I am guessing that you live in the US. In the UK buying games from Steam cost anywhere up to 50% more than from an online retailer who is selling the physical game.
The latest example of this was Dawn of War II, Steam price - £34.99, Play.com price £22.99, High street price - £29.99.
Valve have a really useful platform with Steam but buying games through it makes no sense in the UK. Especially as if you buy Dawn of War II retail you get all of the benefits of steam anyway as it requires validation through steam regardless of where you bought it.
If Valve want Steam to be a valid distribution platform for new games (and not just special offers on back catalogue) then they need to renegotiate the prices they are able to offer to make them competitive versus high street and normal online retailers.
How many modern TV stories have been ruined by this kind of thing? The X-Files? Lost? Buffy?
I agree with you on The X-Files and Lost, but Buffy had a very strong ending. The characters continued to develop throughout the show's run until a very climactic ending.
Buffy suffered more from losing focus in the middle of the seasons. A couple of them start strongly, lose their way a bit in the middle and then have a strong ending. But that tends to be true of a lot of shows that work to a standard 22 episode season. 12 episode seasons tend to be a lot tighter but US television isn't geared up for that.
Children mature more slowly now due to extended education pushing back the point where they enter the 'real world'. 13 year olds from 200 years ago were probably more mature than a lot of the 18 year olds now, you only have to look at a selection of college/university undergrads to demonstrate that.
I think the big problem with trying to legislate sex and age of consent is that a law that is intended to protect children from adults also affects what teenagers can do with each other.
Legislating the private behaviour of teenagers is destined to fail and that is what brings up a lot of examples in other comments about someone being prosecuted for having consensual sex with someone who only marginally younger.
I can see how the contoured keyboards would be comfortable for normal typing but I imagine they make it nearly impossible to type one handed. Which I often find myself doing when logging into websites or typing something brief while holding a phone (or sandwich) in the other hand.
Be careful using SMB in an OSX environment. Unless you have policies in place to restrict the usage of special characters in file names you will find your file and folder names turn to gibberish when accessed over SMB.
I think the major reason the iPhone has gained a larger market share than other smart phones is that Apple aren't selling it as a smart phone. Nokia, Blackberry and most other smart phone manufacturers target their smart phones to business users on the basis that email and office integration aren't what most consumers want.
Apple has marketed the iPhone as a desirable consumer phone which is a much bigger market. Other phone manufacturers have a lot of phones that target this market and outsell the iPhone but they aren't smart phones.
Most people don't want or need smart phone functionality so are happier with a cheaper non-smart phone. Bragging that the iPhone is the best selling smart phone is meaningless when the people buying them probably don't know what smartphone means.
And they will be paying for these apps with their credit cards. Already tens of thousands of dollars in debt? Hell, what's another $1000 here or there
Do you not realise that it is possible to take advantage of the consumer protection that a credit card offers but to pay off the balance each month and incur no interest?
Using a credit card offers many benefits, the main one being that you are paying with the banks money and not your own so if something goes wrong then it is the bank's money lost and not yours.
I find it hard to see what you are getting at here. All of the tools that professional graphic designers used are exactly the same on Windows as they are on OSX. Adobe Creative Suite and Quark are the main tools used by designers and they are identical across the two platforms.
You in no way need to install games to play them on the 360. It is an option that makes the system slightly quieter and reduces loading times for some games.
My only concern is that it will make developers lazier when it comes to optimising their games.
This is becoming a thing of the past, the PS3 now requires installs for quite a few games. Nothing like sitting for 20mins waiting for a game to install. There is also the issue of having to micromanage game installs on a 60gb hard drive.
Firstly I know it is off-topic but the word is 'lose' saying 'loose' makes you sound like a fucking moron.
Secondly are you honestly claiming that your iBook battery lasted for 10 hours when you bought it new 4 years ago?
Isn't burn-in a big problem with plasma screens? I know in the past you couldn't really use them for games and watching a channel with a fixed logo in the corner of the screen could cause burn in if you left it long enough.
