So if their goal is to give real track time without the hassle, are they going to go back and redo Lime Rock? They just finished repaving Lime Rock shortly before the ALMS race this year, and the old version is still in the game. When they did that, they fixed the heinously bumpy front straight, paved over the inlaid concrete in the first few corners, fixed the grip in the west bend, and introduced new (horrible) chicanes.
I decided to try iRacing, figuring $20 isn't too bad if it actually turns out to be decent. Sadly, it didn't. The tracks feel good because they're laser scanned, and they get all the bumps correct... but they don't LOOK good.
The cars you start with... heh. The Pontiac is an understeering hog. It's supposed to be a trainer car, but in my opinion you should learn with a car that's moderately neutral handling... not one you have to wrestle into a turn 50 ft sooner than you would a well-balanced car just to get past the understeer. And the Legends cars are pretty fun, but circle track racing has never been my thing, and they're almost undrivable on real tracks.
The controls... maybe it's just because I don't have a $300 G25, but they don't feel right. They're obviously made for a 900degree wheel, and I have to adjust it to work with my 270 degree wheel, but the connection isn't a 1:1 like the ISI and Simbin games. The brake pedal isn't a 1:1 connection either, so the line between "not slowing down" and "locked up sliding in to the wall" is minimal.
And the business model... that may be the worst part of it all. Most MMOs are $15/month.. and that gets you all the content that goes with it. iRacing is $20/month, then $15-25 per track, and $20 per car. Yeah, I think not.
Most of the people that I've met that are defending iRacing are either A) reviewers who have financial backing or B) "fanbois" trying hard to justify the money they're spending on the game.
Oh well, GTR Evolution comes out Monday, and then I can get my fix of another racing sim:)
Oh please, give me a break. Sony is using the Playstation fanboy wave to help prop up their media format to help assure them of being able to rake in the profits in years to come. Microsoft's "subsidizing" the game industry isn't what has buried the PS3 to date.... SONY is what has buried the PS3 to date. It was rushed to market as a trojan horse to get Blu-Ray into homes with absolutely no regard for gamers, based on the absolute crap library we're still seeing.
Neither one is a role-model for consumer relations, but you're making out as if Sony is some poor little underdog being bullied around by mean ol' Billy Gates. They may not have turned a profit yet, but they introduced competition into the market, and competition is good.
Remember back when they were first criticized for it, and they said that due to adding tilt sensors to the controller, it would be impossible to implement rumble?
I used to be a huge Sony fanboy, but between the pricing, the trainwreck release, the lack of decent titles, and their constant lying about things.... I'm fed up with them.
Seriously! They talk about the $8billion total IT power budget, and this is supposed to cut off $450million... nearly 18% of the total budget... by turning back port speeds on switches and PCs? Those are some bloated numbers to be throwing around without some type of quantifiable facts to back it up.
This is Capcom... the same company that ignored the pleas of many gamers when Dead Rising was thoroughly unreadable on most TVs out there. Should we REALLY be telling other developers to take notes from their behaviour?
I bought a VGA cable yesterday. As it turns out, my favorite game doesn't work with it. Project Gotham Racing 3 gets forced into widescreen mode on a normal 4:3 monitor. Makes playing almost impossible. The rest of my stuff works fine, but I have to go hook my Xbox back up to a standard TV to play PGR3:(
The biggest insult keeps getting overlooked by EVERYONE on this. Capcom has refused to patch the game.... that's a slap in the face. The kick in the teeth comes from the fact that the SAME DAY that they announced they have absolutely no intentions of supporting the game.... they're throwing another $3million at the advertising budget to market the game. As long as DR keeps going out the doors, they don't give a crap.
TV Ad Buys Doubled to $6 Million to Increase National Exposure for Acclaimed Zombie Game
Crap... that was me and I'm too stupid to login. Let me post again so it doesn't get filtered out. --------- I just set up CactiEZ from cactiusers.org to test out some stuff on my network. It's a basic distro built on CentOS 4 that installs just what you need, has most of the stuff pre-configured out of the box like the MySQL backend, the cron jobs, etc... and is just generally EASY to use.
Personally, I'm running it in a VMWare machine without seeing a very big performance hit on the Win2k3 server it's hosted on. Then again, I'm only using it to monitor a handfull of firewalls, routers, and UPSes.
Either way, don't let Cacti's complexity scare you off.... the CactiEZ distro is incredibly quick to get setup and going.
And going completely nutso over the incident to the point that the government tramples our rights means that the terrorists got exactly what they wanted, to change our way of life.
Remember the days when you could step foot in a public place without emptying your pockets and walking through metal detectors? Remember when you could take a flight somewhere without arriving 4 hours early to get through security and give you enough time to still make your flight if the random check pulls you aside for your body cavity search?
