The thing I think of as I read these Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD vs. whatever news article is how much of my money is going to go down the drain if I decide to be an early adapter, or how much time I'm going to waste searching for out of print copies on eBay if I wait until the winner is declared.
Bleh, I doubt it really matters. Neither Blu-Ray nor HD DVD will make crappy movies any better. Here's an idea! Give us a disc format that makes craptastic films palatable.
I officially nominate Robert Kotick for the annual Grand Master of the Obvious award. For mentioning something that has been obvious to gamers for the last twenty years or so.
There has to be a point missing from what Tor Thorsen wrote. Why did such a topic come up at a Bank of America Investment Conference of all places? Was Robert Kotick trying to dissuade investors from investing in Atari 2600 E.T. games or something? Microsoft and Sony are such massive companies that you can't very well just buy stock just on console performance and Nintendo doesn't sell their stock in the U.S. market. Is this a lame attempt to convince investors to invest in Activision with such a painfully obvious statement?
Most products drop in price when a newer or more desirable product hits the market. It's such a fact of life (at least in the U.S. noting the Japan statement elsewhere) that I could only imagine such a statement from someone who haven't been around any evolving consumer market for the last hundred years or so. The second lesson I ever learned about the gaming market were the price drops after new consoles were released. How to pop a quarter into an arcade machine being the first.
In other words, Valve was in no way obligated to give me those things, even though I had given them $50.
That is the kind of mentality that disgusts me about the Valve community. People act like Valve is the second coming of Christ or something.
Over the years, I've paid roughly $280 into the Half-Life franchise. This includes my purchase of the original version of Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Half-Life 2 and Gunman (even though GC is not technically a part of Half-Life). Under normal conditions, I would have multiple, viable, copies of some of these games due to the way they've been packaged. With Steam, I lose all of that.
Valve has a habit of, "joining," existing accounts to new purchases. Therefor, if I already have a copy of HL registered on Steam, I don't get a second viable copy if I buy the Gold/Silver package. http://www.steampowered.com/ clearly states I get the back catalogue, yet what happens if I already have a copy of it? Does Valve give you a second copy? Nope, not at all. People pay $80 for what? HL2 and crap port versions of HL:S and CS:S?
Until gamers figure out that Steam hurts gamers, be sure you have a lot of lube.
I've never understood why anyone would actually like Steam. Some of the biggest annoyances about Steam have already been pointed out, the requirement for a viable online connection and the requirement to download updates.
I'm not happy about handing over my bandwidth to a service that really doesn't serve me anything. Yippie, it can download patches automatically. I still have to wait for those patches to come through the wire regardless of whether or not I get them via Steam or via File Planet. The only difference being that when I download from a site, I can still play the game (at a minimum, in Single Player mode). Steam doesn't always let me do that, so I end up waiting while Steam downloads a, "necessary," patch.
To add insult to injury, some of the Steam patches have proven to be a joke. I'm surprised how many gamers have very short term memory. Gamers wow at how the patches come in automatically. It seems to me that most gamers don't remember how Valve released a patch through Steam, then had to turn around and recall the patch due to some ridiculous bug that should never had made it past testing. The gist of it is, with Steams ability to apply and remove patches at the whim of the developers, Valve has gotten slack in testing their patches to ensure glaring bugs are squashed.
Now visualize the same situation on the XBox 360 or whatever. You pop in your DVD (or whatever medium you use) and you can't launch a game because someone at Valve screwed up and sent out a patch that didn't work. Yeah, I'm going to be getting rid of that game pretty quick
I bought a PC knowing that I would deal with patches, downtime and other operational gaming hazards. I bought my consoles knowing that all I need to do is pop in a disc, check the battery on my wireless controllers, and destroy a few brain cells while I play. I really have no interest in buying a console when I'm going to be dealing with all the crap that comes with a PC. Might as well hack the console and install Linux if all I'm going to be doing is downloading and installing patches for it.
I don't really know a whole lot about human biology, but isn't glucose somewhat important to the human body? So when you start adding a whole lot of.... accessories that draw power using this method, couldn't that cause some sort of glucose deficiency? In other words, what are the long term effects of yanking electrons off the glucose in the human body? Would we all eventually gain the ability to throw of shocks of lightning like a Vortigaunt as the body attempts to maintain an electrical balance?
