Because if you support mods and treat the property right you can continue to get sales years and years after its release?
I'd love to see the figures that Valve gets for its back catalogs, to this very day they are still getting sales from properties like Half-Life 1 and Counter Strike Classic, long after the property has made them their investment back plus a big profit.
And what good are huge numbers of casual players if you can't make any money off of them? Look at how Zynga has been tanking as far as their stock goes because while they have the eyeballs they just can't get enough people to spend money on their in game crap to make any real money. The hard core crowd buys actual boxed products, they'll buy from digital services like steam, and they'll buy DLC if done right.
If I had mod points you'd be getting them, that was thoughtful and well said. I think that's why I've pretty much stopped getting games anywhere but Steam, all my family and friends are there so if I want to fire up a game like Saints Row 3 I can just pop off a message to one of my buds and say "Hey want to join me in some carnage?" and playing with or against them is actually FUN. Playing against some stranger (and for some reason I usually get the smartass that "talks" in SMS speak which drives me up a wall) is simply not fun, I'd say its worse than playing against the computer as i'm not getting LOLSpeak popups from the damned computer.
You are not alone friend, as while there are a couple of games I'll play online co-op with friends or family (Saints Row 3 and we're looking forward to Torchlight 2 so we can go dungeon crawling together) I frankly have NO desire to run like a chicken with its head cut off blasting everything that twitches.
Once in awhile I'll fire up a little Bioshock II MP but that is more of a friendly team thing since it always ends up a race to either find the Big daddy suit or get together and drop the guy who grabbed the Big Daddy suit but I've tried dozens of MP only games and just find them repetitive and dull.
So while I can see the appeal, hell my oldest has already won around $120 in steambux playing TFII sniping the hell out of everyone for me its just too boring.
Well if it was like Bioshock II, where you could completely ignore it if you wanted? i don't see a problem with that. With Bioshock II you could completely ignore the MP if you wanted, it was just there if you wanted to spend a few minutes blasting other players but really didn't matter, same with Bulletstorm. But if you have to be online always? No thanks, even Ubisoft abandoned that crap.
Is it really any surprise that EA is on the selling block with stupidity like this though? They have been puking out assembly line crap for years and with PHBs like this are we really surprised they are up for sale? Jim Sterling at The Escapist as a great video on why people hate EA but I guess he'll have to update it now to add "Having stupid MP in games that don't make sense having MP" to that very long list he already gives.
Its a home system, so no access to the hardware. I'm gonna have him toss the router and basically start over, see if we can kill it that way but if that doesn't work then I'm stumped as i'm running out of ideas here.
While your idea has merit I seriously doubt I can walk this guy through all that and I can't afford to take a day off and drive across the state for a former customer. hell my truck gets 14MPG and gas is nearly $4 here, it'd cost me a c-note just for the trip alone.
My grandparents knew all about that, in fact my grandfather killed the mayor of the next town over because of it. he had let out some of his land to some black folks to help him with his crops and the klan decided to pull a ride, he buried an axe in the thigh of the lead rider and 3 days later the mayor of the next town over died of "a mysterious wound" in his thigh.
It doesn't change the fact that a large majority actually helped each other and stuck together, now you can have someone murdered on a doorstep in front of 300 people and nobody lift a finger. Sad but that is how it is.
That is simple friend, we in the USA have the most powerful propaganda weapon in the history of the world pointed right at us, the MSM. The MSM has been in bed with the government and the megacorps for decades now and they constantly feed the "You can be rich!" lie to the American people daily, the entire thing is one giant unreality fest designed to lull the populace into a stupor.
But I agree in the end you can't simply propaganda away reality, and the reality is you could wipe out a good 45% of the USA population and it wouldn't hurt the quality of life but actually help it. The machines are simply better than the man and now that computers have gotten so powerful and reliable the last job humans had, running the machines, will quickly be wiped out.
The ironic part is that you have a certain party screaming about handout when in reality a good part of the services industry is NOTHING but "make work" that if it weren't for subsidies would have already been replaced by the machines. tell me friend, what job at Mickey D's couldn't be done by an automated assembly line? You could replace the entire staff with a line and a couple of cleaner bots and the place would actually be safer and run better, same thing with jobs like stocker and checkout girl, it can ALL be automated now.
In the end capitalism simply can't survive if the average person can't trade their labor for capital and now its quickly coming to the day, I'd already argue its here, when a large chunk of the population's labor simply is no longer required.
But they already cool the chips with liquid, its simply sealed in heat pipes and isn't near as messy, and more importantly its been working just fine up to and including the latest chips.
Which again makes me wonder, what aren't they saying? We've already heard how the die shrinks are getting harder and harder to pull off thanks to how many bad chips per wafer they are getting along with electron leakage, and lets face it Intel has to have something new to sell you, otherwise why not stick with what you have?
Servers don't need more powerful GPUs so the APU direction the consumer side has been going, which it looks like is about to run out of steam as well, just look at the latest benches on the Intel and AMD APUs and you'll see they quickly become bottlenecked by the slower system memory, so to sell you new chips they need more IPC, more MHz, and or more cores. AMD has been throwing more cores to the point that with Bulldozer the design actually hurts performance but Intel has had enough IPC they haven't needed to go apeshit with cores like AMD, but if they are going oil cooling my guess is they see the writing on the wall with the die shrinks and are gonna need something else to sell the chips while it takes longer and longer to work on the bugs in each new process.