But, most people DO only know as much about their cars as they do about their computers. You think the typical soccer mom driving along in her Chevy Yukon or Ford Exploder while talking on her cell phone and applying makeup knows how her engine works? You'd be lucky if she knew what the "check oil" light meant. Typical drivers understand how the key goes in the ignition, and what "D" and "R" on their shifter stand for. More and more kids are growing up now with no clue how to drive a straight drive, no clue how to do any standard maintenance on a car, or even how to change a flat tire. "What? Three pedals? OMG! What do I do?" Cars are nothing more than a lazy boy recliner with a funny wheel and some pedals to most people.
Idiot users outnumber us geeks the same way schmucks in SUVs outnumber those of us with a clue or even a desire for knowledge about cars.
Have you PLAYED since 1.10? For us, BWL is almost unlivable. Fight starts, lag spikes through the roof. Warriors can't sunder, healers can't heal, aggro goes crazy, people die... repeat process. It hangs at authentication, and after moving on from that... hangs at handshaking. If you're lucky, Retrieving Character List will only take 20 seconds during primetime. If not, it'll be 5 minutes like it did to me last night. This is not counting the fact that every Friday night, the entire server just starts dropping zones. If you're in an instance you're ok... if not.... buh-bye now.
For the last month, Windrunner has been absolutely atrocious. I don't know if you just play during the day and not during US primetime or what, but our server at least is in foul shape.
He's not talking about a problem with Gentoo or the Linux community, but a problem in society that pisses off many of us on a daily basis. That problem being political correctness run amuck.
I too believe if someone is sitting around thinking "OMG, that might offend someone!!" then yes, they ARE part of the problem.
Yes, I'm sure people are just JUMPING at the chance to pay their own money to fly to Moscow with thier own equipment to prove under Starforce's conditions that their product is flawed. They make it so easy, it's an absolute wonder that a ton of people haven't claimed it yet.
I'll offer $10,000 to anyone that can prove Katie Holmes isn't my sister, but to collect on it you have to meet me on the surface of Jupiter and perform all the necessary genealogical lookups there.
Yellow means proceed with caution down here. With the 18 wheeler that had been riding my bumper, I deemed going through a light to be more safe than trying to get on the brakes and hope he could slow down from 55mph as fast as I could.
I don't even think they review them.... they just mail them out. I got one in Monroe, NC last November for running a redlight by 0.017 seconds. Cost me $50 that I had to mail to some company up in Ohio. You figure out exactly how long 0.017 seconds is and tell me how much I was over the white line by. The sensors say you're over the line, and you get mailed a bill. City cops probably never even known an incident took place... they just receive a check every quarter or so, I bet.
I'm pretty sure the rest would stay property of the scum^W reputable company that sells these revenue generating^W^W live-saving devices.
Some cities have traffic cameras outside of these things, and I would think THAT could be used as defense.
So.... even though I don't drink.... I should have to fork out $600 on a useless piece of junk, just so it can make whiny crybaby big-brother liberals like you feel happy?
I would disagree. I work for a small community bank with two branches and a third under construction. We recently moved our ATM off of Star to another processor, and in the process switched from straight Frame Relay to a LAN hookup.... thus going from 911 to 912 software in the process.
The Diebold tech came out, I let him into the ATM room, gave him the IP, gateway, and the host IP and port... and he had the system converted in no time flat. Unfortunately, the problem was NOT with Diebold.
Once he had the system up and online, we had to get the software with the screens the public sees downloaded to the ATM. We spent about 5 hours on the phone off and on with a programmer from our processor and with a programmer from Diebold. They argued back and forth about whose fault it was, and finally the guy from Diebold convined them to email him the load they were sending us and the load from a working bank so he could compare. The next day I come in to work, the Diebold tech shows up about 20 minutes later (10 minutes earlier than he had told me he would)... and he immediately starts telling me what's going on. Apparently our processor is sending us an imcomplete load for some reason, less than half the size it should be. All that arguing yesterday, and they never actually took the time to check that they were sending us the right thing.
So we have to sit and wait for them to get into THEIR offices and send the correct and working load to our ATM. When they finally do, the Diebold guy finishes up the install by loading the admin card onto the HD, showing the CSR that will handle it how to balance both from the front of the ATM and from the rear screen, and he was done.
I lay absolutely NONE of the blame on Diebold for the incident. He even said that he wouldn't bill us for the hours that he sat around waiting on someone at the processor to fix the problem. Other than a few frame relay outages (not Diebold's fault) and this little conversion incident (again not Diebold's fault)... this ATM has been rock solid. Unfortunately, we can't get one like that anymore, so the ATM going into our new branch is going to be an Opteva running Windows TCS+.
Long story short, Diebold is a large company that sells everything; the cabinets, the actual vault and vault door, our security system and cameras, the ATM, and even the modular frame for the teller line. To dismiss the whole company because of issues that they have with e-voting is unfair and unfortunate. Yeah, I'm the IT guy.... but I've also helped oversee every aspect of both of our new branches, and have yet to find a complaint about Diebold.
You work at a bank.. you should know more about how much they charge for their services rather than just the hardware. We're using standard hardware, but paying out the arse for the connection to Starcom.