"If you remember your history from the film Demolition Man you would know that it would be a Taco Bell Battlecruiser in the future."
You don't realize how close Doritos and Taco Bell really are. Taco Bell was part of the Tricon Food Group which recently renamed themselves to Yum!. Yum!, "spun off," from PepsiCo in the late 90's. I think at the time of the seperation, Tricon consisted of only three chains, Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. It's up to six or so now.
Meanwhile, everyone knows Doritos just happens to be owned by PepsiCo
It's kind of hard to write this without turning it into some kind of senseless rant:(... oh well.
This is just the first step in a really fine line the developers and advertisements are trying to find. In my opinion, advertisements have gotten way out of control. For example, in my old High School there's a subtle form of advertisement where Coca-Cola gave our school a certain percentage of profit from a bunch of soda machines located around campus. I didn't realize the impact of this when I found out that our school actually had a quota to meet every month before the school could receive their cut. Yep, fat kids just so the school can pay their bills.
OK, so it's not like AO is suffering for cash with their subscribers. It's fairly explicit the advertisements are displayed to non-paying, "customers." But wait! What's this?
Even with atmosphere breaking marketing, would any players actually complain about ads if they resulted in lowered or free subscription costs?
There are two key points in that sentence. The first is the author admits the ads break the atmosphere of the game. Honestly, imagine running around Diablo II and seeing Pepsi soda machines out in the middle of nowhere? Or playing a game that takes place 500 years into the future and flying a, "Doritos Battlecruiser," into a fight? Free or not, I'll go somewhere else, thank you.
The other point he brings up is how players might not complain if the costs are reduced or even removed. If some random company starts putting advertisements into their MMOG, they might not actually lower fees or even make it free for everybody. Subscribe to Cable TV and you'll see what I mean. For example, Cable TV is always loaded with advertisements. I pay $45/month and I still get the same number of advertisements as I would if I didn't pay any money at all. Only difference would be fewer channels to watch. Hell, I'd have to be paying $100/month or more to even hope of getting any channels advert free.
AO might keep this current model. Who knows? But I have serious doubts that other MMOG's or future ones will follow suit. Freebie accounts might have these ugly advertisements. Paid accounts might have more subtle ones, or ones you can control. The point is, the idea of paying cash to get rid of advertisements isn't going to last very long once you have that captive audience and some bean counter figures out how much more profit the company will earn.
If I'm in a game, I'd rather live without the ads. I don't want to be kicking some alien ass in Duke Nukem Forever in a sea of redundant Coca-Cola and McDonalds ads 20 years from now. I get enough of those adverts in real life.
Tom's Hardware was the primary reason I stopped reading his site... er....
Let me clarify, A long time ago, during the BH6 heydays, I used to read Tom's Hardware almost religiously. I scarfed down every article with near fever, trying to stay on top of the latest hardware reviews. Then I got stupid and started dating, so I ignored Ol' Tom for a few years. When my other half and I broke up, I started digging into the hardware scene again, so I went back to Tom's to get up to speed.
A few articles into it, I realized the, "feel," of the articles changed. There didn't seem to be as much useful, practical, information in them anymore. They didn't have any interesting opinions on the hardware being reviewed. In fact, I don't think I found an article that was harshly negative in any way. Nor did I find any articles with useful grit-in-your-teeth information. Initially, I thought the, "neutralism," being presented in the articles were because of the close tolerances of the hardware being reviewed. I mean overclocking a 333MHz CPU to 450MHz had greater net results than overclocking the more modern CPU's now. But I put my faith in Tom, because it's supposed to be the best. After all, his site does say:
Tom's Hardware Guide readers have come to rely on the site for unbiased and authoritative articles on the products....
So who was I to argue with that?
I just can't put my finger on what, exactly, Tom is missing. As near as I can figure, Tom's Hardware reviews read too much like brochures. It's just enough to try and get a person interested. But whatever it is, it's enough to prevent me from utilizing his site for anything more than keeping track of the latest hardware. Nowadays, if I want real hard and honest opinions, I just hop on over to my favorite forum/BBS/IRC/whatever and sort through the flamefests to get a feel for a particular piece of hardwares viability.
Retired USC professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems, Melvin Breuer, died in his home due to a faulty pacemaker.
