endless bullshit with countless types of meaningless DLC and extras, depending on where you bought it from or under what conditions.
Then, they often add more DRM *on top of that*. For instance, even though Stream is supposed to take care of it for you and you are supposed to be able to play your games anywhere as long as you have logged in to your account, the individual games (Including Dragon Age II, if I recall correctly) have a Spore-style install/activation limit. Actually, the last game I saw this on might have been Crysis 2.
And on top of all that, the PC version is often riddled with bugs, like Crysis, which couldn't utilize multiple GPUs or multiple GPU cards without causing strobe-light-effect flickering that makes the game unplayable (the solution to it for several weeks was to change the game/card profile so that it only used one GPU, which of course is not ideal at all). The long term solution was to apply (for ATI, at least) a new alpha version of Catalyst drivers that AMD put out. Then there were bugs like zero-ing out all of your in-game currency every time you loaded the game. Then there were the issues like it being unable to save your serial number, so every single time you wanted to play multiplayer, you had to type the entire serial number in again. Then the disconnects experienced every five or ten minutes. The stat resets in multiplayer games (if you played a couple hours and ranked up a few times, the next time you get on and play, all that you achieved during the last session may have been wiped out). Plenty of other bugs, too. And anyone who has played Fallout 3 (even now) or Fallout: New Vegas knows how the polish on PC versions of these games seems to be at a whole new low.
I buy a ridiculous amount of games on every platform, but it seems like we are increasingly fighting up-stream. Especially on the PC. It seems like they're doing everything they can to dissuade us from even wanting to play them.
I don't have a problem with game awards shows that award all aspects of gaming and development. If it wouldn't appeal to a huge general audience, then broadcast it online to a niche audience (a well done one would still be huge) and treat it with respect and dignity. I'd pay a few bucks to watch that live online every year. Awards are part of acknowledging and rewarding bold new attempts, even if they're not commercially successful. They're important in every industry, frankly. Granted, some are more relevant than others (I can't think of many things less relevant than the Grammy's -- except maybe the Oscar's and the one for kids). Instead of piggy backing on something that already exists, I'd love to see something crafted lovingly for gamers and game makers. And by lovingly, I don't mean the fucking shit that Spike TV does every year that makes you feel kind of sick and embarrassed to be a gamer.
Spend an extra $40 to get a business account and that huge problem with congestion and bandwidth limitations in your area magically seems to disappear.
Also, the only thing all this does is make the whole "content ownership" thing CLEARER. It doesn't CHANGE it.
Who are you to determine what value there is or isn't in someone using a piece of property that they own in the way they wish? And how would you feel if the same claim was made about using home media server software (like PS3 Media Server) to stream content to your PS3 from your computer? How about universities and the military buying PS3s in the thousands to use as commodity clustered server solutions for projects? How about we apply this to PCs and take you to court, because you installed linux on your laptop?
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if they'd only start to drop their affiliation with that fraudster who runs Rip Off Reports. The guy who allows anyone to anonymously complain about any company or even any *individual* with private personal information and no validity to their complaints (say, they're just a bitter ex) and will only address the issue if you pay money to be part of the service as a "business" (thousands of dollars, if I recall). And, somehow, they are always magically weighted to the top of Google. (You can do a search for plenty of well known tech personalities and others who have had problems with this guy's blackmail service hiding as a legitimate consumer advocacy service).
Yahoo and others have not weighted them the same way that Google has prioritized the results.
It's amusing that people are concerned about the price of a Bluray, yet they still are willing to pay $20 for a DVD. Either way, you're paying a lot for something that there's no point to watching more than once. When you realize how much you're paying *either way* for a bunch of stuff that will just take up shelf space and never be used, it's still a rip off.
Exactly. I have only owned HDTVs (and 55" or larger) since 2000. I know people in 2011 who still have 32" CRTs and say that they can't see any reason they'd need anything else. These are even people who are heavy film and pop culture buffs. And not old, either. In their 30s. They're content with regular DVDs and with streaming netflix on standard def. They even play their XBOX 360 on them. It's kind of baffling, but I guess there must have been holdouts when color television came out, who insisted their black and white was more than anyone would need for a couple decades afterward.
Then, you also have the fact that a Bluray is still $20 to $30 and it's not worth that much for a movie that I'm only going to ever watch once (twice, maybe, for the extremely amazing greatest movies of all time). Especially when I can get access to like 9,000,000 songs from a streaming service like MOG for $5/mo and more movies and television than I could ever watch in a life time from a streaming service like Netflix for $8/mo.
Even when you push aside the people who are satisfied with 1980s technology and the people like myself who don't want to "collect" videos, the remaining people simply don't see a point in the investment in a format that is being replaced by streaming/downloads over time. They figure they can just skip this generation's media format and jump back in when we've settled on digital downloads as the ultimate option.
