And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If every member of the OHA commits all of its changes back to Android then we'll have a fairly homogenized Android market. What would the handset companies be competing over? A better camera? More storage? If it's fast enough the user experience will be pretty damn similar across the board and would end up hurting Android. Of course this can go too far like locking a phone to only use signed code. It's a balancing act.
I'm not sure what country you are from, but in the US not everyone pays unemployment insurance. About 8 months ago I lost my job and after applying for unemployment and going through several phone conversations I was denied since my job class didn't pay into UI and didn't qualify. I can think of only two job classes that don't pay into UI, select state-defined jobs and self-employed. I worked at a university and now I am a "consultant". So I don't get unemployment at all. Then again my friend worked in construction and was laid off in December of '08 and they just decided to extend his unemployment benefits again.
I also find it interesting that the TFS mentions "...excessive collaboration..." as a form of cheating. Considering many CS students will graduate and get jobs as some type of programmer I would think collaboration would be a really good thing to impart on students. Granted this is a computer science degree and not a software engineering degree, but I personally know my university treated it more like the latter, and I'm sure this happens in many other universities. Even if it were taught more like a proper CS degree collaboration is still something that should be required to learn. The most collaboration I ever did was with three other people in a software engineering course.
I also did a major in mathematics in college. In contrast with the exception of first year courses like calculus you were always encouraged to work on problems together. Most of my classes were small enough (8 people or less) that the entire class including the instructor worked on the problems. Of course in math your grade was 50% homework and 50% exams. So even if you worked on problems as a group and just took the answers without contributing, you would still fail the class since exams were worth so much (and a C- and under is failing).
I agree that true CS curriculum requires a lot more critical thought, it's actually largely a subfield of math, but that's not what a lot of CS students get. I know I didn't.
I generally consider Starsiege: Tribes a very influential game in the FPS genre. Up until that point for the most part FPS games were rather cramped and multiplayer was rather limited in size. Tribes introduced wide open terrain, seamless transition between interior and exterior portions of a map, vehicles, and cooperative team play on an extremely large scale[1]. Games after, notably the Battlefield series picked up on this and really popularized these concepts. Even Halo was inspired partly by Tribes[2]. Today most games support these basic features, but in 1998 it was extremely impressive. I can't say for sure whether Tribes was the first to do any of this, I'm sure someone did before, but it was popular enough to grab the attention of other developers. Unfortunately it wasn't popular enough to establish a stable sub-genre which is generally called the FPS+Z genre[3]; most likely this was due to the gameplay complexity that was introduced by this game. Still, this game should make it to more top game lists.
Another game which may belong on this list in a few years is Achron which is a time traveling based RTS. I doubt this game will become largely popular, however the concept is simply fantastic and shows a lot of thought towards mixing the genre up a bit. Perhaps it shouldn't be labeled a Real Time Strategy game, perhaps Meta Time Strategy game would be more accurate.
[1]I think the max server size was 64 upon release in 1998, although it could have been 128. It's been a long time.
[2]I'd have to find the commentary. I don't remember if it was on a web site, in a magazine, or what.
[3]Tribes had a jet pack and by "skiing" players could attain incredible speeds.
Not quite. They're talking about water ice here. Water ice is less dense than liquid water. So 600 million metric tons of water ice = 600 billion kilograms of water ice = 6.52 x 10^11 liters of water ice.
I know what you were trying to say, but it doesn't work for water ice, just liquid water. Just thought I'd correct that minor mistake;).
This is the third person I've seen use the word "streamlined" to describe ME2. The mere fact that this game has limited ship fuel, limited probes, and manual planet scanning completely negates the description of "streamlined".
I'd actually like to point out that that picture is somewhat misleading. The first few pages always show who is currently in game (and admins I believe who are offline in that picture), the next few pages show those who are online but not in any game, and the remainder of the pages show those who are offline. If you took that group as a sample, a rather large sample, then 19/833 ~ 2.8% are playing CoD:MW2. Even then this percentage isn't a true representation of how many people out of the group ended up buying the game. Like I said, that picture is a bit misleading. I'd be interested in the percentage of people who bought the game after boycotting it though; I'm willing to bet it's quite high.
Even those who complain about things are still playing it full force.