Shock rang out through the computing industry as the the Breuer family attempt to lay blame on the faulty pacemaker against the manufacture. Astute Slashdot readers have stepped forward with evidence of papers written by Melvin Breuer showing the professor as an advocate for the use of low-cost faulty computer chips in consumer electronics.
Unfortunately, the research did not forsee the consequence of allowing flawed chips onto the global market. An investigation reveals the manufacturer of the pacemaker purchased the pacemaker chips from an overseas source. The foreign company purchased low grade chips earmarked for exclusive use in consumer audio and graphics, and resold them as perfect chips to be used in mission critical applications, such as pacemakers.
Hundreds of manufacturers have initiated recalls on thousands of mission critical consumer and industrial products that have used chips from the foreign supplier, ranging from pacemakers to automobiles to net enabled teddy bears.
Ok, the way I'm interpreting, "more sophisticated forms," is more hours spent trying to code websites to be compatible across different browsers. More hours spent adding and debugging code to check for the existence of support for a particular, "standard." More hours spent writing parallel code for users who support the new, "standard," and for users who don't. As well as yet another access point for virus writers to potentially exploit.
I like pretty forms to look at as much as the next user, but I'd rather have a fast loading site that gets me the information and products I want instead of having to deal with yet another pointless error message. I'm sure sites like eBay and Amazon might adapt this new specification, but not without using parallel code for those users with browsers who don't support it yet.
The same question keeps popping up about Half-Life 2 and Steam. By all rights, once we buy a game, we should be able to sell it to another person if we don't want the game. With Half-Life 2, anyone can buy the CD/DVD in the store and that same person can turn around and sell it to Joe Blow after they're done playing. Unfortunately, for Joe Blow, he's screwed, and the original person can keep on playing.
Valve tries to compensate by allowing you to send in $10 and some information. But, in the long run, you're boned either way.
This kind of thing is going to keep cropping up over and over as companies like Valve and Blizzard test just how far they can abuse consumers. With such a young, unknowledgeable and apathetic targetted market group, it's just going to get worse until someone looks over the EULA and finds some way to sue the companies.
Like someone once mentioned, companies simply don't like us selling our used games once we're done. I think there was even a lawsuit a long time ago about the used market for CD's. The premise was that since the CD's don't wear out like cartridges, that they are considered, "like-new," condition and the companies should receive their cut of the profits. That would mean that I would have to give a cut of the profits to American Greetings every time I purchased a MIB Strawberry Shortcake Doll from eBay. Damn flawed logic if you ask me.
The forums now seem to have imploded under the strain of complaints.
How is this a surprise? When Half-Life 2 was finally released, Valve employees and the moderators at the Steam Powered forums actually disabled the forum due to the onslaught of complaints. It was left up to fan forums like Planet Half-Life to take the complaints. Even though none of the fan forums can do anything to help. I believe that first time, Valve claimed their servers can't handle the load. That's kind of puzzling considering the kind of money Valve is pulling in. Now, not for the last time, Valve and the Steam forums has shrinked away from their angry customers and shoved the load onto other forums.
This kind of behavior is just a tip of the iceberg. They've done all sorts of things to piss off the community. Granted, the community at large hasn't been very kind to Valve Software (remember ANON?). But, Valve created the very community that they're fighting now. What did they expect? They got their money, now the community wants their game. Come Hell or Bill Gates, community is going to get it.
I can not think of a single profession where there is a similar situation.
I can think of several. My brother is a mechanic who works on cars like Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari, etc. Even from the very beginning of his career, he has always been required to purchase his own tools. This gets really expensive when you have to buy specialty tools that are for a specific make and model of a car.
A friend of mine is a DJ for a popular local strip club. He's required to have his own music and his own equipment (to jack into the club sound system).
I think it depends entirely on the relationship between employer and employee. If I went into a company with the understanding that I was going to be hired as an outside contractor, then that makes sense to have your own, "tools." You would take your tools with you when you leave. But if a company hires you as a salaried or hourly employee, then the usual expectation is the company would supply you with what you need to do the job. If the company hires you with the understanding that they would supply you the tools, then suddenly do an about face and say that you must buy/pay for those tools, then something is wrong.
I agree with the others here, something is wrong with the company. You might want to start looking for another job.