So if I have to take a guess its that there is gonna be serious issues that are gonna take serious time to work out on the next die shrinks so they are gonna try to sell new chips by cranking up the speed by binning the best chips of the current process for the server line. Makes sense, servers make more money per chip than consumer and both Intel and AMD have done this in the past, but the catch is faster chips equal more heat and if they are really gonna crank the clocks to sell the next chips they are gonna have to deal with all that extra heat, hence the oil.
But I don't buy the environmental angle, you don't go to all the trouble and mess and expense of switching to something radical like that unless you have no choice.
Nope, similar drug called tegison that was used to treat psoriatic arthritis. The drug was a miracle, no side effects (other than flipper babies) and for those of us in the 80s frankly there weren't really any other drugs that worked even a tenth as good. When my pharmacist heard they were gonna take it off the market, bless his old heart, he called every damned distributor and bought every damned box he could get his hands on because he knew how many years I'd suffered and that it worked beautifully on me. he even called contacts across the border and bought every box they had as well.
Now the drug I'm on wastes my immune system, leaves me with permanent sinus infections, and costs about 3000% more than tegison did. Yay progress. I would have been happy to sign an ironclad contract to get the drug, still would today, but thanks to blood sucking leech lawyers and bambi bimbettes I can't get it.
Well GOG has a selection of Ubisoft games with no DRM of course, so you can still buy some Ubisoft games without the BS. I bought FC 2 from them...its sucks ass BTW. The worst AI I'd seen in years, which after how damned crafty the AI was in FC 1 was a major let down.
Oh and for the Linux guys there is even a page listing the games that work on Linux so GOG has something for everybody, DRM free and great prices to boot. Great place to get some games.
While its true that they've been putting out titles with $50-$60 price tags that are getting reviews in line with $30 budget titles I still have to wonder how big of a dent in their wallet the always online DRM really caused.
I mean think about it, not only do you have this huge amount of bad will from your customer, you're paying for all these servers, bigger pipes than they would normally need, every connection issue becomes a PR nightmare, its just not good business.
And while I can only speak for my family and my friends we've all been avoiding Ubisoft games for several years now thanks to not wanting to deal with the always online DRM crap. All it takes is a single friend having an issue with crap like that and the word spreads like wildfire. After a friend of mine bought one of their titles on launch and couldn't play the damn thing for 3 or 4 days due to serious connectivity issues we all said "For a game? The hell with that noise!" and stayed far away.
Since then NONE of us has bought a single Ubisoft game, one of my buds would pop up a window on the Steam sale and say "Hey bud, check it out, Splinter Cell sale!" and all it took was me saying "Always online DRM" to have them go "Oh hell no!, Thanks for reminding me" and them moving on. I bought plenty of Ubisoft titles before, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, none since the always online crap.
So hopefully they'll strip it out, not simply replace it with some equally nasty Starforce style rootkit crap, and I can pick up the Splinter Cells and AC games. It would be nice to see Ubisoft sales go up after they strip the shit out, just to show the industry that treating their customers right is rewarded while acting like assholes gets tanked sales.
Considering how consumer unfriendly this company has been I don't blame you friend. And is this gonna apply to new titles only, or are they stripping it from previous games? Because there were several Ubisoft titles on Steam I would have bought if it weren't for the always on DRM. If they are gonna strip it from everything great, all for it, if not it'll be a royal PITA still to buy any of their titles because you'll have to search the fine print to see if its pre, during, or post douchebaggery.
Well the problem we are gonna have is frankly the rich will fight it right up until they are placed against the wall. There are simply too many of them that LIKE the fact that they can consider themselves "better" than someone else and if others have to suffer too fucking bad. What we are seeing is more of a return of the robber barons, complete with Pinkerton style PMCs like Blackwater and the real 1% being able to do pretty much any damned thing they want.
But I think eventually we'll have no choice but to change, you can't have millions starving while a handful live like Gods without the starving rising up to take what the wealthy have. I have to wonder if this is why no empire really lasts, if the greed and the concentration of wealth becomes so great that the people will happily burn it to the ground rather than continue to live as they were.
Of course the big worry is automated weapons systems, look at the little mini robot tanks Israel has patrolling their borders and you'd have a perfect weapon to use against those starving masses. It wouldn't care about shooting women and children, wouldn't care how big a body count it racks up, just flip the switch and let it do its thing.
In any case i think its gonna get a LOT worse before it gets better, especially with the right tripping over themselves to cut what little aid the poor have in this country. It reminds me of the line Lenin wrote "a capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with" because if they think they can give themselves some more tax breaks while leaving a large section of the population with no way to survive I think they are gonna be in for a shock, the poor will fight back.
The problem is the thing is NOT based on science, its how likely the drug company is to be sued if something goes wrong.
I was on a drug in the 80s that was frankly like a miracle, no side effects, low cost, worked like a charm...one catch, you can never have kids because you'll end up with flipper babies. We all had to watch a video AND get a lecture AND sign a contract, simple enough right? Wrong, two bambi bimbettes took the drug and promptly got knocked up and had flipper babies and then sued the drug company. Jury took one look at the fucked up kids and gave them a ton of money so now the drug is gone and the drug I'm on now costs about 3000% more and doesn't work as well.
