I don't know if Microsoft should make their software "free". Older operating systems that they refuse to profit from anymore? Sure. It makes sense. If you openly refuse to profit from a product you've made, I think you should do what's best for the world at large and toss it into public domain.
And they don't even have to do that right away. They can wait a year or two until adoption of whatever has stagnated to some point. This would actually be a really nice PR move for them. A lot of companies still require some really outdated versions of Windows because of the software they use. It just makes it easier for them to continue using a Microsoft product.
In the mean time, it would also be nice if they didn't cripple the software they don't intend on profiting from anymore.
While I don't know if you'll be on hold for hours (everyone I personally knows states it's only been a few minutes, but experiences can differ), I do agree that the act of having to call them up because of Windows software arbitrarily deciding that you're now a pirate is annoying, to say the very least.
I wish all software companies would realize that pirates have already found their way around their methods. In the end, all you do is punish the legitimate consumer. You *may* hinder a few pirates, but at what cost? Is it the expected ROI for such crappy decisions worth it?
Well, it probably won't do more for Linux than Vista, but it will probably do something positive for Linux in some capacity. What that is, no one really knows.
It's the annoying factor. No one really wants to deal with someone over the phone for something as stupid and simple as a license key because the one they had decided to stop working for an arbitrary reason.
My buddy hates Windows (he's Loonix all the way), so when a new version comes out, I just have him pick one up for me through his MSDNAA. It runs me about $20 + shipping (which is whatever he pays). The only agreement he has to abide by is that he uninstalls the operating systems from HIS computer when he no longer attends that school.
Do yourself a favor and pirate a copy of 2k on that system. ME crashes just by breathing in the same room as the PC. If it can run ME, it can probably run 2k. Hell, 98 crashes less.
I actually thought about that after posting my comment. It would make a whole lot of sense. Your discrete GPU could be in a sleep state until it's actually needed. Until then your computer could just use the hybrid chip.
I really do like where Intel and AMD are going with this. The naysayers around here can keep saying nay, but this solution already looks significantly better than what is currently out on the low-end. It's great for general purpose computing. It's great for the average person editing home movies. It's great the gaming market as a whole.
I think those that are disagreeing with you haven't played many good RPG's. You can have a linear, somewhat linear, and open ended RPG not scale with you and you can still progress through the game without any grinding. If there is "grinding" to be done, they handle it in a classy fashion ala side quests. As long as they keep the story of the side quest interesting, it only enables you to delve further into whatever role you've created for yourself.
Really, are you somehow trying to imply that the story in Oblivion was something other than crap? I can see how you're not, but the way that you sort of praise of not doing one thing to enhance another leads me to believe that you have.
Oblivion's story was a half-hearted attempt at a plot. Like a lot of of open ended games, some of the side quests were far more interesting and fun than the actual plot.
But that's just the plot itself. The scaling of the levels actually meant no challenge, even on the hardest difficulty. My friends and I found very little challenge throughout the game. After finishing the game, I felt zero accomplishment. I just sat back and said to myself, "that really was a waste of time". I haven't played the game since.
Redundancy is how you drive a point home. How do you think advertising works? How do you think debate and discussion works? Excuse me, I'm going to be redundant again.
One of the better methods of getting your point across is to be redundant. You don't like it? Live under a rock.
"OH MY GOD! CPU AND GPU ON ONE DIE IS STOOOOOOOOPIIIIIDDDDDEDEDDDD!!!1111oneoneone"
How stupid is it really? So what if the average consumer actually knows very little about their PC. That doesn't necessarily mean it won't be put into a person's PC.
If they were really forward thinking, they could see it as an effort to bridge the gap between low-end PC's and high-end PC's. Now maybe, at some point in the future, people can do gaming a little better on those PC's.
Instead of games being nigh unplayable, are now running slightly more smoothly. With advance in this design, it could really work out better.
Sure, for the time being, I don't doubt that the obvious choice would be to have a discrete component solution for gaming. However, there might be a point where that isn't in the gamers best interests anymore. I'm not a soothsayer, I don't know.
Still, I can't only help but imagine how Intel's and AMD's ideas can only help everyone as a whole.