Well.... I suppose you could do that, but are all CCFL lamps the same?
I honestly don't know the answer since I don't have any LCD screens just sitting around the house. But keeping an old LCD for the CCFL sounds pack ratting. It's like keeping that box of mysterious screws that you just keep adding to, but never actually using. You've got a pile of screws in that box, but not one of them is ever actually useful when the time comes that you actually need to use one.
One has to wonder why Valve seems to be spending so much time on Steam. I've seen previous comments speculating that the reason Valve is delaying HL2 is to work on getting Steam 100% correct.
I would imagine that this is a somewhat correct assumption. I once had a copy of a Steam PowerPoint presentation (Dead link, send me a message if you happen to have a copy of it.) that pretty much stated that Valve was going to use Steam, and it's DRM related design, to force markets like Asia to pay up for their copies. Knowing that, everything else with Steams design is merely a consequence of its nature.
Think about it. If you strip away all the things that many pro-Steam users cite as advantages of Steam that is also unique to Steam, you're not left with a whole hell of a lot to work with.
For example; Automatic updates: So what? That was what Sierra Utilities was originally meant for. Of course, it was terrible since the FTP server in question was always full or down. But that didn't mean there couldn't be another non-DRM attempt.
Content (Game) delivery: Am I the only one that remembers the RealPlayer network offering of downloadable TFC?
New GUI: Like this couldn't be done with the old version?
Includes VAC: I swear everytime this lame argument pops up, they pretend the WON version never had VAC... ever.
I could go on and on about all these, "features," of Steam and how they've could have been done in other ways. But once you boil it all down, it's really another noose that's prettied up with cute little pink flowers that someone is trying to tie around our collective necks.
I've had a cached URL to overclocking your Genesis/Mega Drive for a long time. Unfortunately, it's in Japanese and Babel Fish makes it really tough to understand technical instructions.
I wonder if the author of the article at Epic Gaming read the Japanese article and got the idea from there?
It wouldn't matter if someone went up and brought the diamond back. As soon as you send it to the jewelers to be mapped and evaluated, they'll just swap it out for another, lesser quality, diamond without you even knowing.
I say leave it in place. We could shave off the first 30 miles of top layer and shine a giant laser at it for the largest intergalactic network ever known to man. Since it would take light 50 years to travel to the planet, Half-Life 2 should be just about ready to play by then.
On that business about the Cyveillance bot being ill behaved. Did anybody else find it strange that they use a robots.txt and their contact information is a free yahoo.com address?
I guess it's OK for Cyveillance to harass everyone else, but we're not to harass them.:-\
Slashdot Mirror
The thing I think of as I read these Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD vs. whatever news article is how much of my money is going to go down the drain if I decide to be an early adapter, or how much time I'm going to waste searching for out of print copies on eBay if I wait until the winner is declared.
Bleh, I doubt it really matters. Neither Blu-Ray nor HD DVD will make crappy movies any better. Here's an idea! Give us a disc format that makes craptastic films palatable.
I officially nominate Robert Kotick for the annual Grand Master of the Obvious award. For mentioning something that has been obvious to gamers for the last twenty years or so.
There has to be a point missing from what Tor Thorsen wrote. Why did such a topic come up at a Bank of America Investment Conference of all places? Was Robert Kotick trying to dissuade investors from investing in Atari 2600 E.T. games or something? Microsoft and Sony are such massive companies that you can't very well just buy stock just on console performance and Nintendo doesn't sell their stock in the U.S. market. Is this a lame attempt to convince investors to invest in Activision with such a painfully obvious statement?
Most products drop in price when a newer or more desirable product hits the market. It's such a fact of life (at least in the U.S. noting the Japan statement elsewhere) that I could only imagine such a statement from someone who haven't been around any evolving consumer market for the last hundred years or so. The second lesson I ever learned about the gaming market were the price drops after new consoles were released. How to pop a quarter into an arcade machine being the first.
That is the kind of mentality that disgusts me about the Valve community. People act like Valve is the second coming of Christ or something.
Over the years, I've paid roughly $280 into the Half-Life franchise. This includes my purchase of the original version of Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Half-Life 2 and Gunman (even though GC is not technically a part of Half-Life). Under normal conditions, I would have multiple, viable, copies of some of these games due to the way they've been packaged. With Steam, I lose all of that.