I just find this sad personally. I think it was a bad idea for them to not include things like modding and dedicated servers and I haven't bought or even rented the game for the console. Note that I always knew the game would be a blockbuster hit, I just disagree with the route they're taking. It saddens me that people who said they would not buy the game did anyway. People need to grow a backbone.
It's also nice that you can just jump in to the game (without friends, or with them in same lobby - you always get to same side and see each others with different color on radar and name). No need to hunt for different servers which can be crappy. Yes, there are host migrations and other stupid things sometimes, but the easiness to just jump in to the game outweights them. I'm not a serious gamer and neither are majority of people.
The ability to jump in and out of a game is always good. Personally I always found communities I enjoyed through trial and error and generally stuck around. Until just recently I even helped run a rather large one in my free time.
I see it as a trade-off. With the type of system in Modern Warfare 2 you don't really get the same communal feeling as you do with dedicated servers, you just don't. I know the whole friends list thing tries to rectify this, but it's not really the same. However, it's very easy to start the game and start playing without having to deal with empty servers and poorly run communities. I personally value strong communities that I can help out. It's really just a matter of taste.
This doesn't make sense. You aren't going to beat a great and popular movie that costs $15 with a mediocre or bad game that costs $60. The higher priced product also has to be good, which MW2 definitely is.
To my understanding consoles have a licensing cost when you develop games for it where as the PC does not. I don't know how much truth there is to this, but a lot of people felt the extra $10 for console games was because of this and they questioned why the PC version needed a $10 price hike. However, I'm sure MW2 was ludicrously expensive to produce, so it may have been required.
No they don't. Me and almost all of my friends play it on PC because of keyboard and mouse. And to tell the truth, I rather don't see so much tweaking and mods by the users and get all stupid doom and quake sounds or no gravity when I join the server. I like the game the way IW made it.
This is where I'm going to disagree a lot. First of all you don't need to use a mouse and keyboard, you could have easily just used a controller on a 360 for the same experience. You prefer playing games with a mouse and keyboard, the same way that a lot - but by no means the majority - of people prefer to have custom content and the ability to generate it themselves. Just because you and your friends don't personally enjoy such things doesn't mean other people don't either. It's a personal preference and you really have no right saying what everyone should like.
Second it's not just minor game tweaks[1]. It's a whole range of things. Custom maps[2], models, sounds, gametypes, small modifications, and total conversions. You may think nothing interesting comes from modding but I'd disagree. Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Red Orchestra, Killing Floor and Insurgency to name a few. The first two morphed into commercial games with very, very large player bases, the two after also went commercial.
I actually enjoy playing unmodified games as well. My all time favorite multiplayer FPS, Starsiege: Tribes, was exceedingly modifiable. People are still modifying it to this day. Even with all of the mods I still prefer playing base. However, I play a lot of custom maps and a few custom gametypes. Some of the best competition maps for that game were custom content. I'd also like t
I don't think it's necessarily piracy, I just think consoles are more profitable than the PC. As someone above you mentioned, the Xbox is a closed platform. Most of my friends are console gamers and they buy a lot of DLC. I'm a PC gamer myself and I just can't justify the cost of the DLC (on top of the $60 price tag for the console game) when I generally get that stuff for free on the PC or through modifications, community maps, etc...
Now I'm not saying I'm entitled to lots of free stuff, I've just always enjoyed this aspect of PC gaming. I think generally developers favor consoles more because they can make more money through things like paid DLC and map packs.
Assuming for a moment that this sample size of 21 people, 11 of which are playing MW2, is an accurate representation of the total population (it probably isn't) there's still a few problems. Just like in the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott group I'm sure there were people who supported the game and were not boycotting it but were a part of the group*. That's sort of like presenting the chance for a male to get cancer and including the results from women in the calculations. Even if this isn't the case there's still a sampling bias. Steam groups are organized by Administrators, In-Game Persons, Online Persons, and Offline Persons if I remember correctly, feel free to correct me. That picture shows the first 21 members of the first page which shows the admin and the people in-game. This isn't a very random sample of this (sub)population.
I've seen this picture thrown around quite a bit and it irritates me. Not because I think the boycott worked, given the Steam statistics I'm pretty sure it didn't, but because the picture is quite disingenuous.
