It drives me nuts too. I find it harder to get the margins to match up to how I want them in OO. In MS Office, I can set them, and that's how it prints. Although that's just one minor gripe. Hopefully that's fixed. I also like to use bullets, and I found that OO's default bullet size was too big. I need them to be a few sizes smaller and could never figure out how to make them smaller. It's actually quite simple to do that in MS office. I've also found it difficult to set up individual margins or tabs for specific parts of the document with OO. In MS Office you just click where you want it to be on the ruler, hit the tab key, and boom, it just works as you want it to. I could never find any easy way to get it to work with OO.
But those are my only complaints with OO. I do a documentation for my job, and these two things are deal breakers for me specifically for those things. I need the documentation to look pretty and follow a specific format so the idiots that I work with have an easier time reading what I write. Maybe it's just my inexperience with OO that gave me problems for those things, I don't know. But what I do know is that I couldn't find out how to do them easily, if at all. With MS Office, I can not use it for years, go back to it, and still figure out how to do something in a matter of minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I push OO on people who don't have an office suite. An office suite is better than no office suite. I just with people who use MS Office would stop saving their files in something other than docx or rtf, or other stupid bullshit.
Case and point. My mom is in a community group, and they all need to use word processing and spreadsheets for whatever project they work on. Her and her neighbor do not have an office suite, so I downloaded OO for them and installed it. Well, people in the group who claim to be far more tech savvy than any five people on Slashdot put together (a bit of an exaggeration, but that's their attitude anyway) save everything in fucking docx. There's also a few people in the group who have older versions of MS Office. So it ends up being that only a few people can open the docx documents. I've tried telling these people how to save the file as.doc, but they insist on using docx and claim that I just don't know what I'm talking about, these other people are doing it, or that their PC is just too old (I personally built my moms PC so that it would outlast anything Dell or HP could put out in the next five years or so, it's a powerful machine in that regard).
So anyway. I've tried getting these people to use OO and writing everything in that and saving it as.doc if they were going to refuse to do it with MS Office (this way everything would be compatible with everyone in the group and any future people who joined). One person of that docx group downloaded it and hated it. His biggest complaint was that OO associated MS Office file types with OO, over writing MS Office's file types. I doubt he used it beyond that, but that was his "biggest" complaint with it. The guy told me the only way he could "fix it" was to uninstall OO. I tried explaining to him how there was other ways of fixing it, but he just looked at me like I was the stupid one.
I guess my whole point with that rant is that OO has a long way to go to grab market share from MS Office users yet. The average idiot is an idiot. They need to find some way to make sure they can't blow themselves up (metaphorically speaking) when even installing their software, as it's obvious they don't read what they're doing. I also hope 3.0 addresses some of my concerns with it. If it does, I will switch over.
You have it all wrong. Technicians are always the first to notice these problems. They of course always report the failures (especially if they become common), get ignored, by the Q&A department and the engineering department until higher up wants to feel important. Than the issue is address, and the technicians (and probably their immediate supervisor) are reprimanded for not alerting someone of this issue sooner.
At least that's always been my experience as a technician and a manager. (And it hasn't changed from any of the companies I've worked at yet.)
You're right that most people probably won't stop. However, I doubt most people are using that phrase anyway. The only people you hear using that phrase are the staunch supporters of the artists who are heavily into the whole RIAA debacle in the first place.
However if you're just strictly taking that group into consideration and ignoring the rest, well, I have no fucking clue. Some assuredly will, and some definitely won't (they'll just find other reasons).
Yes, sincere so that they could flood the "market" with fake files, among other things. Nothing in the e-mails made it seem sincere about what they had in mind (nor un-sincere). All they wanted to do was distance the names from each other.
I can see why they wanted to distance the names from each other, but they could have spun it in a positive fashion if they wanted to.
In any case, would you trust any sort of service coming from these jackals?
I too work for an electronics company, and have worked for many. I've noticed that there's plenty of employees who don't properly test their straps or even use them, and management turns a blind eye to it, unless whatever they're working on is actually a high-rel device (but how often is management actually around to watch you?).
I know I've been guilty of it from time to time, and I'm sure you have too. I would venture to guess that if ESD was a problem, it happened during assembly, not during voting.