Is this not the case anymore?
but sony kills the market with their platinum series
I for one would much rather buy a brand new copy of a game on Sony platinum or Xbox360 classics for £15 instead of paying a comparable price for a used copy. The risk of problems with scratched discs and missing manuals is not worth the hassle in my opinion. Even if you visually inspect the discs before leaving the shop there is no guarantee that they will work flawlessly.
This is especially important for games that require a large time investment. Playing a game like GTAIV for weeks only to find that there is a scratch on the disc that stops the last mission from loading properly would be incredibly frustrating.
will gamers have to start paying tax on their hobbies? That would suck.
Gamers would only have to pay this tax if they converted their virtual currency into real money. If you just play the game then this wouldn't affect you. Basically all they are saying is that if you sell virtual currency they are going to charge 20% sales tax.
As has been mentioned above there are a lot of ways to get around a dog, whether that is with drugs/poison, or something like mace. One particularly nasty trick would be feed the dog something with poison in and then come back a couple of days later to break in.
The other problem with guard dogs is that dogs who will attack someone who breaks into your house will unless very well trained also attack any other visitors. I certainly wouldn't want a dog in my house that would attack anyone coming in the front door who it hadn't met before. Especially if I had children.
But, of course, why bother having a particularly secure lock, when your all-metal steel-bolted door is right next to a 6 foot plate-glass bay window?
Most modern houses have double glazing and any window that is big enough to climb through normally uses safety glass which is very hard to break through. Using normal plate glass in large windows is very dangerous as if the window is broken then the pieces can fall from the frame like a guillotine.
Double glazing and safety glass has massively increased home security by removing the weak link of easily broken windows. As most people also get a uPVC front door along with the windows that makes the house even more secure.
in my opinion nintendo's first venture at this bordered on blackmarket extortion.
You are describing the questionable sales tactics of stores in your area. This has nothing to do with Nintendo. They set a recommended retail price for the console. If a store decides to charge 5 times that price then that is up to them.
I still find it hard to believe all the stories of people trying for months to buy a wii. If you can't find one in a shop near you why not just buy online? A lot of online stores have had them in stock consistently throughout the year at the RRP.
Certainly in the UK you can walk into somewhere like HMV or Virgin and buy one no problem, for the £179.00 RRP and get a free new release game with it.
Off the top of my head I can't think of any Windows keyboard commands that require more than two keys, apart from Ctrl-Alt-Del and you really shouldn't need that very often.
My point wasn't to put down keyboard commands, they can be very useful when you get used to them. My point was that OSX (and OS9 before it) seems to be based around keyboard shortcuts that require 3,4 or even 5 keys, and that experienced Mac users reel these off to new users as if they are a perfectly natural way for a casual user to operate their computer.
It wasn't really the actual key combination I was referencing but the way that when asked how to do something by a novice, mac users invariably answer with something like "oh that's easy just press Alt-Command-Shift-X". As if they can't believe that someone wouldn't have stumbled across it on their own!
I love the way everytime a mac guru hands down advice it is in the form of a long string of keys that need to be held down. It does make me wonder if Steve Jobs is secretly an octopus...
When you don't type your password all your time, why would you only use a password up to 20 characters.
I would have agreed with this but with wi-fi now in use on so many devices it is a real ball-ache to punch in 63 characters including punctuation and upper/lower case on a mobile phone. Or having to plug in a keyboard every time I move the Wii or 360 to a different network.
This isn't theoretical. I actually use gestures across applications now.
I have had a look in OSX (10.4.11) and online and can't find a way to setup mouse gestures without using a third-party program? From your comments I presumed it was an OS feature, are you using a third party app or is it just hidden away somewhere?
why would you want to have to re-enter and retrain your mouse gestures for each application individually
You would have to do this anyway as you need to interact with different programs in different ways. So you end up with weird cross overs. A down mouse gesture might open a new tab in a browser but in iTunes it might start a new playlist. It would be impossible to make the gestures intuitive over all programs so you would still have to learn them for each one.