* The group is invite only now, I'm pretty sure it wasn't earlier, but I could be wrong.
Last time I was at the Luxor in Las Vegas I played a few hands of Blackjack. They were using continuous auto-shufflers and the cards were shuffled after every single hand. I believe they only used a couple of decks, though it's been about a year since I saw this. I haven't seen it in any other casino after that, although I rarely gamble.
And people in the USA can also download as much as they want without paying the blank media levies. So it appears as though in this instance the USA is better. Don't get me wrong, the copyright laws in the US have a lot of problems, but a lot of the first world countries tends to follow along with them to a similar degree.
Are you sure decapping failed here? Without any other sources to go by than the article it seems that the decapping was a success despite what the summary says.
Even decapping the CPU had failed previously...
There was great news in the GB scene a short while ago, when Neviksti from CherryRom forums announced that he had been able to extract the BIOS image from the original GameBoy by decapping the chip, staining the ROM, and using a really powerful microscope to individually resolve and read out each bit one by one.
I've had similar experiences. I actually bought the 12" PowerBook quite a while ago. I never had any trouble with that laptop and I found it to be incredibly rugged. The hard drive went bad after a few years of abuse and I replaced it and it still works today, despite the copious amounts of dings, dents, and scratches I've inflicted on it. I'm sorry to hear you didn't have the same experience I did with the PowerBook.
However, a while back I bought a 13" MacBook. I really don't like large laptops and at the time the 13" MacBook Pro wasn't on the market. A few months after I got it the hard drive basically died on me. After quite a lot of work searching error codes and doing general research I determined that this was the cause. I don't remember exactly, but I believe you get 3 months of AppleCare Protection or whatever when you buy Mac from them. I believe four or five months had passed since I bought it, so I wasn't covered under that, but I still had a 1 year warranty. So I called Apple to tell them that the hard drive died and I need a replacement. I told them exactly how I determined it was the hard drive and that I really just need it replaced (user replaceable on the MacBook). After about ten minutes they explained that I can't call them for this sort of thing unless I wanted to buy a 1 year AppleCare Protection Plan. I told them that I wasn't going to spend money on something like that since it's covered in my warranty. They told me I could go into an Apple store to get the problem fixed.
So I was kind of miffed at this point and a while later I went to an Apple store which was about an hour drive from me. I spoke with their pretentiously named Geniuses who told me that since I didn't have an AppleCare Protection Plan they wouldn't fix it unless I made an appointment in advance. However, if I bought the 1 year plan I could drop it off that day (see a pattern?). I politely told them that I live nowhere near the Apple store and this was a special trip and that I wasn't going to buy a plan just to have them honor the warranty. So they told me to call Apple again.
So again I called Apple. This time the customer service rep said they would replace the hard drive. So they sent me an empty box to return my entire laptop in. After a while, not sure how long, they sent it back and everything was okay. The only really good thing to come out of this was they replaced the top plastic face where the keyboard is since the plastic had chipped away quite severely*.
All in all I think Apple makes some good products. My PowerBook was an amazing laptop, at least for me, but the MacBook is apparently made without durability in mind. The real problem I have with Apple is their customer service which seems more interested in selling you the AppleCare Protection Plan than actually helping you. When I need a new laptop I'll almost definitely not get another Mac laptop simply because of the nonsense I went through.
As always, your mileage may vary.
*I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to put relatively brittle plastic where the magnetic latches close, but a couple years later the plastic has chipped away on a large portion of that piece. When I got it back I made sure to close my laptop ludicrously carefully so it wouldn't chip, and it still did.
Wouldn't it suck if the little corkscrew thing started to push the gold out and right when it's going to fall it stops and the gold just sits there. Man, that'd be so much worse than not getting a candy bar!
I find it quite strange that TF2 (after a few years), still hasn't released any of their code so people can start properly modding the game. Whereas there's a sortof other way to go about it (by using a plugin, called SourceMod), but using that is still severely limiting the possibilities to what you can do.
They still haven't released the source code for Counter-Strike: Source or Day of Defeat: Source (not to mention the GldSrc games). They're not going to either. Counter-Strike: Source was very modable though. You couldn't add an all new weapon to the game, but through Eventscripts, SourceMod, MetaMod: Source, and Valve Server Plugins you could do a lot. For instance zombie mod was written as a MMS Plugin/VSP, GunGame was written in Eventscripts (which is itself a VSP). I haven't used SourceMod (also a VSP) extensively but I know that has some stuff for it as well.