I'd just like to point out that for the static electricity to have even been a problem, whoever was working with the insides of the machine was probably not "strapped down" (i.e. an ESD strap on your wrist going to ground), and the necessary electronics inside were not at the very least coated with some sort of spray on plastic layer (like it should have been). Those two things will easily get rid of your static electricity problems.
I honestly don't buy the whole "voters touching the screen" or lever, or whatever they touch on the machine, could have done this. Someone had to get inside and touch the electronics themselves for static to have seriously been any sort of relevant problem.
It is possible that for whatever reason, the machine itself wasn't manufactured probably and somehow static could have seeped through, but that's highly unlikely.
So I go back to my first assumption, that if static is somehow to blame, whoever assembled the machine didn't take necessary precautions in the first place, and the ESD that occurred during assembly is now causing problems (which in theory, is possible).
In either scenario, it just gives more credence as to why we shouldn't trust electronic voting.
I never said the old way was better, but just merely agreeing with the AC that you needn't worry about lead based solder if you took one careful precaution.
Even then, the amount of lead you could potentially ingest wouldn't harm most people. I work with electronics every day and I see people not washing their hands and handling their food with dirty hands. I've seen these people do this for years, and not a single one of them has had lead poisoning. There probably are some people out there that are more sensitive to lead than other people, but for most people, it's practically a non-issue.
Honestly, unless you eat a whole roll of lead based solder, you probably have nothing to worry about. Although I personally don't like handling my food with dirty hands.
Valve is allowing you to do this, but it's still at their sole discretion for now (as far as mods are concerned). If you visit any of the good mods forums, you'll see their fans saying "hey, why isn't this happening for us?", and the devs for those mods will keep saying "bug valve about it, it's out of our control". All of which means, "we've contacted Valve and they have no plans right now to allow us to use their tools". You're even forced to contact someone at Valve just to get the tools to do so.
I would recommend running through the maps on a local server by yourself so you know how they flow (which will also give you the necessary "know how" with cyberspace interaction).
One could also look at it as the game failing to introduce those concepts forcefully enough for thick-headed individuals like myself... although I seem to have no problem playing Disgaea 3.
I think it just boils down to you not paying attention well enough. It introduces a lot of core gameplay concepts to you right away.
I got into a cycle where I lost a few times in succession, and had no items to use then (which I used liberally to try to win said fight earlier).
Two things to remedy that. The first being that you could have went back to the first area and just did a grind for items. All of the item boxes were back where they needed to be.
Secondly, you didn't have to keep going the same route in the slums area. You could have gone down a different path and maybe found an enemy or two that was a little easier to deal with. That should have been enough to gain you a level.
You also have to keep in mind that any of your guys attacks are stronger/weaker/normal against certain types of enemies. Once you learn this (mainly through trial and error, some is a little intuitive), the game becomes significantly easier.
Yes, you apparently did do something wrong. Did you learn how to block attacks by that point? Did you learn how to make your attacks do more damage? While there was an increase in difficulty, it wasn't so large that you couldn't have won that battle.
I agree with your question, but not the premise of it.
It just didn't feel right buying a game that I knew that had DRM in it that actually restricted the amount of installs one could have. While I probably won't ever go beyond whatever retarded limit they had set, the possibility that I might is enough cause for alarm.
Really, I'm not a soothsayer. I just don't know what will happen in the future.
This is just one of those concessions to DRM that I just don't like accepting. Then if I ever do go beyond the amount of allowable installs, I have to go out of my way to e-mail someone, or call someone up, or whatever, just so I am allowed to reinstall the game. It's a bullshit process. I paid for the damn game. Don't give me hassles.
I have no idea if their process of reactivation is painless or not. I really don't care. When I want to do something, and there's no damn good reason why I would have to wait, I do not like waiting. Making me wait just because you want to believe you've cut some just blow into some despicable scoundrels on the high seas is not a good way to keep your customers happy.
Even so, I'm still tempted to buy their second game. I immensely enjoyed the first enough to play it a few times. The demo turned the game into an impulse buy. Now a sequel, I won't bother with a demo, which makes it even more of an impulse buy. Seriously. Just get rid of the install limit and keep whatever other DRM you had that wasn't so "fuck you in the ass without lube and a reach around" bad and I'll be a happy customer.