So frankly I'd be all for it if it was simply the doctors deciding but its not, its the lawyers.
Now as for TFA, is it just me or is the word "charity" almost like a magic shield? I mean Gates only has to say he's "giving most of his money to charity" and it seems like a large section of the populace instantly quits questioning what EXACTLY he is calling charity. Just looking under criticisms on the Wiki page already makes me think he's doing more harm than good with that money, a combo of pop science and helping out his billionaire buddies get new markets in the third world, but I just find it interesting that you can just throw the word charity out there and people just stop questioning where the money goes or if its doing any good.
I'd say a better question is "Why are they planning for oil cooling in the first place, what are they not telling us?" because i thought Intel got away from the "power piggie space heaters" when they got rid of Netburst, in fact up until Bulldozer on the AMD side both had been lowering the heat with each release.
So I have to wonder what the engineers have told the suits to get everyone on board such a radical change. Maybe their tick tocks are about to run out of steam, maybe they are having serious issues with the die shrinks and electron leakage, who knows? In any case it does make me wonder what is going on in their R&D section to suddenly decide they need to go oil cooling for their chips.
After the president stated (and wasn't stopped or even challenged) that the POTUS has the right to kill Americans without trial? I think all bets are off. We don't even know for certain WHO is being held at Gitmo and the rendition prisons, we know that people from countries we are supposedly allied with like Canada and the UK have been tortured and held without trial, and the simple fact that you have a government that not only admits it tortures but has members of it openly bragging about it means that frankly your rights don't mean jack shit anymore.
I would urge you to watch this video from start to finish. Just a simple little lecture, the person giving it is not a rabble rouser but an accomplished journalist and self proclaimed "little Jewish girl" who is already feeling the chilling effects like watchlists being aimed at her. Her crime? Talking about constitutional rights and what we need to do to preserve our freedoms. When openly talking about the constitution can get you put on watchlists friend then i think we both agree the shit ain't what it seems and most of those 'rights" that many here talk about are just useless platitudes. Because if you ever get into a position where you actually need those rights the state has already implemented mechanisms where they can take them away.
Thank the FSM that I don't do corporate anymore but frankly that doesn't surprise me one little bit. If there is one sentence that would describe MSFT as a company under Ballmer its "doesn't get it".
I mean here they are, already behind the ball when it comes to server deployments (last numbers I saw had MSFT doing well with SMBs but large corporate deployments are down with Linux growing) and dealing with a more well known and popular product with VMWare so what do they do? Play a game of "let's gouge" and kill any chance of gaining real share. BTW are they using that horrible metro UI on server? Really wouldn't shock me if they did at this point.
I have a feeling historians will look back upon this time and hold MSFT up as a shining example oof what happens when marketing takes over the company and Wall Street stock prices matter more than smart business moves. Of course playing let's gouge makes Wall Street happy in the short term but more often you gouge and customers start looking at exit strategies which when your competitor is free as in beer, well supported and runs all the software most corps depend on is NOT what you want people to do! Just one more dumbass move from the marketing team of Ballmer and Co, which considering his track record dumbass moves is pretty much SOP there now.
Not surprising, the people can be hurt, can sue, demand actual money for work, demand breaks and even time for sleep. Why should any corporation want meatsacks? Well except for the CEO and board of course, no way a machine could ever take the place of the "job creators" you know.
Seriously though this is why I've said for years, screams from the right notwithstanding, that capitalism like every other ism before it is doomed. The simple fact is we have reached a point where technology no longer empowers the individual to do more work with less effort but replaces the individual completely. Factories where thousands worked in the 50s and 60s can now be run by a couple of glorified button pushers while everything else is completely automated, hell you could replace a good 90% of the people in the services industry, nothing done in your local Walmart of Mickey D's that couldn't be done by automated assembly lines and robots. I would argue that the ONLY reason you haven't seen that done is the government uses those industries as "make work" with subsidies thus making humans cheaper to use than they actually are. See how new Walmart employees get shown training videos on how to apply for government aid for an example.
In the end capitalism breaks down when the entire basis of the system, a person trading their labor for capital, is broken thanks to the ever advancing technology. Even jobs in places we wouldn't think would be replaced are gonna end up phased out, see the rise of disposable high tech instead of repairs and smart self diagnosing servers. There are even systems being tested that will lay down a road or build a house from prefabbed parts without human interaction, all automated.
If we are gonna avoid major wars and upheaval we are just gonna have to accept the fact that many individuals being born now, and I would argue quite a few living right now, will have to be paid to not work for the rest of their lives. Not because they are lazy or don't want to work, but because their labor is simply no longer required. The machines don't get tired or sick, take breaks or need medical leave, and will work 24/7 and can be exposed to things that will sicken or kill humans so the machine is simply the better choice long term.
You could probably wipe out a good 45% of the population planetwide and not only would you not affect the quality of life more likely it would go up across the board. We simply have to accept the fact there comes a point when the old ways no longer work and I would say we are already beginning to see that, with the wealth concentration in the hands of so few (who can afford the factories filled with machines) while the average worker can kill themselves working as hard as they can and never get above where they are now. If our system doesn't change we are gonna have ever growing masses of poor and unemployed and that is when things traditionally get nasty.