I'll agree that games running on the Orange Box engine are more restrictive with what you can do using the above, but they're still pretty good. I know there's a zombie gametype called Zombie Fortress written in SourceMod. It's not the greatest one out there and it has bugs, but the game was still changed. Basically Valve is willing to release the source to the game content, but not the source to the game logic. That's not entirely true actually as they do release quite a bit of info which allows things such as Eventscripts to exist, but for the most part that's what happens.
Perhaps with their next major engine update (not like the incremental Orange Box update) they'll add native support for scripting and do a fair bit of the game logic in there as Unreal does with UnrealScript*.
The stats/achievement thing:...
It's already been bypassed at least a year ago. Or should I say someone figured out how to use the Steam API itself to unlock all achievements. It basically mimics the game telling Steam you got an achievement. You can google it if you want.
*The entire Killing Floor game was written in UnrealScript. Much easier than starting out with something like the Source SDK. To boot you can do interesting mutators right out of the box, unlike Source games which require ES/SM. Of course it may not be as flexible as a full on SDK.
Actually university isn't so much about learning information (although you do learn a lot), it's more about learning how to learn. My room mate is a sophomore, whereas I graduate in a few weeks. I've noticed her coursework is very "Learn this, here's how to do X, now go do Y which is nearly identical to X." My coursework on the other hand is "Do Y, you're expected to learn how to do it." That little piece of paper doesn't say you know everything, it just says you know how to and are willing to learn.
At least that's what I've gathered from my time at university.
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And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If every member of the OHA commits all of its changes back to Android then we'll have a fairly homogenized Android market. What would the handset companies be competing over? A better camera? More storage? If it's fast enough the user experience will be pretty damn similar across the board and would end up hurting Android. Of course this can go too far like locking a phone to only use signed code. It's a balancing act.
I'm not sure what country you are from, but in the US not everyone pays unemployment insurance. About 8 months ago I lost my job and after applying for unemployment and going through several phone conversations I was denied since my job class didn't pay into UI and didn't qualify. I can think of only two job classes that don't pay into UI, select state-defined jobs and self-employed. I worked at a university and now I am a "consultant". So I don't get unemployment at all. Then again my friend worked in construction and was laid off in December of '08 and they just decided to extend his unemployment benefits again.
C'est la vie.
Actually I believe that was from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" dubbed the Cosmic Calendar. Here's a link.
To expand upon this a bit I can say that Pi = 5.981734819456272. As you can see I am very precise however, I am not at all accurate.
I also find it interesting that the TFS mentions "...excessive collaboration..." as a form of cheating. Considering many CS students will graduate and get jobs as some type of programmer I would think collaboration would be a really good thing to impart on students. Granted this is a computer science degree and not a software engineering degree, but I personally know my university treated it more like the latter, and I'm sure this happens in many other universities. Even if it were taught more like a proper CS degree collaboration is still something that should be required to learn. The most collaboration I ever did was with three other people in a software engineering course.
I also did a major in mathematics in college. In contrast with the exception of first year courses like calculus you were always encouraged to work on problems together. Most of my classes were small enough (8 people or less) that the entire class including the instructor worked on the problems. Of course in math your grade was 50% homework and 50% exams. So even if you worked on problems as a group and just took the answers without contributing, you would still fail the class since exams were worth so much (and a C- and under is failing).
I agree that true CS curriculum requires a lot more critical thought, it's actually largely a subfield of math, but that's not what a lot of CS students get. I know I didn't.
I generally consider Starsiege: Tribes a very influential game in the FPS genre. Up until that point for the most part FPS games were rather cramped and multiplayer was rather limited in size. Tribes introduced wide open terrain, seamless transition between interior and exterior portions of a map, vehicles, and cooperative team play on an extremely large scale[1]. Games after, notably the Battlefield series picked up on this and really popularized these concepts. Even Halo was inspired partly by Tribes[2]. Today most games support these basic features, but in 1998 it was extremely impressive. I can't say for sure whether Tribes was the first to do any of this, I'm sure someone did before, but it was popular enough to grab the attention of other developers. Unfortunately it wasn't popular enough to establish a stable sub-genre which is generally called the FPS+Z genre[3]; most likely this was due to the gameplay complexity that was introduced by this game. Still, this game should make it to more top game lists.
