It really does make doing google searches difficult when I've encountered a problem. That at C# and.NET. (I know Microsoft did that on purpose, what was Valve's excuse?)
Okay, now who's being the pedant? It is an interesting argument, though. Are the music artists really losing something of value when they give away a track? Yes, they lose the sale of that track. But you may claim they've retained their rights to the track, so they lose nothing. Granted, that's not a great argument (I was going to try and make it better and my first attempt at using that analogy was atrocious...)
In any case, when you give up information to a party (demographic information) to facebook in lieu of cash then you have lost something of value to gain something of value. Which is a long way to describe "payment."
Payment is defined as the act of being paid, where paid is defined as "to settle (a debt, obligation, etc.), as by transferring money or goods, or by doing something". Notice that the act of paying is not necessarily monetary. Therefore, we are paying with a good, our private information, to use facebook. Therefore facebook is not "free", or gratis which is defined as "without charge or payment; free". Notice the use of "payment" and "free" in the definition of gratis.
There's ton of room for a social network protocol; I would just like to see it be something distributed.
That's the point of facebook, though - a central location for people to view your thoughts, activities, invites, etc. It is why sites like slashdot and fark got started. Specifically with fark, he was tired of spamming friends with interesting* stuff and created a site where he could just point everyone to so they could check it out "centrally".
I do agree that there are other aspects to being social on the Internet and the protocols you mention are still valid forms of communication for their specific tasks.
But to say the Facebook is free is disingenuous. It is clearly not free because the user is required to give up a certain amount of privacy. Certainly, there is a cost trade off. Some people probably would not walk for free food and some people are fine with having their private lives available for the entire public and advertisers (and potential criminals). "I'm just pointing out the excruciatingly obvious"
Umm, what part of "I worked for a startup, was given stock options" did you not understand? The FOUNDERS did exactly what any normal company would do - hire people to do WORK for COMPENSATION. Of which part of that was apparently detrimental stock options - stock options that are meant to reward the WORKERS of THEIR hard work building the company. I've worked both sides of the "My company" and "someone else's company" - the concept of ownership and compensation really isn't that hard to understand.
Agreed. For as much enjoyment as I've gotten from the Orange Box (TF2 and Portal), I'm not too terribly upset at having spent $50 for Portal 2.
Don't get me wrong, Portal 2 is an awesome game, has beautiful, well thought out levels, great voice acting, and such. To me (a cheap-skate), $50 on a game that I completed in 9-11 hours (single player) is too much - I would have accepted $30.
And with taxes the way they are in most western style countries, the rich are subsidizing the poor. (The good or bad of it is a topic for another discussion board)
Define "Lawful Contact". From everything I've read, that means you just got busted doing something illegal, they can then ask about your right to be in the country. It's no different than what is on the lawbooks at the Federal level, it's just that AZ puts in paper again to let the State police know they can do it, too.
You've answered your own question: Why don't more companies do this? Because they want to keep you from canceling the contract. But your point is valid, there may not be a cost benefit between making call backs and losing customers.
"Please listen to the menu options as they have recently changed."
Yeah, right! When was the last time you recently changed them? Oh, listen, I haven't called company X in over a year, but their menu system has not recently changed, it's been the same for so many years!
Agreed. I'll probably get sick of seeing high version numbers: New Firefox 133 - now faster and better than Firefox 132 (released 3 months ago). Umm, yeah, okay...
The thing is, at least for a phone call or a knock on the door, the recipient is forced to acknowledge the messenger on the messenger's time, not their own. With facebook, e-mail, or post(snail-mail), they can toss aside the message until they feel a desire to catch up with the messenger. Also with facebook, and other social sites, the messenger only need to post the message once for a multitude of recipients with the advantage of not wasting bandwidth sending out multiple messages (one-to-many, as opposed to an e-mail's (one-to-one)^x).
Interesting. I did not know that. It is significant. They are making money like crazy. I don't see why a subscription has to be $15/mo, or even over $12/mo.
The problem with the Modding aspect is that some companies are actively against it. Take, for example, the Need for Speed series. At least with Underground 2, I saw a huge potential where the maps could have been expanded, new tracks inserted, better AI, and more cars/paint/graphics, etc. All I've found was a music extractor. I think that EA, and others like it, will not allow modding so that they will force the gamer to buy New Game 2011 That Adds a Few New Things, when they've tired of Old Game 2010.