If you are over scrolling then blame the GUI friend, because they should have set the scroll sensitivity correctly. Personally I use this as one of the gauges of whether a title is good or not, a good GUI should easily allow you to do the actions you are required to perform in the heat of battle while a bad interface design will leave your frustrated and pissed.
For an example of a bad user interface design please watch this Angry Joe review and watch how many times he says things like "WTF? Stop...stop it!" because he can't get the UI to perform the action he requires to play the game.
In the end if you want more buttons? That's fine and dandy, plenty of gamer mice out there with up to a dozen buttons on them. But these basic actions like switching weapons have been done correctly in so many games over the years that frankly there is no excuse for getting it wrong. If you want to try a game that will frustrate the shit out of you try Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty which is a damned shame because the premise (Churchill dies in a 29 and America's isolationism lets the Nazis take Russia and then come after the USA in the 50s) is interesting and the graphics are good, but the game is totally broken by a truly horrible interface that will have you struggling to climb ladders and perform other basic actions. The fact that its an X360 port with hard coded buttons just makes it worse but the unresponsive UI took what could have been a great game and shat all over it, because from the reviews the X360 had the same interface issues.
If that were true then the GUIs back then would have been better and more functional, but they aren't. The simple fact is every. single. thing. you named is primarily a SERVER program and money is actually spent to make those tools useful on servers perform better, whereas the desktop has never been a priority.
That is why even today if someone wanted to run Linux I'd suggest they'd need to use it in a server or embedded role, in those two use cases the tools are mature and bugs fixed quickly so its actually nice to use there, while on the desktop its a good 3 to 5 years behind the competition and there are tons of amateur hour bugs that will cause everything from GUI glitches to full blown desktop crashes.
In the end as I said Linux has a busted shitter problem, the amount of money spent on the desktop is a bad joke and without a monetary incentive to fix those bugs many simply won't care, they'll go on to making the next new thing instead as its more fun to do and if I'm working for gratis why should I do the shit work?
Hell if he doesn't want to use that (why I don't know, a wheel makes it crazy fast to spin through a weapon switch) there are several gamer mice that have a rocker switch on the right side where the thumb would rest on a traditional mouse.
BTW I know this is a little childish but to all those FOSS zealots that were "Oh no, GabeN is doing this because he really believes in Linux!" allow me to say TOLD YOU SO, he's building a fricking Steambox because Ballmer waved his flabby ass in GabeN's face with the whole appstore loaded with casual games trying to cut into Steam, so Gabe is gonna royally fuck over old Ballmer by slitting his throat in the console business. Of course the Linux fans will be pissed, as it'll no doubt have hardware DRM so no hacking allowed, but Linux hackers isn't their target audience so why should Valve care.
Which I have to say though, if it works and cuts them a serious chunk of the console market? Then I don't see how Ballmer is gonna keep his job. The X360 has been one of the few things on his watch that has done what they set out to do, even if it did cost them an extra 2 billion due to jerkass rushing the machine out before it was finished, and that was to give MSFT a nice sized chunk of the console market which gets them into content. A whole lot of money flows from content and the bitch for MSFT is Valve is a hell of a lot more liked by the gamer community than MSFT.
So if Gabe can get the other publishers on board, so your one Steam account will let you move your games back and forth between PC and console, while still having the crazy sales and great service Steam is famous for? I could see MSFT being in serious trouble when the 720 or whatever its gonna be called comes out.
Wow, thanks roman I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH!
The problem isn't the text, its that a lot of the access code crap is required to turn in homework through the site. Its basically a tollbooth that if you abolished copyright tomorrow wouldn't do jack because they'd still be able to put a toll on the homework.
Actually if they are a "boomer" then they were born between 45-49 since the "boom" being referred to was all the GIs coming back from the war and having kids at almost the exact same instant, hence the boom. While there were a few vets that got to come home early from injuries and such if you look at the birthrate of previous years and then at 45-49 it does a hockey stick thanks to so many vets having a couple of kids a piece.
Not that I'm blaming them mind you, if I survived the kind of shit my grandfather and great uncle survived in WWII, like the banzai charges and seeing my buddies turn into red mist by a PAK-88? Damned right I'd be wanting to screw my brains out and look on the positives of life like family instead of being reminded of the horror.
I don't think so, as the generation that went through the depression and WWII tried to work together, not constantly stab each other in the backs.
My grandma talked about how the neighbors and her would get together to make "hobo soup" so that those traveling the rails would have a bite to eat when they stopped in their little town, and in return, without asking mind you, she never had to split a single rick of wood and every chore that needed doing would be done by a hobo. The entire town looked after each other and if someone got sick or hurt the others would come round to help them get back on their feet again.
It went from that to a serious "Fuck you I'm entitled and you're not" attitude which i truly believe came from being spoiled rotten. The previous generation had suffered and struggled and during the boom years of the 50s was generous to a fault with their kids, only the kids just took the cash and not the lessons to appreciate what they had and help those who had less. If you'd have pushed a Gordon Gecko style character in the 40s and 50s he'd have been looked down on as a piece of self centered trash, their kids looked at him as a hero and a perfect example of their ethos.
Sad really but that's just how it turned out and now as they get old they scream and whine and demand million dollar treatments to keep their asses from the grave just a few more months.
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Because if you support mods and treat the property right you can continue to get sales years and years after its release?