No, it's more probably a plot to demean the word "sugar" so that, eventually, they can package corn based processed sugars as "real sugar" rather than having to identify it as not exactly "real sugar" as we think of it.
Homefront is an awful game with a couple of very exciting set-piece moments, like a confrontation on the Golden Gate Bridge that is kind of mind-blowing.
Unfortunately, it was touted for being story-driven (written by the guy from Red Dawn and apparently Apocolypse Now), while there is nearly no story at all. Here's the story: The resistance needs pilots. You are a pilot. They need to get you from Colorado to San Francisco. That's it. You do fly a helicopter once, for a brief time. But despite being a pilot, you're actually spending the whole time doing the "go from point A to point B while blowing the shit out of everything along the way". Because, of course, if a pilot is such a precious resource, the one thing you're going to do is throw him on the front line with a machine gun. That's it. There is no story other than "You are pilot going from point A to point B . . . on foot".
It looks fairly dated. Has a very "Half Life 2" feel to the presentation. And the whole "this is something new and you'll be amazed by the deep and thoughtful experience!" thing that they tried to push with their advertising campaign was betrayed by the first couple of minutes of game play, where the guy who fights along side you for awhile hands you a gun and says "shoot everything in the head". Oh, wow. Golly. That's new. I don't do that in EVERY OTHER FPS.
There's no survival aspect to it. No gripping story. The best thing about Homefront is the potential of what it *could* have been. That's pretty meaningless, since the finished product achieves none of that aspiration, at all.
Also, the article is making it up. There is no "controversy" over Homefront. That's just ridiculous.
I had a girlfriend exactly like that, once. She was all "If I can't have you, then NOBODY CAN HAVE YOU!". It got pretty scary there, for awhile.
How quaint.
You and Grandpa Dvorak.
HD podcasts, streaming music, streaming HD netflix, streaming video events, Steam downloads, VPN and VNC work, remote backups, gaming.
I'd be more interested in knowing how someone can *not* use 250gb a month.
No reasonable way to use 250gb a month? Really?
Streaming HD is around 2gb/hr. Watch two movies per day (simple in a household) and you're looking at around 250gb.
Just because you and your grandmother only use it for email and printing out coffee cake recipes doesn't mean the rest of us do.
Business accounts have a limit. It just isn't acknowledged as any specific limit. You can easily use a terabyte or maybe even two without running into problems. After a certain point, they're likely to want to speak with you about signing up for a more dedicated service at a higher cost.
It's interesting, however, that in the same physical location, they can't afford more than 250gb/mo, because it is consuming all of their precious resources. Pay them an extra $40, however, and that same location and network can suddenly handle six or eight times that much bandwidth. Of course, the other important reason to get their business service is that you can get 5, 10, or even 50 mbps *up*, instead of 768kbps.
You're right. Mistaken identity. There's no story here, whatsoever. It's not like it also contained something about targeting someone for an incident of anti-social behavior or anything.
They can't make Firefox 5.0 the Alpha, becauseFirefox 6.0 is already the Alpha:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2446957
If one percent would generate a lot of revenue, why not make it ten percent? And if that's a ton, why not make it twenty?
After they acquire enough significant sponsorship, I wouldn't be surprised to see it become free. Most of us may not desire that, because if you can afford $114 for an e-reader, you can probably afford $139. On the other hand, if you can't afford anything near that price, then ad consumption in return for a device could mean the difference between having and not having one at all. It would make it available to an entire range of people who may otherwise not be able to benefit from a device so many of us take for granted (whether or not we own or use them).
Of course, the real appeal for this will be that when it becomes free, it'll surely be given to every student in every public school and they'll receive a special stream of advertisements not only as currently described in the press release by Amazon, but on a more granular basis. I can just see students opening their textbook and hearing/seeing "Remember, this Earth Sciences textbook is brought to you by Monsanto Growth for a Better World! or a five and ten second pre-rolls for every test question.
Scientific and free-thinking communities generally don't adhere to the same bullshit "THERE IS OUR ENEMY!" rhetoric as politicians and the ignorant masses they lead.
I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking this. :P
Ever heard of a "little" game called The Witcher and The Witcher II?
Homefront was $60 and took less than four hours.
Bulletstorm was $60 and took six or seven hours.
There's a Battle for LA game that sells for $10 on Steam and takes about 30-45 minutes.
And, when you look at conversations on gaming websites about length and price of games, they tend to react favorably. Often, the comment is "I have a busy life, so I don't get much time to play games, so I don't want to pay $60 for a game that I don't have time to finish". It's kind of baffling to me. It's like saying that long books are stupid, because they take too much time to read, so you'd rather pay full price for cliff notes.