Another game which may belong on this list in a few years is Achron which is a time traveling based RTS. I doubt this game will become largely popular, however the concept is simply fantastic and shows a lot of thought towards mixing the genre up a bit. Perhaps it shouldn't be labeled a Real Time Strategy game, perhaps Meta Time Strategy game would be more accurate.
[1]I think the max server size was 64 upon release in 1998, although it could have been 128. It's been a long time.
[2]I'd have to find the commentary. I don't remember if it was on a web site, in a magazine, or what.
[3]Tribes had a jet pack and by "skiing" players could attain incredible speeds.
Not quite. They're talking about water ice here. Water ice is less dense than liquid water. So 600 million metric tons of water ice = 600 billion kilograms of water ice = 6.52 x 10^11 liters of water ice.
;).
I know what you were trying to say, but it doesn't work for water ice, just liquid water. Just thought I'd correct that minor mistake
This is the third person I've seen use the word "streamlined" to describe ME2. The mere fact that this game has limited ship fuel, limited probes, and manual planet scanning completely negates the description of "streamlined".
Yeah, but then they'd never get a woman on the moon!
I'd actually like to point out that that picture is somewhat misleading. The first few pages always show who is currently in game (and admins I believe who are offline in that picture), the next few pages show those who are online but not in any game, and the remainder of the pages show those who are offline. If you took that group as a sample, a rather large sample, then 19/833 ~ 2.8% are playing CoD:MW2. Even then this percentage isn't a true representation of how many people out of the group ended up buying the game. Like I said, that picture is a bit misleading. I'd be interested in the percentage of people who bought the game after boycotting it though; I'm willing to bet it's quite high.
Even those who complain about things are still playing it full force.
I just find this sad personally. I think it was a bad idea for them to not include things like modding and dedicated servers and I haven't bought or even rented the game for the console. Note that I always knew the game would be a blockbuster hit, I just disagree with the route they're taking. It saddens me that people who said they would not buy the game did anyway. People need to grow a backbone.
It's also nice that you can just jump in to the game (without friends, or with them in same lobby - you always get to same side and see each others with different color on radar and name). No need to hunt for different servers which can be crappy. Yes, there are host migrations and other stupid things sometimes, but the easiness to just jump in to the game outweights them. I'm not a serious gamer and neither are majority of people.
The ability to jump in and out of a game is always good. Personally I always found communities I enjoyed through trial and error and generally stuck around. Until just recently I even helped run a rather large one in my free time.
I see it as a trade-off. With the type of system in Modern Warfare 2 you don't really get the same communal feeling as you do with dedicated servers, you just don't. I know the whole friends list thing tries to rectify this, but it's not really the same. However, it's very easy to start the game and start playing without having to deal with empty servers and poorly run communities. I personally value strong communities that I can help out. It's really just a matter of taste.
This doesn't make sense. You aren't going to beat a great and popular movie that costs $15 with a mediocre or bad game that costs $60. The higher priced product also has to be good, which MW2 definitely is.
To my understanding consoles have a licensing cost when you develop games for it where as the PC does not. I don't know how much truth there is to this, but a lot of people felt the extra $10 for console games was because of this and they questioned why the PC version needed a $10 price hike. However, I'm sure MW2 was ludicrously expensive to produce, so it may have been required.
No they don't. Me and almost all of my friends play it on PC because of keyboard and mouse. And to tell the truth, I rather don't see so much tweaking and mods by the users and get all stupid doom and quake sounds or no gravity when I join the server. I like the game the way IW made it.
This is where I'm going to disagree a lot. First of all you don't need to use a mouse and keyboard, you could have easily just used a controller on a 360 for the same experience. You prefer playing games with a mouse and keyboard, the same way that a lot - but by no means the majority - of people prefer to have custom content and the ability to generate it themselves. Just because you and your friends don't personally enjoy such things doesn't mean other people don't either. It's a personal preference and you really have no right saying what everyone should like.