I never really modded Oblivion, either. The one exception was the mod that allowed me to decorate my house with some sanity. There were a couple of things that really bothered me about the game - if we were allowed to buy houses, why was decorating it such a pain? It ended up being a toss everything on the table, ground, or wherever and hope it landed upright. Even with the decorator mod, the physics caused stuff to knock around very easily.
I never understood why I only had 8 hotkey options, there 10 numbered keys, plus function keys. Neverwinter Nights, WoW, Everquest had all been around for awhile. But now that you mention they likely designed this for a console, it makes much more sense - especially with the thick UI elements and large fonts.
being an old fps gamer, I got myself trained on a very weird scheme:
right button = run/walk
ALT = run backward
X, C = strafe L/R
Z = duck
SHIFT = modify speed
This leaves a,s,d,f,g,v,b,q,w,e,r,t,y all available (f = light; v = use; a=toggle last weapon, s,d=grenades or a,s,d,e,g=specific weapon toggle, q=drop weapon, w,t=teamtalk/talk, r=reload)
Yes, I know the setup appears rather inefficient. I sometimes get caught trying to run forward and backward at the same time and I'm missing out on a lot of buttons due to reach. If I were competitive (like I used to be), I'd try and change it.
Maybe it means WOW will eventually go FTP, or a successor title will.
Not while they're under Activision. Even if they weren't tied to Activision, I doubt Blizzard would make such a move. They've got plenty of users and the number of attrition doesn't quite alarm them, yet I'm sure. (There are still millions of players worldwide.) I imagine if they had to start reducing the number of servers down to about the 10+/- range, then they'd start to worry.
Having said that, I've let my subscription to WoW lapse recently and indefinitely. It was a fun game, but if I'm paying a monthly sub, I feel I need to get my money's worth - and that meant 2-3 hours a night nearly every day. Some would call that an addiction, except I have no urges or desires to jump back into the game, heh.
Slashdot Mirror
It really does make doing google searches difficult when I've encountered a problem. That at C# and .NET. (I know Microsoft did that on purpose, what was Valve's excuse?)
Ok, Then we agree: Facebook is not free.
Similarly, when I hand over legal tender for a good or service, I value that good or service over the piece of paper.
But then I see your final statement where you confuse the definition of free and gratis. Free of payment does not exclusively mean loss of cash.
Okay, now who's being the pedant? It is an interesting argument, though. Are the music artists really losing something of value when they give away a track? Yes, they lose the sale of that track. But you may claim they've retained their rights to the track, so they lose nothing. Granted, that's not a great argument (I was going to try and make it better and my first attempt at using that analogy was atrocious...)
In any case, when you give up information to a party (demographic information) to facebook in lieu of cash then you have lost something of value to gain something of value. Which is a long way to describe "payment."
Payment is defined as the act of being paid, where paid is defined as "to settle (a debt, obligation, etc.), as by transferring money or goods, or by doing something". Notice that the act of paying is not necessarily monetary. Therefore, we are paying with a good, our private information, to use facebook. Therefore facebook is not "free", or gratis which is defined as "without charge or payment; free". Notice the use of "payment" and "free" in the definition of gratis.
Myspace only slightly improved on Geocities for webpage creation :b
Facebook is better, imo, but is still terribly cluttered and difficult to navigate.
There's ton of room for a social network protocol; I would just like to see it be something distributed.
That's the point of facebook, though - a central location for people to view your thoughts, activities, invites, etc. It is why sites like slashdot and fark got started. Specifically with fark, he was tired of spamming friends with interesting* stuff and created a site where he could just point everyone to so they could check it out "centrally".
I do agree that there are other aspects to being social on the Internet and the protocols you mention are still valid forms of communication for their specific tasks.
But to say the Facebook is free is disingenuous. It is clearly not free because the user is required to give up a certain amount of privacy. Certainly, there is a cost trade off. Some people probably would not walk for free food and some people are fine with having their private lives available for the entire public and advertisers (and potential criminals). "I'm just pointing out the excruciatingly obvious"
Umm, what part of "I worked for a startup, was given stock options" did you not understand? The FOUNDERS did exactly what any normal company would do - hire people to do WORK for COMPENSATION. Of which part of that was apparently detrimental stock options - stock options that are meant to reward the WORKERS of THEIR hard work building the company. I've worked both sides of the "My company" and "someone else's company" - the concept of ownership and compensation really isn't that hard to understand.
That is interesting. Why not loan against the shares. Default on the loan and give the shares up to the bank. Then the bank could sell the shares.
Probably wouldn't work. I still don't understand why the founders could sell their shares but you weren't be able to do so.
TF3?! Heck, I just want to get HL2:Ep3 and HL3 at some point!