Valve has a habit of, "joining," existing accounts to new purchases. Therefor, if I already have a copy of HL registered on Steam, I don't get a second viable copy if I buy the Gold/Silver package. http://www.steampowered.com/ clearly states I get the back catalogue, yet what happens if I already have a copy of it? Does Valve give you a second copy? Nope, not at all. People pay $80 for what? HL2 and crap port versions of HL:S and CS:S?
Until gamers figure out that Steam hurts gamers, be sure you have a lot of lube.
I've never understood why anyone would actually like Steam. Some of the biggest annoyances about Steam have already been pointed out, the requirement for a viable online connection and the requirement to download updates.
I'm not happy about handing over my bandwidth to a service that really doesn't serve me anything. Yippie, it can download patches automatically. I still have to wait for those patches to come through the wire regardless of whether or not I get them via Steam or via File Planet. The only difference being that when I download from a site, I can still play the game (at a minimum, in Single Player mode). Steam doesn't always let me do that, so I end up waiting while Steam downloads a, "necessary," patch.
To add insult to injury, some of the Steam patches have proven to be a joke. I'm surprised how many gamers have very short term memory. Gamers wow at how the patches come in automatically. It seems to me that most gamers don't remember how Valve released a patch through Steam, then had to turn around and recall the patch due to some ridiculous bug that should never had made it past testing. The gist of it is, with Steams ability to apply and remove patches at the whim of the developers, Valve has gotten slack in testing their patches to ensure glaring bugs are squashed.
Now visualize the same situation on the XBox 360 or whatever. You pop in your DVD (or whatever medium you use) and you can't launch a game because someone at Valve screwed up and sent out a patch that didn't work. Yeah, I'm going to be getting rid of that game pretty quick
I bought a PC knowing that I would deal with patches, downtime and other operational gaming hazards. I bought my consoles knowing that all I need to do is pop in a disc, check the battery on my wireless controllers, and destroy a few brain cells while I play. I really have no interest in buying a console when I'm going to be dealing with all the crap that comes with a PC. Might as well hack the console and install Linux if all I'm going to be doing is downloading and installing patches for it.
I don't really know a whole lot about human biology, but isn't glucose somewhat important to the human body? So when you start adding a whole lot of.... accessories that draw power using this method, couldn't that cause some sort of glucose deficiency? In other words, what are the long term effects of yanking electrons off the glucose in the human body? Would we all eventually gain the ability to throw of shocks of lightning like a Vortigaunt as the body attempts to maintain an electrical balance?
You don't realize how close Doritos and Taco Bell really are. Taco Bell was part of the Tricon Food Group which recently renamed themselves to Yum!. Yum!, "spun off," from PepsiCo in the late 90's. I think at the time of the seperation, Tricon consisted of only three chains, Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. It's up to six or so now.
Meanwhile, everyone knows Doritos just happens to be owned by PepsiCo
It's kind of hard to write this without turning it into some kind of senseless rant :(... oh well.
This is just the first step in a really fine line the developers and advertisements are trying to find. In my opinion, advertisements have gotten way out of control. For example, in my old High School there's a subtle form of advertisement where Coca-Cola gave our school a certain percentage of profit from a bunch of soda machines located around campus. I didn't realize the impact of this when I found out that our school actually had a quota to meet every month before the school could receive their cut. Yep, fat kids just so the school can pay their bills.
OK, so it's not like AO is suffering for cash with their subscribers. It's fairly explicit the advertisements are displayed to non-paying, "customers." But wait! What's this?
There are two key points in that sentence. The first is the author admits the ads break the atmosphere of the game. Honestly, imagine running around Diablo II and seeing Pepsi soda machines out in the middle of nowhere? Or playing a game that takes place 500 years into the future and flying a, "Doritos Battlecruiser," into a fight? Free or not, I'll go somewhere else, thank you.
The other point he brings up is how players might not complain if the costs are reduced or even removed. If some random company starts putting advertisements into their MMOG, they might not actually lower fees or even make it free for everybody. Subscribe to Cable TV and you'll see what I mean. For example, Cable TV is always loaded with advertisements. I pay $45/month and I still get the same number of advertisements as I would if I didn't pay any money at all. Only difference would be fewer channels to watch. Hell, I'd have to be paying $100/month or more to even hope of getting any channels advert free.