Second it's not just minor game tweaks[1]. It's a whole range of things. Custom maps[2], models, sounds, gametypes, small modifications, and total conversions. You may think nothing interesting comes from modding but I'd disagree. Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Red Orchestra, Killing Floor and Insurgency to name a few. The first two morphed into commercial games with very, very large player bases, the two after also went commercial.
I actually enjoy playing unmodified games as well. My all time favorite multiplayer FPS, Starsiege: Tribes, was exceedingly modifiable. People are still modifying it to this day. Even with all of the mods I still prefer playing base. However, I play a lot of custom maps and a few custom gametypes. Some of the best competition maps for that game were custom content. I'd also like t
I don't think it's necessarily piracy, I just think consoles are more profitable than the PC. As someone above you mentioned, the Xbox is a closed platform. Most of my friends are console gamers and they buy a lot of DLC. I'm a PC gamer myself and I just can't justify the cost of the DLC (on top of the $60 price tag for the console game) when I generally get that stuff for free on the PC or through modifications, community maps, etc...
Now I'm not saying I'm entitled to lots of free stuff, I've just always enjoyed this aspect of PC gaming. I think generally developers favor consoles more because they can make more money through things like paid DLC and map packs.
Assuming for a moment that this sample size of 21 people, 11 of which are playing MW2, is an accurate representation of the total population (it probably isn't) there's still a few problems. Just like in the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott group I'm sure there were people who supported the game and were not boycotting it but were a part of the group*. That's sort of like presenting the chance for a male to get cancer and including the results from women in the calculations. Even if this isn't the case there's still a sampling bias. Steam groups are organized by Administrators, In-Game Persons, Online Persons, and Offline Persons if I remember correctly, feel free to correct me. That picture shows the first 21 members of the first page which shows the admin and the people in-game. This isn't a very random sample of this (sub)population.
I've seen this picture thrown around quite a bit and it irritates me. Not because I think the boycott worked, given the Steam statistics I'm pretty sure it didn't, but because the picture is quite disingenuous.
* The group is invite only now, I'm pretty sure it wasn't earlier, but I could be wrong.
Indeed. A lot of communities require proof before they'll ban a hacker, generally a demo. Shame communities can do neither of these things.
That explains why planes are falling out of the sky left and right.
Last time I was at the Luxor in Las Vegas I played a few hands of Blackjack. They were using continuous auto-shufflers and the cards were shuffled after every single hand. I believe they only used a couple of decks, though it's been about a year since I saw this. I haven't seen it in any other casino after that, although I rarely gamble.
And people in the USA can also download as much as they want without paying the blank media levies. So it appears as though in this instance the USA is better. Don't get me wrong, the copyright laws in the US have a lot of problems, but a lot of the first world countries tends to follow along with them to a similar degree.
Even decapping the CPU had failed previously...
There was great news in the GB scene a short while ago, when Neviksti from CherryRom forums announced that he had been able to extract the BIOS image from the original GameBoy by decapping the chip, staining the ROM, and using a really powerful microscope to individually resolve and read out each bit one by one.
Although it is late and I may be misreading that.
Personally when I read the blurb I thought of the car scene in Demolition Man with the foam. Here's a video if you don't remember.
I've had similar experiences. I actually bought the 12" PowerBook quite a while ago. I never had any trouble with that laptop and I found it to be incredibly rugged. The hard drive went bad after a few years of abuse and I replaced it and it still works today, despite the copious amounts of dings, dents, and scratches I've inflicted on it. I'm sorry to hear you didn't have the same experience I did with the PowerBook.
However, a while back I bought a 13" MacBook. I really don't like large laptops and at the time the 13" MacBook Pro wasn't on the market. A few months after I got it the hard drive basically died on me. After quite a lot of work searching error codes and doing general research I determined that this was the cause. I don't remember exactly, but I believe you get 3 months of AppleCare Protection or whatever when you buy Mac from them. I believe four or five months had passed since I bought it, so I wasn't covered under that, but I still had a 1 year warranty. So I called Apple to tell them that the hard drive died and I need a replacement. I told them exactly how I determined it was the hard drive and that I really just need it replaced (user replaceable on the MacBook). After about ten minutes they explained that I can't call them for this sort of thing unless I wanted to buy a 1 year AppleCare Protection Plan. I told them that I wasn't going to spend money on something like that since it's covered in my warranty. They told me I could go into an Apple store to get the problem fixed.