Agreed. For as much enjoyment as I've gotten from the Orange Box (TF2 and Portal), I'm not too terribly upset at having spent $50 for Portal 2.
Don't get me wrong, Portal 2 is an awesome game, has beautiful, well thought out levels, great voice acting, and such. To me (a cheap-skate), $50 on a game that I completed in 9-11 hours (single player) is too much - I would have accepted $30.
And with taxes the way they are in most western style countries, the rich are subsidizing the poor. (The good or bad of it is a topic for another discussion board)
OOH!!! I've been waiting for them to release a new one of these. It took them long enough.
Meet the Sniper, HWGuy, Engineer, and Demon are my faves. The soldier one is fun enough, just a little disturbing.
Define "Lawful Contact". From everything I've read, that means you just got busted doing something illegal, they can then ask about your right to be in the country. It's no different than what is on the lawbooks at the Federal level, it's just that AZ puts in paper again to let the State police know they can do it, too.
You've answered your own question: Why don't more companies do this? Because they want to keep you from canceling the contract. But your point is valid, there may not be a cost benefit between making call backs and losing customers.
"Please listen to the menu options as they have recently changed."
Yeah, right! When was the last time you recently changed them? Oh, listen, I haven't called company X in over a year, but their menu system has not recently changed, it's been the same for so many years!
Agreed. I'll probably get sick of seeing high version numbers: New Firefox 133 - now faster and better than Firefox 132 (released 3 months ago). Umm, yeah, okay...
The thing is, at least for a phone call or a knock on the door, the recipient is forced to acknowledge the messenger on the messenger's time, not their own. With facebook, e-mail, or post(snail-mail), they can toss aside the message until they feel a desire to catch up with the messenger. Also with facebook, and other social sites, the messenger only need to post the message once for a multitude of recipients with the advantage of not wasting bandwidth sending out multiple messages (one-to-many, as opposed to an e-mail's (one-to-one)^x).
I've noticed that I have to insert
at the end of all my lines when I post. Just don't forget to Preview before Posting.
Interesting. I did not know that. It is significant. They are making money like crazy. I don't see why a subscription has to be $15/mo, or even over $12/mo.
The problem with the Modding aspect is that some companies are actively against it. Take, for example, the Need for Speed series. At least with Underground 2, I saw a huge potential where the maps could have been expanded, new tracks inserted, better AI, and more cars/paint/graphics, etc. All I've found was a music extractor. I think that EA, and others like it, will not allow modding so that they will force the gamer to buy New Game 2011 That Adds a Few New Things, when they've tired of Old Game 2010.
Always run in offline mode. Leave it running.
I never really modded Oblivion, either. The one exception was the mod that allowed me to decorate my house with some sanity. There were a couple of things that really bothered me about the game - if we were allowed to buy houses, why was decorating it such a pain? It ended up being a toss everything on the table, ground, or wherever and hope it landed upright. Even with the decorator mod, the physics caused stuff to knock around very easily.
I never understood why I only had 8 hotkey options, there 10 numbered keys, plus function keys. Neverwinter Nights, WoW, Everquest had all been around for awhile. But now that you mention they likely designed this for a console, it makes much more sense - especially with the thick UI elements and large fonts.
being an old fps gamer, I got myself trained on a very weird scheme:
right button = run/walk
ALT = run backward
X, C = strafe L/R
Z = duck
SHIFT = modify speed
This leaves a,s,d,f,g,v,b,q,w,e,r,t,y all available (f = light; v = use; a=toggle last weapon, s,d=grenades or a,s,d,e,g=specific weapon toggle, q=drop weapon, w,t=teamtalk/talk, r=reload)
Yes, I know the setup appears rather inefficient. I sometimes get caught trying to run forward and backward at the same time and I'm missing out on a lot of buttons due to reach. If I were competitive (like I used to be), I'd try and change it.
Maybe it means WOW will eventually go FTP, or a successor title will.
Not while they're under Activision. Even if they weren't tied to Activision, I doubt Blizzard would make such a move. They've got plenty of users and the number of attrition doesn't quite alarm them, yet I'm sure. (There are still millions of players worldwide.) I imagine if they had to start reducing the number of servers down to about the 10+/- range, then they'd start to worry.
Having said that, I've let my subscription to WoW lapse recently and indefinitely. It was a fun game, but if I'm paying a monthly sub, I feel I need to get my money's worth - and that meant 2-3 hours a night nearly every day. Some would call that an addiction, except I have no urges or desires to jump back into the game, heh.
Where's my insightful mod!