AO might keep this current model. Who knows? But I have serious doubts that other MMOG's or future ones will follow suit. Freebie accounts might have these ugly advertisements. Paid accounts might have more subtle ones, or ones you can control. The point is, the idea of paying cash to get rid of advertisements isn't going to last very long once you have that captive audience and some bean counter figures out how much more profit the company will earn.
If I'm in a game, I'd rather live without the ads. I don't want to be kicking some alien ass in Duke Nukem Forever in a sea of redundant Coca-Cola and McDonalds ads 20 years from now. I get enough of those adverts in real life.
~SavannahLion
Tom's Hardware was the primary reason I stopped reading his site... er....
Let me clarify, A long time ago, during the BH6 heydays, I used to read Tom's Hardware almost religiously. I scarfed down every article with near fever, trying to stay on top of the latest hardware reviews. Then I got stupid and started dating, so I ignored Ol' Tom for a few years. When my other half and I broke up, I started digging into the hardware scene again, so I went back to Tom's to get up to speed.
A few articles into it, I realized the, "feel," of the articles changed. There didn't seem to be as much useful, practical, information in them anymore. They didn't have any interesting opinions on the hardware being reviewed. In fact, I don't think I found an article that was harshly negative in any way. Nor did I find any articles with useful grit-in-your-teeth information. Initially, I thought the, "neutralism," being presented in the articles were because of the close tolerances of the hardware being reviewed. I mean overclocking a 333MHz CPU to 450MHz had greater net results than overclocking the more modern CPU's now. But I put my faith in Tom, because it's supposed to be the best. After all, his site does say:
So who was I to argue with that?
I just can't put my finger on what, exactly, Tom is missing. As near as I can figure, Tom's Hardware reviews read too much like brochures. It's just enough to try and get a person interested. But whatever it is, it's enough to prevent me from utilizing his site for anything more than keeping track of the latest hardware. Nowadays, if I want real hard and honest opinions, I just hop on over to my favorite forum/BBS/IRC/whatever and sort through the flamefests to get a feel for a particular piece of hardwares viability.
19 March 2020
Retired USC professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems, Melvin Breuer, died in his home due to a faulty pacemaker.
Shock rang out through the computing industry as the the Breuer family attempt to lay blame on the faulty pacemaker against the manufacture. Astute Slashdot readers have stepped forward with evidence of papers written by Melvin Breuer showing the professor as an advocate for the use of low-cost faulty computer chips in consumer electronics.
Unfortunately, the research did not forsee the consequence of allowing flawed chips onto the global market. An investigation reveals the manufacturer of the pacemaker purchased the pacemaker chips from an overseas source. The foreign company purchased low grade chips earmarked for exclusive use in consumer audio and graphics, and resold them as perfect chips to be used in mission critical applications, such as pacemakers.
Hundreds of manufacturers have initiated recalls on thousands of mission critical consumer and industrial products that have used chips from the foreign supplier, ranging from pacemakers to automobiles to net enabled teddy bears.
Ok, the way I'm interpreting, "more sophisticated forms," is more hours spent trying to code websites to be compatible across different browsers. More hours spent adding and debugging code to check for the existence of support for a particular, "standard." More hours spent writing parallel code for users who support the new, "standard," and for users who don't. As well as yet another access point for virus writers to potentially exploit.
I like pretty forms to look at as much as the next user, but I'd rather have a fast loading site that gets me the information and products I want instead of having to deal with yet another pointless error message. I'm sure sites like eBay and Amazon might adapt this new specification, but not without using parallel code for those users with browsers who don't support it yet.
The same question keeps popping up about Half-Life 2 and Steam. By all rights, once we buy a game, we should be able to sell it to another person if we don't want the game. With Half-Life 2, anyone can buy the CD/DVD in the store and that same person can turn around and sell it to Joe Blow after they're done playing. Unfortunately, for Joe Blow, he's screwed, and the original person can keep on playing.
Valve tries to compensate by allowing you to send in $10 and some information. But, in the long run, you're boned either way.
This kind of thing is going to keep cropping up over and over as companies like Valve and Blizzard test just how far they can abuse consumers. With such a young, unknowledgeable and apathetic targetted market group, it's just going to get worse until someone looks over the EULA and finds some way to sue the companies.