I'd love to see the figures that Valve gets for its back catalogs, to this very day they are still getting sales from properties like Half-Life 1 and Counter Strike Classic, long after the property has made them their investment back plus a big profit.
And what good are huge numbers of casual players if you can't make any money off of them? Look at how Zynga has been tanking as far as their stock goes because while they have the eyeballs they just can't get enough people to spend money on their in game crap to make any real money. The hard core crowd buys actual boxed products, they'll buy from digital services like steam, and they'll buy DLC if done right.
If I had mod points you'd be getting them, that was thoughtful and well said. I think that's why I've pretty much stopped getting games anywhere but Steam, all my family and friends are there so if I want to fire up a game like Saints Row 3 I can just pop off a message to one of my buds and say "Hey want to join me in some carnage?" and playing with or against them is actually FUN. Playing against some stranger (and for some reason I usually get the smartass that "talks" in SMS speak which drives me up a wall) is simply not fun, I'd say its worse than playing against the computer as i'm not getting LOLSpeak popups from the damned computer.
You are not alone friend, as while there are a couple of games I'll play online co-op with friends or family (Saints Row 3 and we're looking forward to Torchlight 2 so we can go dungeon crawling together) I frankly have NO desire to run like a chicken with its head cut off blasting everything that twitches.
Once in awhile I'll fire up a little Bioshock II MP but that is more of a friendly team thing since it always ends up a race to either find the Big daddy suit or get together and drop the guy who grabbed the Big Daddy suit but I've tried dozens of MP only games and just find them repetitive and dull.
So while I can see the appeal, hell my oldest has already won around $120 in steambux playing TFII sniping the hell out of everyone for me its just too boring.
Well if it was like Bioshock II, where you could completely ignore it if you wanted? i don't see a problem with that. With Bioshock II you could completely ignore the MP if you wanted, it was just there if you wanted to spend a few minutes blasting other players but really didn't matter, same with Bulletstorm. But if you have to be online always? No thanks, even Ubisoft abandoned that crap.
Is it really any surprise that EA is on the selling block with stupidity like this though? They have been puking out assembly line crap for years and with PHBs like this are we really surprised they are up for sale? Jim Sterling at The Escapist as a great video on why people hate EA but I guess he'll have to update it now to add "Having stupid MP in games that don't make sense having MP" to that very long list he already gives.
Its a home system, so no access to the hardware. I'm gonna have him toss the router and basically start over, see if we can kill it that way but if that doesn't work then I'm stumped as i'm running out of ideas here.
While your idea has merit I seriously doubt I can walk this guy through all that and I can't afford to take a day off and drive across the state for a former customer. hell my truck gets 14MPG and gas is nearly $4 here, it'd cost me a c-note just for the trip alone.
My grandparents knew all about that, in fact my grandfather killed the mayor of the next town over because of it. he had let out some of his land to some black folks to help him with his crops and the klan decided to pull a ride, he buried an axe in the thigh of the lead rider and 3 days later the mayor of the next town over died of "a mysterious wound" in his thigh.
It doesn't change the fact that a large majority actually helped each other and stuck together, now you can have someone murdered on a doorstep in front of 300 people and nobody lift a finger. Sad but that is how it is.
That is simple friend, we in the USA have the most powerful propaganda weapon in the history of the world pointed right at us, the MSM. The MSM has been in bed with the government and the megacorps for decades now and they constantly feed the "You can be rich!" lie to the American people daily, the entire thing is one giant unreality fest designed to lull the populace into a stupor.
But I agree in the end you can't simply propaganda away reality, and the reality is you could wipe out a good 45% of the USA population and it wouldn't hurt the quality of life but actually help it. The machines are simply better than the man and now that computers have gotten so powerful and reliable the last job humans had, running the machines, will quickly be wiped out.
The ironic part is that you have a certain party screaming about handout when in reality a good part of the services industry is NOTHING but "make work" that if it weren't for subsidies would have already been replaced by the machines. tell me friend, what job at Mickey D's couldn't be done by an automated assembly line? You could replace the entire staff with a line and a couple of cleaner bots and the place would actually be safer and run better, same thing with jobs like stocker and checkout girl, it can ALL be automated now.
In the end capitalism simply can't survive if the average person can't trade their labor for capital and now its quickly coming to the day, I'd already argue its here, when a large chunk of the population's labor simply is no longer required.
But they already cool the chips with liquid, its simply sealed in heat pipes and isn't near as messy, and more importantly its been working just fine up to and including the latest chips.
Which again makes me wonder, what aren't they saying? We've already heard how the die shrinks are getting harder and harder to pull off thanks to how many bad chips per wafer they are getting along with electron leakage, and lets face it Intel has to have something new to sell you, otherwise why not stick with what you have?
Servers don't need more powerful GPUs so the APU direction the consumer side has been going, which it looks like is about to run out of steam as well, just look at the latest benches on the Intel and AMD APUs and you'll see they quickly become bottlenecked by the slower system memory, so to sell you new chips they need more IPC, more MHz, and or more cores. AMD has been throwing more cores to the point that with Bulldozer the design actually hurts performance but Intel has had enough IPC they haven't needed to go apeshit with cores like AMD, but if they are going oil cooling my guess is they see the writing on the wall with the die shrinks and are gonna need something else to sell the chips while it takes longer and longer to work on the bugs in each new process.