Before AMD bought ATI, ATI was doing a crappy job in a lot of areas. ATI cards have generally always had the better hardware, but for whatever reason, generally had some awful driver support. I still don't think their driver support is there yet. I believe their cards can do a whole lot more than what their drivers allow them to do. I'm only basing this off of what NVidia has historically had with their hardware, where they can do more with less.
But that's just driver support alone. I honestly can't express much opinion about the portability; I haven't tried it yet. It's just what I've read so far in new stories. Price and Performance, without owning the card yourself, the only thing you can rely on are benchmarks, and there's a lot to show that Radeon 4870 can keep its pace with NVidia's GTX 280.
Looking at Newegg, an HD4870 (not a HD4870X2 - not really worth it in price vs performance IMO), is around $280. The GTX280 is on average, $440. Now that you have the prices, you have the benchmarks, you can decide if what you've read about the portability is enough of a factor for you.
You are behind the times. ATI cards, as far as price vs performance, are spanking NVidia's cards with moon rocks. I think a big helping hand in that is that for whatever reason, AMD said to them, "make better drivers, or else!".
Also, AMD has gone the route of trying to be more open source friendly with their cards, more so than NVidia.
Currently, you just can't go wrong with owning a current generation Radeon card right now.
This is a common practice in the food industry. While there might be a few cases of people really not realize what they've bought for their consumers is the wrong stuff, by far and large, especially in the restaurant biz, they know it's not what they've claimed it to be.
Why do this do this? Profits of course! Charge $18 for a mahi meal and serve them cod or tilapia instead. The average persons taste buds aren't refined enough to know the difference.
I've been kindly asked to leave sushi places before when my "fresh super white tuna from Korea" tasted a lot like farm raised cod, which I rudely pointed out when the waitress asked me if "everything was ok". At least I got a somewhat free meal out of it!
And now that I think about it, all of the Sushi places I've been too, there's only been one or two places that actually served what they advertised. Hands down, best tasting sushi I will ever have.
Ultimately, I don't think this will change anything on the restaurant side. Grocery store side? Maybe. When you can make large profits from misrepresenting what you're selling and get away with it, the barcoding won't stop it. All it will do is help the honest business stay honest.
It doesn't matter how deep or absorbing the game can be. If the controls suck and it gives a bad first impression by not at the very least trying to marginally stay up to date with the looks, it's going to turn more people away than it would draw in.
It is possible to create a fun, deep, absorbing, and rewarding game even while you give clear direction (when necessary), and having controls that function in a way to enhance your experience (instead of hindering them). And you can even do this while keeping the looks somewhat up to date.
Graphical aspects can be somewhat forgiven, as not everyone has the abilities, talents, or money, to make things as graphically pleasing as possible. I understand this. However, if you're designing a game, your goal should be to make it as easy as possible to at the very least pick up and play. Mastering the game can be an entirely different story, however.
Paying for a game like "Depths of Peril". With any game, I play with the intent of having a fun experience that will make me want to go out and buy it. I always look at the price first to see if that price reflects a quality that I could tolerate. The game lacks a lot of visual polish, which made it very difficult for me to get into the game. The gameplay was also nothing new. Oh, and the website? looks like something I made in 1995. I have a rule of thumb with indie games, and it generally holds true. If the website looks like shit, the game probably looks and plays the same way.
I'm not trying to be a big time jerk here. I just couldn't get into the game. I looked at the keyboard menu and felt overwhelmed. I scanned it and it just made me say "what the fuck?". I tried playing the game and felt like I had no direction for any of the quests (a good tutorial would have helped here).
Essentially, I played better games on my NES that looked roughly the same. If I wanted to pay that kind of money for a game, I'd find one that had better quality put into it. At $10, Depths of Peril might feel fun.
I'm dismayed that AudioSurf wasn't on that list. Not that that game needs more help to make sales (STEAM has seen to that it sells well). It's just nice to see a list that actually recommends good games. I can't say this one has.