Like someone once mentioned, companies simply don't like us selling our used games once we're done. I think there was even a lawsuit a long time ago about the used market for CD's. The premise was that since the CD's don't wear out like cartridges, that they are considered, "like-new," condition and the companies should receive their cut of the profits. That would mean that I would have to give a cut of the profits to American Greetings every time I purchased a MIB Strawberry Shortcake Doll from eBay. Damn flawed logic if you ask me.
The forums now seem to have imploded under the strain of complaints.
How is this a surprise? When Half-Life 2 was finally released, Valve employees and the moderators at the Steam Powered forums actually disabled the forum due to the onslaught of complaints. It was left up to fan forums like Planet Half-Life to take the complaints. Even though none of the fan forums can do anything to help. I believe that first time, Valve claimed their servers can't handle the load. That's kind of puzzling considering the kind of money Valve is pulling in. Now, not for the last time, Valve and the Steam forums has shrinked away from their angry customers and shoved the load onto other forums.
This kind of behavior is just a tip of the iceberg. They've done all sorts of things to piss off the community. Granted, the community at large hasn't been very kind to Valve Software (remember ANON?). But, Valve created the very community that they're fighting now. What did they expect? They got their money, now the community wants their game. Come Hell or Bill Gates, community is going to get it.
Valve software is even on record at the BBB.
I can think of several. My brother is a mechanic who works on cars like Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari, etc. Even from the very beginning of his career, he has always been required to purchase his own tools. This gets really expensive when you have to buy specialty tools that are for a specific make and model of a car.
A friend of mine is a DJ for a popular local strip club. He's required to have his own music and his own equipment (to jack into the club sound system).
I think it depends entirely on the relationship between employer and employee. If I went into a company with the understanding that I was going to be hired as an outside contractor, then that makes sense to have your own, "tools." You would take your tools with you when you leave. But if a company hires you as a salaried or hourly employee, then the usual expectation is the company would supply you with what you need to do the job. If the company hires you with the understanding that they would supply you the tools, then suddenly do an about face and say that you must buy/pay for those tools, then something is wrong.
I agree with the others here, something is wrong with the company. You might want to start looking for another job.
I honestly don't know the answer since I don't have any LCD screens just sitting around the house. But keeping an old LCD for the CCFL sounds pack ratting. It's like keeping that box of mysterious screws that you just keep adding to, but never actually using. You've got a pile of screws in that box, but not one of them is ever actually useful when the time comes that you actually need to use one.
I would imagine that this is a somewhat correct assumption. I once had a copy of a Steam PowerPoint presentation (Dead link, send me a message if you happen to have a copy of it.) that pretty much stated that Valve was going to use Steam, and it's DRM related design, to force markets like Asia to pay up for their copies. Knowing that, everything else with Steams design is merely a consequence of its nature.
Think about it. If you strip away all the things that many pro-Steam users cite as advantages of Steam that is also unique to Steam, you're not left with a whole hell of a lot to work with.
For example;
Automatic updates: So what? That was what Sierra Utilities was originally meant for. Of course, it was terrible since the FTP server in question was always full or down. But that didn't mean there couldn't be another non-DRM attempt.
Content (Game) delivery: Am I the only one that remembers the RealPlayer network offering of downloadable TFC?
New GUI: Like this couldn't be done with the old version?
Includes VAC: I swear everytime this lame argument pops up, they pretend the WON version never had VAC... ever.
I could go on and on about all these, "features," of Steam and how they've could have been done in other ways. But once you boil it all down, it's really another noose that's prettied up with cute little pink flowers that someone is trying to tie around our collective necks.
I wonder if the author of the article at Epic Gaming read the Japanese article and got the idea from there?
It wouldn't matter if someone went up and brought the diamond back. As soon as you send it to the jewelers to be mapped and evaluated, they'll just swap it out for another, lesser quality, diamond without you even knowing.
I say leave it in place. We could shave off the first 30 miles of top layer and shine a giant laser at it for the largest intergalactic network ever known to man. Since it would take light 50 years to travel to the planet, Half-Life 2 should be just about ready to play by then.I guess it's OK for Cyveillance to harass everyone else, but we're not to harass them. :-\
Simply because Valve hasn't released any Steam servers for us to publicly use.