So if I have to take a guess its that there is gonna be serious issues that are gonna take serious time to work out on the next die shrinks so they are gonna try to sell new chips by cranking up the speed by binning the best chips of the current process for the server line. Makes sense, servers make more money per chip than consumer and both Intel and AMD have done this in the past, but the catch is faster chips equal more heat and if they are really gonna crank the clocks to sell the next chips they are gonna have to deal with all that extra heat, hence the oil.
But I don't buy the environmental angle, you don't go to all the trouble and mess and expense of switching to something radical like that unless you have no choice.
Nope, similar drug called tegison that was used to treat psoriatic arthritis. The drug was a miracle, no side effects (other than flipper babies) and for those of us in the 80s frankly there weren't really any other drugs that worked even a tenth as good. When my pharmacist heard they were gonna take it off the market, bless his old heart, he called every damned distributor and bought every damned box he could get his hands on because he knew how many years I'd suffered and that it worked beautifully on me. he even called contacts across the border and bought every box they had as well.
Now the drug I'm on wastes my immune system, leaves me with permanent sinus infections, and costs about 3000% more than tegison did. Yay progress. I would have been happy to sign an ironclad contract to get the drug, still would today, but thanks to blood sucking leech lawyers and bambi bimbettes I can't get it.
Well GOG has a selection of Ubisoft games with no DRM of course, so you can still buy some Ubisoft games without the BS. I bought FC 2 from them...its sucks ass BTW. The worst AI I'd seen in years, which after how damned crafty the AI was in FC 1 was a major let down.
Oh and for the Linux guys there is even a page listing the games that work on Linux so GOG has something for everybody, DRM free and great prices to boot. Great place to get some games.
While its true that they've been putting out titles with $50-$60 price tags that are getting reviews in line with $30 budget titles I still have to wonder how big of a dent in their wallet the always online DRM really caused.
I mean think about it, not only do you have this huge amount of bad will from your customer, you're paying for all these servers, bigger pipes than they would normally need, every connection issue becomes a PR nightmare, its just not good business.
And while I can only speak for my family and my friends we've all been avoiding Ubisoft games for several years now thanks to not wanting to deal with the always online DRM crap. All it takes is a single friend having an issue with crap like that and the word spreads like wildfire. After a friend of mine bought one of their titles on launch and couldn't play the damn thing for 3 or 4 days due to serious connectivity issues we all said "For a game? The hell with that noise!" and stayed far away.
Since then NONE of us has bought a single Ubisoft game, one of my buds would pop up a window on the Steam sale and say "Hey bud, check it out, Splinter Cell sale!" and all it took was me saying "Always online DRM" to have them go "Oh hell no!, Thanks for reminding me" and them moving on. I bought plenty of Ubisoft titles before, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, none since the always online crap.
So hopefully they'll strip it out, not simply replace it with some equally nasty Starforce style rootkit crap, and I can pick up the Splinter Cells and AC games. It would be nice to see Ubisoft sales go up after they strip the shit out, just to show the industry that treating their customers right is rewarded while acting like assholes gets tanked sales.
Considering how consumer unfriendly this company has been I don't blame you friend. And is this gonna apply to new titles only, or are they stripping it from previous games? Because there were several Ubisoft titles on Steam I would have bought if it weren't for the always on DRM. If they are gonna strip it from everything great, all for it, if not it'll be a royal PITA still to buy any of their titles because you'll have to search the fine print to see if its pre, during, or post douchebaggery.
Well the problem we are gonna have is frankly the rich will fight it right up until they are placed against the wall. There are simply too many of them that LIKE the fact that they can consider themselves "better" than someone else and if others have to suffer too fucking bad. What we are seeing is more of a return of the robber barons, complete with Pinkerton style PMCs like Blackwater and the real 1% being able to do pretty much any damned thing they want.
But I think eventually we'll have no choice but to change, you can't have millions starving while a handful live like Gods without the starving rising up to take what the wealthy have. I have to wonder if this is why no empire really lasts, if the greed and the concentration of wealth becomes so great that the people will happily burn it to the ground rather than continue to live as they were.
Of course the big worry is automated weapons systems, look at the little mini robot tanks Israel has patrolling their borders and you'd have a perfect weapon to use against those starving masses. It wouldn't care about shooting women and children, wouldn't care how big a body count it racks up, just flip the switch and let it do its thing.
In any case i think its gonna get a LOT worse before it gets better, especially with the right tripping over themselves to cut what little aid the poor have in this country. It reminds me of the line Lenin wrote "a capitalist will sell you the rope you hang him with" because if they think they can give themselves some more tax breaks while leaving a large section of the population with no way to survive I think they are gonna be in for a shock, the poor will fight back.
The problem is the thing is NOT based on science, its how likely the drug company is to be sued if something goes wrong.
I was on a drug in the 80s that was frankly like a miracle, no side effects, low cost, worked like a charm...one catch, you can never have kids because you'll end up with flipper babies. We all had to watch a video AND get a lecture AND sign a contract, simple enough right? Wrong, two bambi bimbettes took the drug and promptly got knocked up and had flipper babies and then sued the drug company. Jury took one look at the fucked up kids and gave them a ton of money so now the drug is gone and the drug I'm on now costs about 3000% more and doesn't work as well.