Of course, plenty of games sputter out by the end of just a few hours, so you wouldn't want a lot more game that is nothing but repetition or padding. And worse, most current games that are more than eight or ten hours are only that long, because they have added two hours of collecting flags, an hour of collecting orbs, and three hours of kicking a guy in the balls 30,000 times to get an achievement. Not actual value-added game play. Just trivial bullshit to substitute for content. But they wouldn't dare consider selling a shorter game of good quality at lower price, so a game that you can sink hundreds of hours into is $60 and a game that takes four hours is $60. Go figure.
Getting dozens of hours of play out of a game is pretty rare, these days. The length of most games tend to be somewhere in the four to eight hour range, for $60 (plus tax). On the PC, some games are still $50, but that's becoming uncommon.
For $8/mo, I can get all the movies and television shows I could ever want on almost any device, through Netflix. For $5/mo, I can get almost all the music I'd ever want through through MOG. For $65, I can get a videogame with five to eight hours of gameplay and maybe some shitty tacked-on mulitiplayer that requires me to jump through countless hoops just to enjoy something I legitimately own.
It's not only DRM. It's the whole process of DLC and registrations, too. Buying and installing and playing a game from Bioware on Steam is fucking ridiculous. First, Steam is supposed to have the whole "security" part covered. One reason developers and publishers choose to distribute through them. For the user, the benefit is supposed to be consistency, ease, and being able to play the game anywhere you wish any time you wish as long as you're signed into your account.
Instead, even after you download and install these games, you may have to register with the developer or publisher on their website. Then do the whole "click on email activation link" thing. Then login to their website. Then enter serials and registrations so they're tied to your account. Then you finally have access to DLC (that you have to pay for and download and access through their external non-Steam website). Then, if you want higher resolutions (since, you know, you're playing on a modern computer and not a piece of console hardware that was $300 six years ago), you have to download and install a high res texture pack (over a gigabyte and only available once you have logged into your EA/Bioware account and provided serial/registration information). Then, you have to be logged in to EA when you play the game. Then there's the endless bullshit with countless types of meaningless DLC and extras, depending on where you bought it from or under what conditions.
Then, they often add more DRM *on top of that*. For instance, even though Stream is supposed to take care of it for you and you are supposed to be able to play your games anywhere as long as you have logged in to your account, the individual games (Including Dragon Age II, if I recall correctly) have a Spore-style install/activation limit. Actually, the last game I saw this on might have been Crysis 2.
And on top of all that, the PC version is often riddled with bugs, like Crysis, which couldn't utilize multiple GPUs or multiple GPU cards without causing strobe-light-effect flickering that makes the game unplayable (the solution to it for several weeks was to change the game/card profile so that it only used one GPU, which of course is not ideal at all). The long term solution was to apply (for ATI, at least) a new alpha version of Catalyst drivers that AMD put out. Then there were bugs like zero-ing out all of your in-game currency every time you loaded the game. Then there were the issues like it being unable to save your serial number, so every single time you wanted to play multiplayer, you had to type the entire serial number in again. Then the disconnects experienced every five or ten minutes. The stat resets in multiplayer games (if you played a couple hours and ranked up a few times, the next time you get on and play, all that you achieved during the last session may have been wiped out). Plenty of other bugs, too. And anyone who has played Fallout 3 (even now) or Fallout: New Vegas knows how the polish on PC versions of these games seems to be at a whole new low.
I buy a ridiculous amount of games on every platform, but it seems like we are increasingly fighting up-stream. Especially on the PC. It seems like they're doing everything they can to dissuade us from even wanting to play them.
I don't have a problem with game awards shows that award all aspects of gaming and development. If it wouldn't appeal to a huge general audience, then broadcast it online to a niche audience (a well done one would still be huge) and treat it with respect and dignity. I'd pay a few bucks to watch that live online every year. Awards are part of acknowledging and rewarding bold new attempts, even if they're not commercially successful. They're important in every industry, frankly. Granted, some are more relevant than others (I can't think of many things less relevant than the Grammy's -- except maybe the Oscar's and the one for kids). Instead of piggy backing on something that already exists, I'd love to see something crafted lovingly for gamers and game makers. And by lovingly, I don't mean the fucking shit that Spike TV does every year that makes you feel kind of sick and embarrassed to be a gamer.
Spend an extra $40 to get a business account and that huge problem with congestion and bandwidth limitations in your area magically seems to disappear.
Also, the only thing all this does is make the whole "content ownership" thing CLEARER. It doesn't CHANGE it.
Homebrew has no real value on a PS3.
Who are you to determine what value there is or isn't in someone using a piece of property that they own in the way they wish? And how would you feel if the same claim was made about using home media server software (like PS3 Media Server) to stream content to your PS3 from your computer? How about universities and the military buying PS3s in the thousands to use as commodity clustered server solutions for projects? How about we apply this to PCs and take you to court, because you installed linux on your laptop?