Yet somehow all of that extra fluff made it far less stable than 98. I remember my parents buying a new PC with ME on it. I'd fart, it would BSOD. I'd run a game for more than 2 seconds, it would crash. I'd breathe air, sure enough, it would crash! I quickly downgraded to 98SE for stability until I could get my hands on a pirated copy of 2k.
I don't agree that Vista does "more things right than XP", but a lot of that may just boil down to personal preferences (though I will sing praises about their installer from one mountain top to the next, it is that much better IMO). I honestly run into more issues on Vista than I did with XP, and I haven't done much differently. I, like many other gamers, bought Vista hoping that the DX10 upgrade would be worth all of the DRM hassle.
And while Microsoft might be releasing slower operating systems, I think that accepting it as the norm is bullshit. Microsoft has the resources to develop a feature rich OS that isn't resource intensive. Linux has some of the same features and it runs just fine on older hardware, but if you try to do some of those very things on Vista with older hardware, you're not going to get much luck.
If Microsoft wants us to keep swallowing these new operating systems, they need to remove the bloat, make them run faster, and please remove the DRM.
We can make a monster that affects your mobility, we can make a monster that has different kinds of attacks that are dangerous to you and that you actually have to avoid. And so it makes the combat a lot more interesting.
There were monsters that had attacks that could affect your mobility in Diablo II. There were certain attacks you really had to avoid unless you were in the top tier of players in Diablo II. It doesn't sound any different to the person who didn't try to pimp out their toon to the max so they could easily walk all over everything. And honestly, not everyone could, not with how the games economy was so horribly screwed over by the botters.
I fully understand the implications of said action. I'm just not particularly worried in this incident. They can *try* all they might to block TPB, but it won't work. Even if a few users are affected, there's so many torrent sites out there that it won't matter. Besides, there's always Tor.
While this certainly has a lot of terrible implications, those people could just use other torrent sites. The only reason TPB is being blocked here is because of their notoriety. I honestly can find my trackers easier using other bit torrent sites anyway. And what will Italy do once people get their TPB trackers from other sites?
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I don't know if Microsoft should make their software "free". Older operating systems that they refuse to profit from anymore? Sure. It makes sense. If you openly refuse to profit from a product you've made, I think you should do what's best for the world at large and toss it into public domain.
And they don't even have to do that right away. They can wait a year or two until adoption of whatever has stagnated to some point. This would actually be a really nice PR move for them. A lot of companies still require some really outdated versions of Windows because of the software they use. It just makes it easier for them to continue using a Microsoft product.
In the mean time, it would also be nice if they didn't cripple the software they don't intend on profiting from anymore.
While I don't know if you'll be on hold for hours (everyone I personally knows states it's only been a few minutes, but experiences can differ), I do agree that the act of having to call them up because of Windows software arbitrarily deciding that you're now a pirate is annoying, to say the very least.
I wish all software companies would realize that pirates have already found their way around their methods. In the end, all you do is punish the legitimate consumer. You *may* hinder a few pirates, but at what cost? Is it the expected ROI for such crappy decisions worth it?
Well, it probably won't do more for Linux than Vista, but it will probably do something positive for Linux in some capacity. What that is, no one really knows.
It's the annoying factor. No one really wants to deal with someone over the phone for something as stupid and simple as a license key because the one they had decided to stop working for an arbitrary reason.
I do have the PC version, and they did not remove any of the lameness for it.
Well, rebates don't last forever. You can't really rely on them for a pricing structure. Just saying.
My buddy hates Windows (he's Loonix all the way), so when a new version comes out, I just have him pick one up for me through his MSDNAA. It runs me about $20 + shipping (which is whatever he pays). The only agreement he has to abide by is that he uninstalls the operating systems from HIS computer when he no longer attends that school.
Do yourself a favor and pirate a copy of 2k on that system. ME crashes just by breathing in the same room as the PC. If it can run ME, it can probably run 2k. Hell, 98 crashes less.
I actually thought about that after posting my comment. It would make a whole lot of sense. Your discrete GPU could be in a sleep state until it's actually needed. Until then your computer could just use the hybrid chip.
I really do like where Intel and AMD are going with this. The naysayers around here can keep saying nay, but this solution already looks significantly better than what is currently out on the low-end. It's great for general purpose computing. It's great for the average person editing home movies. It's great the gaming market as a whole.