I have an enthusiast system and found the gameplay lack-luster. They did a terrific job of stealing ideas from a lot of other games and tossing them into some melting pot where they concocted a mediocre game. There was nothing spectacular or overly enjoying about Crysis. The end.
But DRM is a big deal and it continues to be more of a deal every year.
Also, what the DRM does and how it effects your PC should be called out so you at least know what it does. It's a fucking rootkit. That's why people care.
You're on fucking slashdot for crying out loud. You should understand this by now.
It sort of, kind of, can, but it's really not attributed to STEAM. Publishers sometimes have completely different versions for STEAM and other download services which can ruin such things, or so I've heard.
STEAM's offline mode does work. I don't know why people keep preaching that. Have you updated STEAM at all? Have you just tried to reinstall STEAM? I've never had any problems with it.
Also, the whole pricing and region issue thing makes sense if you'd take a second to yank your head out of your ass. There's a few mitigating factors that you need to consider.
The first being that in certain regions, games are censored in certain ways. If you have a game from a different region, it bypasses that censorship. That can potentially go badly for STEAM, as that government can be all like, "WHY ARENT YOU THINKING ABOUT THE CHILDREN LIKE WE FUCKING DEMAND!!???".
Another important factor is that Valve is a business and they need to make money. The cheaper stuff in those regions is specifically for those regions so they can have market penetration there. So essentially, games are priced differently for each region for a reason. They have to find a balance between making money and getting market penetration. So if you want to be pissed off about a company fucking over people who were trying to fuck them over, be my guest.
Slashdot Mirror
It drives me nuts too. I find it harder to get the margins to match up to how I want them in OO. In MS Office, I can set them, and that's how it prints. Although that's just one minor gripe. Hopefully that's fixed. I also like to use bullets, and I found that OO's default bullet size was too big. I need them to be a few sizes smaller and could never figure out how to make them smaller. It's actually quite simple to do that in MS office. I've also found it difficult to set up individual margins or tabs for specific parts of the document with OO. In MS Office you just click where you want it to be on the ruler, hit the tab key, and boom, it just works as you want it to. I could never find any easy way to get it to work with OO.
But those are my only complaints with OO. I do a documentation for my job, and these two things are deal breakers for me specifically for those things. I need the documentation to look pretty and follow a specific format so the idiots that I work with have an easier time reading what I write. Maybe it's just my inexperience with OO that gave me problems for those things, I don't know. But what I do know is that I couldn't find out how to do them easily, if at all. With MS Office, I can not use it for years, go back to it, and still figure out how to do something in a matter of minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I push OO on people who don't have an office suite. An office suite is better than no office suite. I just with people who use MS Office would stop saving their files in something other than docx or rtf, or other stupid bullshit.
Case and point. My mom is in a community group, and they all need to use word processing and spreadsheets for whatever project they work on. Her and her neighbor do not have an office suite, so I downloaded OO for them and installed it. Well, people in the group who claim to be far more tech savvy than any five people on Slashdot put together (a bit of an exaggeration, but that's their attitude anyway) save everything in fucking docx. There's also a few people in the group who have older versions of MS Office. So it ends up being that only a few people can open the docx documents. I've tried telling these people how to save the file as .doc, but they insist on using docx and claim that I just don't know what I'm talking about, these other people are doing it, or that their PC is just too old (I personally built my moms PC so that it would outlast anything Dell or HP could put out in the next five years or so, it's a powerful machine in that regard).
So anyway. I've tried getting these people to use OO and writing everything in that and saving it as .doc if they were going to refuse to do it with MS Office (this way everything would be compatible with everyone in the group and any future people who joined). One person of that docx group downloaded it and hated it. His biggest complaint was that OO associated MS Office file types with OO, over writing MS Office's file types. I doubt he used it beyond that, but that was his "biggest" complaint with it. The guy told me the only way he could "fix it" was to uninstall OO. I tried explaining to him how there was other ways of fixing it, but he just looked at me like I was the stupid one.