Also most programs don't demand the type of interaction that benefits from mouse gestures. If you are word processing or coding then you have both hands on the keyboard, video and music players are only interacted with occasionally and most third party apps are too specialised for a generic system of gestures.
Spell checking is easy to implement at an OS level as it is consistent between programs, mouse gestures aren't.
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I am guessing that you live in the US. In the UK buying games from Steam cost anywhere up to 50% more than from an online retailer who is selling the physical game.
The latest example of this was Dawn of War II, Steam price - £34.99, Play.com price £22.99, High street price - £29.99.
Valve have a really useful platform with Steam but buying games through it makes no sense in the UK. Especially as if you buy Dawn of War II retail you get all of the benefits of steam anyway as it requires validation through steam regardless of where you bought it.
If Valve want Steam to be a valid distribution platform for new games (and not just special offers on back catalogue) then they need to renegotiate the prices they are able to offer to make them competitive versus high street and normal online retailers.
I agree with you on The X-Files and Lost, but Buffy had a very strong ending. The characters continued to develop throughout the show's run until a very climactic ending.
Buffy suffered more from losing focus in the middle of the seasons. A couple of them start strongly, lose their way a bit in the middle and then have a strong ending. But that tends to be true of a lot of shows that work to a standard 22 episode season. 12 episode seasons tend to be a lot tighter but US television isn't geared up for that.
Children mature more slowly now due to extended education pushing back the point where they enter the 'real world'. 13 year olds from 200 years ago were probably more mature than a lot of the 18 year olds now, you only have to look at a selection of college/university undergrads to demonstrate that.
I think the big problem with trying to legislate sex and age of consent is that a law that is intended to protect children from adults also affects what teenagers can do with each other.
Legislating the private behaviour of teenagers is destined to fail and that is what brings up a lot of examples in other comments about someone being prosecuted for having consensual sex with someone who only marginally younger.
The irony of creating a facebook group to protest about the actions of facebook seems to be escaping a lot of people....
I can see how the contoured keyboards would be comfortable for normal typing but I imagine they make it nearly impossible to type one handed. Which I often find myself doing when logging into websites or typing something brief while holding a phone (or sandwich) in the other hand.
Be careful using SMB in an OSX environment. Unless you have policies in place to restrict the usage of special characters in file names you will find your file and folder names turn to gibberish when accessed over SMB.
I think the major reason the iPhone has gained a larger market share than other smart phones is that Apple aren't selling it as a smart phone. Nokia, Blackberry and most other smart phone manufacturers target their smart phones to business users on the basis that email and office integration aren't what most consumers want.
Apple has marketed the iPhone as a desirable consumer phone which is a much bigger market. Other phone manufacturers have a lot of phones that target this market and outsell the iPhone but they aren't smart phones.
Most people don't want or need smart phone functionality so are happier with a cheaper non-smart phone. Bragging that the iPhone is the best selling smart phone is meaningless when the people buying them probably don't know what smartphone means.
Windows does have an address book, it is called Address Book and can be found in the Accessories folder on the start menu.
Do you not realise that it is possible to take advantage of the consumer protection that a credit card offers but to pay off the balance each month and incur no interest?
Using a credit card offers many benefits, the main one being that you are paying with the banks money and not your own so if something goes wrong then it is the bank's money lost and not yours.
I find it hard to see what you are getting at here. All of the tools that professional graphic designers used are exactly the same on Windows as they are on OSX. Adobe Creative Suite and Quark are the main tools used by designers and they are identical across the two platforms.
You in no way need to install games to play them on the 360. It is an option that makes the system slightly quieter and reduces loading times for some games. My only concern is that it will make developers lazier when it comes to optimising their games.
This is becoming a thing of the past, the PS3 now requires installs for quite a few games. Nothing like sitting for 20mins waiting for a game to install. There is also the issue of having to micromanage game installs on a 60gb hard drive.
Firstly I know it is off-topic but the word is 'lose' saying 'loose' makes you sound like a fucking moron. Secondly are you honestly claiming that your iBook battery lasted for 10 hours when you bought it new 4 years ago?