So frankly I'd be all for it if it was simply the doctors deciding but its not, its the lawyers.
Now as for TFA, is it just me or is the word "charity" almost like a magic shield? I mean Gates only has to say he's "giving most of his money to charity" and it seems like a large section of the populace instantly quits questioning what EXACTLY he is calling charity. Just looking under criticisms on the Wiki page already makes me think he's doing more harm than good with that money, a combo of pop science and helping out his billionaire buddies get new markets in the third world, but I just find it interesting that you can just throw the word charity out there and people just stop questioning where the money goes or if its doing any good.
I'd say a better question is "Why are they planning for oil cooling in the first place, what are they not telling us?" because i thought Intel got away from the "power piggie space heaters" when they got rid of Netburst, in fact up until Bulldozer on the AMD side both had been lowering the heat with each release.
So I have to wonder what the engineers have told the suits to get everyone on board such a radical change. Maybe their tick tocks are about to run out of steam, maybe they are having serious issues with the die shrinks and electron leakage, who knows? In any case it does make me wonder what is going on in their R&D section to suddenly decide they need to go oil cooling for their chips.
After the president stated (and wasn't stopped or even challenged) that the POTUS has the right to kill Americans without trial? I think all bets are off. We don't even know for certain WHO is being held at Gitmo and the rendition prisons, we know that people from countries we are supposedly allied with like Canada and the UK have been tortured and held without trial, and the simple fact that you have a government that not only admits it tortures but has members of it openly bragging about it means that frankly your rights don't mean jack shit anymore.
I would urge you to watch this video from start to finish. Just a simple little lecture, the person giving it is not a rabble rouser but an accomplished journalist and self proclaimed "little Jewish girl" who is already feeling the chilling effects like watchlists being aimed at her. Her crime? Talking about constitutional rights and what we need to do to preserve our freedoms. When openly talking about the constitution can get you put on watchlists friend then i think we both agree the shit ain't what it seems and most of those 'rights" that many here talk about are just useless platitudes. Because if you ever get into a position where you actually need those rights the state has already implemented mechanisms where they can take them away.
Thank the FSM that I don't do corporate anymore but frankly that doesn't surprise me one little bit. If there is one sentence that would describe MSFT as a company under Ballmer its "doesn't get it".
I mean here they are, already behind the ball when it comes to server deployments (last numbers I saw had MSFT doing well with SMBs but large corporate deployments are down with Linux growing) and dealing with a more well known and popular product with VMWare so what do they do? Play a game of "let's gouge" and kill any chance of gaining real share. BTW are they using that horrible metro UI on server? Really wouldn't shock me if they did at this point.
I have a feeling historians will look back upon this time and hold MSFT up as a shining example oof what happens when marketing takes over the company and Wall Street stock prices matter more than smart business moves. Of course playing let's gouge makes Wall Street happy in the short term but more often you gouge and customers start looking at exit strategies which when your competitor is free as in beer, well supported and runs all the software most corps depend on is NOT what you want people to do! Just one more dumbass move from the marketing team of Ballmer and Co, which considering his track record dumbass moves is pretty much SOP there now.
Not surprising, the people can be hurt, can sue, demand actual money for work, demand breaks and even time for sleep. Why should any corporation want meatsacks? Well except for the CEO and board of course, no way a machine could ever take the place of the "job creators" you know.
Seriously though this is why I've said for years, screams from the right notwithstanding, that capitalism like every other ism before it is doomed. The simple fact is we have reached a point where technology no longer empowers the individual to do more work with less effort but replaces the individual completely. Factories where thousands worked in the 50s and 60s can now be run by a couple of glorified button pushers while everything else is completely automated, hell you could replace a good 90% of the people in the services industry, nothing done in your local Walmart of Mickey D's that couldn't be done by automated assembly lines and robots. I would argue that the ONLY reason you haven't seen that done is the government uses those industries as "make work" with subsidies thus making humans cheaper to use than they actually are. See how new Walmart employees get shown training videos on how to apply for government aid for an example.
In the end capitalism breaks down when the entire basis of the system, a person trading their labor for capital, is broken thanks to the ever advancing technology. Even jobs in places we wouldn't think would be replaced are gonna end up phased out, see the rise of disposable high tech instead of repairs and smart self diagnosing servers. There are even systems being tested that will lay down a road or build a house from prefabbed parts without human interaction, all automated.
If we are gonna avoid major wars and upheaval we are just gonna have to accept the fact that many individuals being born now, and I would argue quite a few living right now, will have to be paid to not work for the rest of their lives. Not because they are lazy or don't want to work, but because their labor is simply no longer required. The machines don't get tired or sick, take breaks or need medical leave, and will work 24/7 and can be exposed to things that will sicken or kill humans so the machine is simply the better choice long term.
You could probably wipe out a good 45% of the population planetwide and not only would you not affect the quality of life more likely it would go up across the board. We simply have to accept the fact there comes a point when the old ways no longer work and I would say we are already beginning to see that, with the wealth concentration in the hands of so few (who can afford the factories filled with machines) while the average worker can kill themselves working as hard as they can and never get above where they are now. If our system doesn't change we are gonna have ever growing masses of poor and unemployed and that is when things traditionally get nasty.