I think those that are disagreeing with you haven't played many good RPG's. You can have a linear, somewhat linear, and open ended RPG not scale with you and you can still progress through the game without any grinding. If there is "grinding" to be done, they handle it in a classy fashion ala side quests. As long as they keep the story of the side quest interesting, it only enables you to delve further into whatever role you've created for yourself.
Really, are you somehow trying to imply that the story in Oblivion was something other than crap? I can see how you're not, but the way that you sort of praise of not doing one thing to enhance another leads me to believe that you have.
Oblivion's story was a half-hearted attempt at a plot. Like a lot of of open ended games, some of the side quests were far more interesting and fun than the actual plot.
But that's just the plot itself. The scaling of the levels actually meant no challenge, even on the hardest difficulty. My friends and I found very little challenge throughout the game. After finishing the game, I felt zero accomplishment. I just sat back and said to myself, "that really was a waste of time". I haven't played the game since.
Redundancy is how you drive a point home. How do you think advertising works? How do you think debate and discussion works? Excuse me, I'm going to be redundant again.
One of the better methods of getting your point across is to be redundant. You don't like it? Live under a rock.
"OH MY GOD! CPU AND GPU ON ONE DIE IS STOOOOOOOOPIIIIIDDDDDEDEDDDD!!!1111oneoneone"
How stupid is it really? So what if the average consumer actually knows very little about their PC. That doesn't necessarily mean it won't be put into a person's PC.
If they were really forward thinking, they could see it as an effort to bridge the gap between low-end PC's and high-end PC's. Now maybe, at some point in the future, people can do gaming a little better on those PC's.
Instead of games being nigh unplayable, are now running slightly more smoothly. With advance in this design, it could really work out better.
Sure, for the time being, I don't doubt that the obvious choice would be to have a discrete component solution for gaming. However, there might be a point where that isn't in the gamers best interests anymore. I'm not a soothsayer, I don't know.
Still, I can't only help but imagine how Intel's and AMD's ideas can only help everyone as a whole.
Before AMD bought ATI, ATI was doing a crappy job in a lot of areas. ATI cards have generally always had the better hardware, but for whatever reason, generally had some awful driver support. I still don't think their driver support is there yet. I believe their cards can do a whole lot more than what their drivers allow them to do. I'm only basing this off of what NVidia has historically had with their hardware, where they can do more with less.
But that's just driver support alone. I honestly can't express much opinion about the portability; I haven't tried it yet. It's just what I've read so far in new stories. Price and Performance, without owning the card yourself, the only thing you can rely on are benchmarks, and there's a lot to show that Radeon 4870 can keep its pace with NVidia's GTX 280.
Looking at Newegg, an HD4870 (not a HD4870X2 - not really worth it in price vs performance IMO), is around $280. The GTX280 is on average, $440. Now that you have the prices, you have the benchmarks, you can decide if what you've read about the portability is enough of a factor for you.
You are behind the times. ATI cards, as far as price vs performance, are spanking NVidia's cards with moon rocks. I think a big helping hand in that is that for whatever reason, AMD said to them, "make better drivers, or else!".
Also, AMD has gone the route of trying to be more open source friendly with their cards, more so than NVidia.
Currently, you just can't go wrong with owning a current generation Radeon card right now.
This is a common practice in the food industry. While there might be a few cases of people really not realize what they've bought for their consumers is the wrong stuff, by far and large, especially in the restaurant biz, they know it's not what they've claimed it to be.
Why do this do this? Profits of course! Charge $18 for a mahi meal and serve them cod or tilapia instead. The average persons taste buds aren't refined enough to know the difference.
I've been kindly asked to leave sushi places before when my "fresh super white tuna from Korea" tasted a lot like farm raised cod, which I rudely pointed out when the waitress asked me if "everything was ok". At least I got a somewhat free meal out of it!
And now that I think about it, all of the Sushi places I've been too, there's only been one or two places that actually served what they advertised. Hands down, best tasting sushi I will ever have.