I guess my whole point with that rant is that OO has a long way to go to grab market share from MS Office users yet. The average idiot is an idiot. They need to find some way to make sure they can't blow themselves up (metaphorically speaking) when even installing their software, as it's obvious they don't read what they're doing. I also hope 3.0 addresses some of my concerns with it. If it does, I will switch over.
You have it all wrong. Technicians are always the first to notice these problems. They of course always report the failures (especially if they become common), get ignored, by the Q&A department and the engineering department until higher up wants to feel important. Than the issue is address, and the technicians (and probably their immediate supervisor) are reprimanded for not alerting someone of this issue sooner.
At least that's always been my experience as a technician and a manager. (And it hasn't changed from any of the companies I've worked at yet.)
You're right that most people probably won't stop. However, I doubt most people are using that phrase anyway. The only people you hear using that phrase are the staunch supporters of the artists who are heavily into the whole RIAA debacle in the first place.
However if you're just strictly taking that group into consideration and ignoring the rest, well, I have no fucking clue. Some assuredly will, and some definitely won't (they'll just find other reasons).
Yes, sincere so that they could flood the "market" with fake files, among other things. Nothing in the e-mails made it seem sincere about what they had in mind (nor un-sincere). All they wanted to do was distance the names from each other.
I can see why they wanted to distance the names from each other, but they could have spun it in a positive fashion if they wanted to.
In any case, would you trust any sort of service coming from these jackals?
I thought about it, but then suddenly thought up of those exact words and decided against poking around in such a cesspool of filth.
I too work for an electronics company, and have worked for many. I've noticed that there's plenty of employees who don't properly test their straps or even use them, and management turns a blind eye to it, unless whatever they're working on is actually a high-rel device (but how often is management actually around to watch you?).
I know I've been guilty of it from time to time, and I'm sure you have too. I would venture to guess that if ESD was a problem, it happened during assembly, not during voting.
I'd just like to point out that for the static electricity to have even been a problem, whoever was working with the insides of the machine was probably not "strapped down" (i.e. an ESD strap on your wrist going to ground), and the necessary electronics inside were not at the very least coated with some sort of spray on plastic layer (like it should have been). Those two things will easily get rid of your static electricity problems.
I honestly don't buy the whole "voters touching the screen" or lever, or whatever they touch on the machine, could have done this. Someone had to get inside and touch the electronics themselves for static to have seriously been any sort of relevant problem.
It is possible that for whatever reason, the machine itself wasn't manufactured probably and somehow static could have seeped through, but that's highly unlikely.
So I go back to my first assumption, that if static is somehow to blame, whoever assembled the machine didn't take necessary precautions in the first place, and the ESD that occurred during assembly is now causing problems (which in theory, is possible).
In either scenario, it just gives more credence as to why we shouldn't trust electronic voting.
I never said the old way was better, but just merely agreeing with the AC that you needn't worry about lead based solder if you took one careful precaution.
Even then, the amount of lead you could potentially ingest wouldn't harm most people. I work with electronics every day and I see people not washing their hands and handling their food with dirty hands. I've seen these people do this for years, and not a single one of them has had lead poisoning. There probably are some people out there that are more sensitive to lead than other people, but for most people, it's practically a non-issue.
Honestly, unless you eat a whole roll of lead based solder, you probably have nothing to worry about. Although I personally don't like handling my food with dirty hands.
Valve is allowing you to do this, but it's still at their sole discretion for now (as far as mods are concerned). If you visit any of the good mods forums, you'll see their fans saying "hey, why isn't this happening for us?", and the devs for those mods will keep saying "bug valve about it, it's out of our control". All of which means, "we've contacted Valve and they have no plans right now to allow us to use their tools". You're even forced to contact someone at Valve just to get the tools to do so.
It's not exactly up to the mod makers to take advantage of the system. It's up to Valve, for now anyway.
I would recommend running through the maps on a local server by yourself so you know how they flow (which will also give you the necessary "know how" with cyberspace interaction).
Flux fumes really aren't that bad, unless you're working with excessive amounts of it.
In any case, you're correct in that all you need to do with the lead solder is to make sure you wash your hands before you eat.
http://www.dystopia-game.com
Far far better than the other mods. Nuff said.