If you are over scrolling then blame the GUI friend, because they should have set the scroll sensitivity correctly. Personally I use this as one of the gauges of whether a title is good or not, a good GUI should easily allow you to do the actions you are required to perform in the heat of battle while a bad interface design will leave your frustrated and pissed.
For an example of a bad user interface design please watch this Angry Joe review and watch how many times he says things like "WTF? Stop...stop it!" because he can't get the UI to perform the action he requires to play the game.
In the end if you want more buttons? That's fine and dandy, plenty of gamer mice out there with up to a dozen buttons on them. But these basic actions like switching weapons have been done correctly in so many games over the years that frankly there is no excuse for getting it wrong. If you want to try a game that will frustrate the shit out of you try Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty which is a damned shame because the premise (Churchill dies in a 29 and America's isolationism lets the Nazis take Russia and then come after the USA in the 50s) is interesting and the graphics are good, but the game is totally broken by a truly horrible interface that will have you struggling to climb ladders and perform other basic actions. The fact that its an X360 port with hard coded buttons just makes it worse but the unresponsive UI took what could have been a great game and shat all over it, because from the reviews the X360 had the same interface issues.
If that were true then the GUIs back then would have been better and more functional, but they aren't. The simple fact is every. single. thing. you named is primarily a SERVER program and money is actually spent to make those tools useful on servers perform better, whereas the desktop has never been a priority.
That is why even today if someone wanted to run Linux I'd suggest they'd need to use it in a server or embedded role, in those two use cases the tools are mature and bugs fixed quickly so its actually nice to use there, while on the desktop its a good 3 to 5 years behind the competition and there are tons of amateur hour bugs that will cause everything from GUI glitches to full blown desktop crashes.
In the end as I said Linux has a busted shitter problem, the amount of money spent on the desktop is a bad joke and without a monetary incentive to fix those bugs many simply won't care, they'll go on to making the next new thing instead as its more fun to do and if I'm working for gratis why should I do the shit work?
Hell if he doesn't want to use that (why I don't know, a wheel makes it crazy fast to spin through a weapon switch) there are several gamer mice that have a rocker switch on the right side where the thumb would rest on a traditional mouse.
BTW I know this is a little childish but to all those FOSS zealots that were "Oh no, GabeN is doing this because he really believes in Linux!" allow me to say TOLD YOU SO, he's building a fricking Steambox because Ballmer waved his flabby ass in GabeN's face with the whole appstore loaded with casual games trying to cut into Steam, so Gabe is gonna royally fuck over old Ballmer by slitting his throat in the console business. Of course the Linux fans will be pissed, as it'll no doubt have hardware DRM so no hacking allowed, but Linux hackers isn't their target audience so why should Valve care.
Which I have to say though, if it works and cuts them a serious chunk of the console market? Then I don't see how Ballmer is gonna keep his job. The X360 has been one of the few things on his watch that has done what they set out to do, even if it did cost them an extra 2 billion due to jerkass rushing the machine out before it was finished, and that was to give MSFT a nice sized chunk of the console market which gets them into content. A whole lot of money flows from content and the bitch for MSFT is Valve is a hell of a lot more liked by the gamer community than MSFT.
So if Gabe can get the other publishers on board, so your one Steam account will let you move your games back and forth between PC and console, while still having the crazy sales and great service Steam is famous for? I could see MSFT being in serious trouble when the 720 or whatever its gonna be called comes out.
Dr King wouldn't "say" anything, he'd been in solitary if he was lucky, in Gitmo as a terrorist if not.
Wow, thanks roman I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH!
The problem isn't the text, its that a lot of the access code crap is required to turn in homework through the site. Its basically a tollbooth that if you abolished copyright tomorrow wouldn't do jack because they'd still be able to put a toll on the homework.
Actually if they are a "boomer" then they were born between 45-49 since the "boom" being referred to was all the GIs coming back from the war and having kids at almost the exact same instant, hence the boom. While there were a few vets that got to come home early from injuries and such if you look at the birthrate of previous years and then at 45-49 it does a hockey stick thanks to so many vets having a couple of kids a piece.
Not that I'm blaming them mind you, if I survived the kind of shit my grandfather and great uncle survived in WWII, like the banzai charges and seeing my buddies turn into red mist by a PAK-88? Damned right I'd be wanting to screw my brains out and look on the positives of life like family instead of being reminded of the horror.
I don't think so, as the generation that went through the depression and WWII tried to work together, not constantly stab each other in the backs.
My grandma talked about how the neighbors and her would get together to make "hobo soup" so that those traveling the rails would have a bite to eat when they stopped in their little town, and in return, without asking mind you, she never had to split a single rick of wood and every chore that needed doing would be done by a hobo. The entire town looked after each other and if someone got sick or hurt the others would come round to help them get back on their feet again.
It went from that to a serious "Fuck you I'm entitled and you're not" attitude which i truly believe came from being spoiled rotten. The previous generation had suffered and struggled and during the boom years of the 50s was generous to a fault with their kids, only the kids just took the cash and not the lessons to appreciate what they had and help those who had less. If you'd have pushed a Gordon Gecko style character in the 40s and 50s he'd have been looked down on as a piece of self centered trash, their kids looked at him as a hero and a perfect example of their ethos.
Sad really but that's just how it turned out and now as they get old they scream and whine and demand million dollar treatments to keep their asses from the grave just a few more months.