Ultimately, I don't think this will change anything on the restaurant side. Grocery store side? Maybe. When you can make large profits from misrepresenting what you're selling and get away with it, the barcoding won't stop it. All it will do is help the honest business stay honest.
It doesn't matter how deep or absorbing the game can be. If the controls suck and it gives a bad first impression by not at the very least trying to marginally stay up to date with the looks, it's going to turn more people away than it would draw in.
It is possible to create a fun, deep, absorbing, and rewarding game even while you give clear direction (when necessary), and having controls that function in a way to enhance your experience (instead of hindering them). And you can even do this while keeping the looks somewhat up to date.
Graphical aspects can be somewhat forgiven, as not everyone has the abilities, talents, or money, to make things as graphically pleasing as possible. I understand this. However, if you're designing a game, your goal should be to make it as easy as possible to at the very least pick up and play. Mastering the game can be an entirely different story, however.
Paying for a game like "Depths of Peril". With any game, I play with the intent of having a fun experience that will make me want to go out and buy it. I always look at the price first to see if that price reflects a quality that I could tolerate. The game lacks a lot of visual polish, which made it very difficult for me to get into the game. The gameplay was also nothing new. Oh, and the website? looks like something I made in 1995. I have a rule of thumb with indie games, and it generally holds true. If the website looks like shit, the game probably looks and plays the same way.
I'm not trying to be a big time jerk here. I just couldn't get into the game. I looked at the keyboard menu and felt overwhelmed. I scanned it and it just made me say "what the fuck?". I tried playing the game and felt like I had no direction for any of the quests (a good tutorial would have helped here).
Essentially, I played better games on my NES that looked roughly the same. If I wanted to pay that kind of money for a game, I'd find one that had better quality put into it. At $10, Depths of Peril might feel fun.
I'm dismayed that AudioSurf wasn't on that list. Not that that game needs more help to make sales (STEAM has seen to that it sells well). It's just nice to see a list that actually recommends good games. I can't say this one has.
Yet somehow all of that extra fluff made it far less stable than 98. I remember my parents buying a new PC with ME on it. I'd fart, it would BSOD. I'd run a game for more than 2 seconds, it would crash. I'd breathe air, sure enough, it would crash! I quickly downgraded to 98SE for stability until I could get my hands on a pirated copy of 2k.
I don't agree that Vista does "more things right than XP", but a lot of that may just boil down to personal preferences (though I will sing praises about their installer from one mountain top to the next, it is that much better IMO). I honestly run into more issues on Vista than I did with XP, and I haven't done much differently. I, like many other gamers, bought Vista hoping that the DX10 upgrade would be worth all of the DRM hassle.
And while Microsoft might be releasing slower operating systems, I think that accepting it as the norm is bullshit. Microsoft has the resources to develop a feature rich OS that isn't resource intensive. Linux has some of the same features and it runs just fine on older hardware, but if you try to do some of those very things on Vista with older hardware, you're not going to get much luck.
If Microsoft wants us to keep swallowing these new operating systems, they need to remove the bloat, make them run faster, and please remove the DRM.
I'll be glad to help you move that large sum of money as long as you sign up to one of my websites that features girls with farm animals.
We can make a monster that affects your mobility, we can make a monster that has different kinds of attacks that are dangerous to you and that you actually have to avoid. And so it makes the combat a lot more interesting.
There were monsters that had attacks that could affect your mobility in Diablo II. There were certain attacks you really had to avoid unless you were in the top tier of players in Diablo II. It doesn't sound any different to the person who didn't try to pimp out their toon to the max so they could easily walk all over everything. And honestly, not everyone could, not with how the games economy was so horribly screwed over by the botters.
That's actually the basis for their entire argument, which is quite easy to debunk.
I fully understand the implications of said action. I'm just not particularly worried in this incident. They can *try* all they might to block TPB, but it won't work. Even if a few users are affected, there's so many torrent sites out there that it won't matter. Besides, there's always Tor.
While this certainly has a lot of terrible implications, those people could just use other torrent sites. The only reason TPB is being blocked here is because of their notoriety. I honestly can find my trackers easier using other bit torrent sites anyway. And what will Italy do once people get their TPB trackers from other sites?