One could also look at it as the game failing to introduce those concepts forcefully enough for thick-headed individuals like myself... although I seem to have no problem playing Disgaea 3.
I think it just boils down to you not paying attention well enough. It introduces a lot of core gameplay concepts to you right away.
I got into a cycle where I lost a few times in succession, and had no items to use then (which I used liberally to try to win said fight earlier).
Two things to remedy that. The first being that you could have went back to the first area and just did a grind for items. All of the item boxes were back where they needed to be.
Secondly, you didn't have to keep going the same route in the slums area. You could have gone down a different path and maybe found an enemy or two that was a little easier to deal with. That should have been enough to gain you a level.
You also have to keep in mind that any of your guys attacks are stronger/weaker/normal against certain types of enemies. Once you learn this (mainly through trial and error, some is a little intuitive), the game becomes significantly easier.
Yes, you apparently did do something wrong. Did you learn how to block attacks by that point? Did you learn how to make your attacks do more damage? While there was an increase in difficulty, it wasn't so large that you couldn't have won that battle.
Service providers in the USA, afaik. Those people in Sushi-land? They apparently love giving out lots of bandwidth at affordable prices.
I agree with your question, but not the premise of it.
It just didn't feel right buying a game that I knew that had DRM in it that actually restricted the amount of installs one could have. While I probably won't ever go beyond whatever retarded limit they had set, the possibility that I might is enough cause for alarm.
Really, I'm not a soothsayer. I just don't know what will happen in the future.
This is just one of those concessions to DRM that I just don't like accepting. Then if I ever do go beyond the amount of allowable installs, I have to go out of my way to e-mail someone, or call someone up, or whatever, just so I am allowed to reinstall the game. It's a bullshit process. I paid for the damn game. Don't give me hassles.
I have no idea if their process of reactivation is painless or not. I really don't care. When I want to do something, and there's no damn good reason why I would have to wait, I do not like waiting. Making me wait just because you want to believe you've cut some just blow into some despicable scoundrels on the high seas is not a good way to keep your customers happy.
Even so, I'm still tempted to buy their second game. I immensely enjoyed the first enough to play it a few times. The demo turned the game into an impulse buy. Now a sequel, I won't bother with a demo, which makes it even more of an impulse buy. Seriously. Just get rid of the install limit and keep whatever other DRM you had that wasn't so "fuck you in the ass without lube and a reach around" bad and I'll be a happy customer.
I have an enthusiast system and found the gameplay lack-luster. They did a terrific job of stealing ideas from a lot of other games and tossing them into some melting pot where they concocted a mediocre game. There was nothing spectacular or overly enjoying about Crysis. The end.
But DRM is a big deal and it continues to be more of a deal every year.
Also, what the DRM does and how it effects your PC should be called out so you at least know what it does. It's a fucking rootkit. That's why people care.
You're on fucking slashdot for crying out loud. You should understand this by now.
And what exactly about it is "cheap"?
It's relatively new, and it seems like it will stay small. One new game per month? I don't know what Jerry and Mike were thinking there, but whatever.
It sort of, kind of, can, but it's really not attributed to STEAM. Publishers sometimes have completely different versions for STEAM and other download services which can ruin such things, or so I've heard.
Impulses library is lackluster. Not only that, games that have DRM on and go through that service will still have DRM on them.
STEAM's offline mode does work. I don't know why people keep preaching that. Have you updated STEAM at all? Have you just tried to reinstall STEAM? I've never had any problems with it.
Also, the whole pricing and region issue thing makes sense if you'd take a second to yank your head out of your ass. There's a few mitigating factors that you need to consider.
The first being that in certain regions, games are censored in certain ways. If you have a game from a different region, it bypasses that censorship. That can potentially go badly for STEAM, as that government can be all like, "WHY ARENT YOU THINKING ABOUT THE CHILDREN LIKE WE FUCKING DEMAND!!???".
Another important factor is that Valve is a business and they need to make money. The cheaper stuff in those regions is specifically for those regions so they can have market penetration there. So essentially, games are priced differently for each region for a reason. They have to find a balance between making money and getting market penetration. So if you want to be pissed off about a company fucking over people who were trying to fuck them over, be my guest.
Relive! The machines have sentience! RUUUUUUN!