Isn't burn-in a big problem with plasma screens? I know in the past you couldn't really use them for games and watching a channel with a fixed logo in the corner of the screen could cause burn in if you left it long enough. Is this not the case anymore?
I for one would much rather buy a brand new copy of a game on Sony platinum or Xbox360 classics for £15 instead of paying a comparable price for a used copy. The risk of problems with scratched discs and missing manuals is not worth the hassle in my opinion. Even if you visually inspect the discs before leaving the shop there is no guarantee that they will work flawlessly.
This is especially important for games that require a large time investment. Playing a game like GTAIV for weeks only to find that there is a scratch on the disc that stops the last mission from loading properly would be incredibly frustrating.
Gamers would only have to pay this tax if they converted their virtual currency into real money. If you just play the game then this wouldn't affect you. Basically all they are saying is that if you sell virtual currency they are going to charge 20% sales tax.
As has been mentioned above there are a lot of ways to get around a dog, whether that is with drugs/poison, or something like mace. One particularly nasty trick would be feed the dog something with poison in and then come back a couple of days later to break in.
The other problem with guard dogs is that dogs who will attack someone who breaks into your house will unless very well trained also attack any other visitors. I certainly wouldn't want a dog in my house that would attack anyone coming in the front door who it hadn't met before. Especially if I had children.
Most modern houses have double glazing and any window that is big enough to climb through normally uses safety glass which is very hard to break through. Using normal plate glass in large windows is very dangerous as if the window is broken then the pieces can fall from the frame like a guillotine.
Double glazing and safety glass has massively increased home security by removing the weak link of easily broken windows. As most people also get a uPVC front door along with the windows that makes the house even more secure.
You are describing the questionable sales tactics of stores in your area. This has nothing to do with Nintendo. They set a recommended retail price for the console. If a store decides to charge 5 times that price then that is up to them.
I still find it hard to believe all the stories of people trying for months to buy a wii. If you can't find one in a shop near you why not just buy online? A lot of online stores have had them in stock consistently throughout the year at the RRP.
Certainly in the UK you can walk into somewhere like HMV or Virgin and buy one no problem, for the £179.00 RRP and get a free new release game with it.
Off the top of my head I can't think of any Windows keyboard commands that require more than two keys, apart from Ctrl-Alt-Del and you really shouldn't need that very often.
My point wasn't to put down keyboard commands, they can be very useful when you get used to them. My point was that OSX (and OS9 before it) seems to be based around keyboard shortcuts that require 3,4 or even 5 keys, and that experienced Mac users reel these off to new users as if they are a perfectly natural way for a casual user to operate their computer.
It wasn't really the actual key combination I was referencing but the way that when asked how to do something by a novice, mac users invariably answer with something like "oh that's easy just press Alt-Command-Shift-X". As if they can't believe that someone wouldn't have stumbled across it on their own!
I love the way everytime a mac guru hands down advice it is in the form of a long string of keys that need to be held down. It does make me wonder if Steve Jobs is secretly an octopus...
I would have agreed with this but with wi-fi now in use on so many devices it is a real ball-ache to punch in 63 characters including punctuation and upper/lower case on a mobile phone. Or having to plug in a keyboard every time I move the Wii or 360 to a different network.
I have had a look in OSX (10.4.11) and online and can't find a way to setup mouse gestures without using a third-party program? From your comments I presumed it was an OS feature, are you using a third party app or is it just hidden away somewhere?
You would have to do this anyway as you need to interact with different programs in different ways. So you end up with weird cross overs. A down mouse gesture might open a new tab in a browser but in iTunes it might start a new playlist. It would be impossible to make the gestures intuitive over all programs so you would still have to learn them for each one.
Also most programs don't demand the type of interaction that benefits from mouse gestures. If you are word processing or coding then you have both hands on the keyboard, video and music players are only interacted with occasionally and most third party apps are too specialised for a generic system of gestures.
Spell checking is easy to implement at an OS level as it is consistent between programs, mouse gestures aren't.