So I was kind of miffed at this point and a while later I went to an Apple store which was about an hour drive from me. I spoke with their pretentiously named Geniuses who told me that since I didn't have an AppleCare Protection Plan they wouldn't fix it unless I made an appointment in advance. However, if I bought the 1 year plan I could drop it off that day (see a pattern?). I politely told them that I live nowhere near the Apple store and this was a special trip and that I wasn't going to buy a plan just to have them honor the warranty. So they told me to call Apple again.
So again I called Apple. This time the customer service rep said they would replace the hard drive. So they sent me an empty box to return my entire laptop in. After a while, not sure how long, they sent it back and everything was okay. The only really good thing to come out of this was they replaced the top plastic face where the keyboard is since the plastic had chipped away quite severely*.
All in all I think Apple makes some good products. My PowerBook was an amazing laptop, at least for me, but the MacBook is apparently made without durability in mind. The real problem I have with Apple is their customer service which seems more interested in selling you the AppleCare Protection Plan than actually helping you. When I need a new laptop I'll almost definitely not get another Mac laptop simply because of the nonsense I went through.
As always, your mileage may vary.
*I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to put relatively brittle plastic where the magnetic latches close, but a couple years later the plastic has chipped away on a large portion of that piece. When I got it back I made sure to close my laptop ludicrously carefully so it wouldn't chip, and it still did.
That comparison doesn't quite make sense to me since Antarctica is considered a desert and the driest continent on Earth.
Wouldn't it suck if the little corkscrew thing started to push the gold out and right when it's going to fall it stops and the gold just sits there. Man, that'd be so much worse than not getting a candy bar!
I find it quite strange that TF2 (after a few years), still hasn't released any of their code so people can start properly modding the game. Whereas there's a sortof other way to go about it (by using a plugin, called SourceMod), but using that is still severely limiting the possibilities to what you can do.
They still haven't released the source code for Counter-Strike: Source or Day of Defeat: Source (not to mention the GldSrc games). They're not going to either. Counter-Strike: Source was very modable though. You couldn't add an all new weapon to the game, but through Eventscripts, SourceMod, MetaMod: Source, and Valve Server Plugins you could do a lot. For instance zombie mod was written as a MMS Plugin/VSP, GunGame was written in Eventscripts (which is itself a VSP). I haven't used SourceMod (also a VSP) extensively but I know that has some stuff for it as well.
I'll agree that games running on the Orange Box engine are more restrictive with what you can do using the above, but they're still pretty good. I know there's a zombie gametype called Zombie Fortress written in SourceMod. It's not the greatest one out there and it has bugs, but the game was still changed. Basically Valve is willing to release the source to the game content, but not the source to the game logic. That's not entirely true actually as they do release quite a bit of info which allows things such as Eventscripts to exist, but for the most part that's what happens.
Perhaps with their next major engine update (not like the incremental Orange Box update) they'll add native support for scripting and do a fair bit of the game logic in there as Unreal does with UnrealScript*.
The stats/achievement thing: ...
It's already been bypassed at least a year ago. Or should I say someone figured out how to use the Steam API itself to unlock all achievements. It basically mimics the game telling Steam you got an achievement. You can google it if you want.
*The entire Killing Floor game was written in UnrealScript. Much easier than starting out with something like the Source SDK. To boot you can do interesting mutators right out of the box, unlike Source games which require ES/SM. Of course it may not be as flexible as a full on SDK.
Hell I've been told by friends that still play CS:S there are variations of my maps still being played, which is kinda sad honestly.
I don't see why. CS:S still has a huge player base, although it's being eclipsed by TF2 at this point.
Actually university isn't so much about learning information (although you do learn a lot), it's more about learning how to learn. My room mate is a sophomore, whereas I graduate in a few weeks. I've noticed her coursework is very "Learn this, here's how to do X, now go do Y which is nearly identical to X." My coursework on the other hand is "Do Y, you're expected to learn how to do it." That little piece of paper doesn't say you know everything, it just says you know how to and are willing to learn.
At least that's what I've gathered from my time at university.