A friend of mine had an idea like this a while back and never went through with it. His house is stacked full of old Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Coleco, and even a few Jaguar games. He's bought a bit off of Ebay, but most of those have been because he personally wanted them. The rest came from flea markets, yard sales, etc. He's bought boxes full of games, 100+ Atari games for $5 one time. He's found some classic handheld games.. unopened Final Fantasy, etc at yard sales. If you're wanting to do this, you're gonna have to do some digging. Look around for yard sale signs and get there early, go out to the farmer's market (or whatever) on weekends. Most of the time, the people selling the stuff have no clue what they have, and will get rid of it dirt cheap. On a good day, $100 should bring you home a car load.:)
And I would like to agree about buying stuff that I've tried out on Napster, but to be completely honest with you... I haven't bought a CD in the past year. Was it because I was stealing it off of Napster... uhh.. no. Was it because there hasn't been a single thing released in the last year that I've had any interest in? Yup.. that's the ticket.
I swear.. one more boy band in the next year, and I'm gonna have to hurt somebody.
Yeah, same problem with my DVD player as well. I had originally hooked up my DVD player to my parent's TV to let them watch something, and it was absolutely horrid... brightness would dim and get bright randomly, lines danced around the screen, and all kind of bad things. Then I hooked up the DVD player through my VCR and it's not as bad. There's an occasional place where it will get dim, and I have to turn the audio up.. but it's better than having to buy a new TV set when I'm already so far in debt.
Thank you again Macrovision... who cares how bad you screw the consumers as long as big businesses don't lose any money.
As a VAR, and someone the clients call when they screw something up, the ads I hate most are the ones that look like a Windows popup box. I've had 10 calls in the last week from people who clicked on the "Your connection is not optimized" ad somewhere... most of the time they were trying to click the little X in the corner to close it. The monkey I can live with... but the phone calls about those are driving me to the brink of insanity.
Slashdot Mirror
So if their goal is to give real track time without the hassle, are they going to go back and redo Lime Rock? They just finished repaving Lime Rock shortly before the ALMS race this year, and the old version is still in the game. When they did that, they fixed the heinously bumpy front straight, paved over the inlaid concrete in the first few corners, fixed the grip in the west bend, and introduced new (horrible) chicanes.
I don't know where you're finding $50 track days, but sign me up!
4) rFactor is better anyway.
There, fixed that for you.
I decided to try iRacing, figuring $20 isn't too bad if it actually turns out to be decent. Sadly, it didn't. The tracks feel good because they're laser scanned, and they get all the bumps correct... but they don't LOOK good.
The cars you start with... heh. The Pontiac is an understeering hog. It's supposed to be a trainer car, but in my opinion you should learn with a car that's moderately neutral handling... not one you have to wrestle into a turn 50 ft sooner than you would a well-balanced car just to get past the understeer. And the Legends cars are pretty fun, but circle track racing has never been my thing, and they're almost undrivable on real tracks.
The controls... maybe it's just because I don't have a $300 G25, but they don't feel right. They're obviously made for a 900degree wheel, and I have to adjust it to work with my 270 degree wheel, but the connection isn't a 1:1 like the ISI and Simbin games. The brake pedal isn't a 1:1 connection either, so the line between "not slowing down" and "locked up sliding in to the wall" is minimal.
And the business model... that may be the worst part of it all. Most MMOs are $15/month.. and that gets you all the content that goes with it. iRacing is $20/month, then $15-25 per track, and $20 per car. Yeah, I think not.
Most of the people that I've met that are defending iRacing are either A) reviewers who have financial backing or B) "fanbois" trying hard to justify the money they're spending on the game.
Oh well, GTR Evolution comes out Monday, and then I can get my fix of another racing sim :)
Oh please, give me a break. Sony is using the Playstation fanboy wave to help prop up their media format to help assure them of being able to rake in the profits in years to come. Microsoft's "subsidizing" the game industry isn't what has buried the PS3 to date.... SONY is what has buried the PS3 to date. It was rushed to market as a trojan horse to get Blu-Ray into homes with absolutely no regard for gamers, based on the absolute crap library we're still seeing.
Neither one is a role-model for consumer relations, but you're making out as if Sony is some poor little underdog being bullied around by mean ol' Billy Gates. They may not have turned a profit yet, but they introduced competition into the market, and competition is good.
a reminder
another reminder
yet another reminder
I used to be a huge Sony fanboy, but between the pricing, the trainwreck release, the lack of decent titles, and their constant lying about things.... I'm fed up with them.
Seriously! They talk about the $8billion total IT power budget, and this is supposed to cut off $450million... nearly 18% of the total budget... by turning back port speeds on switches and PCs? Those are some bloated numbers to be throwing around without some type of quantifiable facts to back it up.
The ones that don't run Windows still run OS/2.
Lesser of the two evils?
This is Capcom... the same company that ignored the pleas of many gamers when Dead Rising was thoroughly unreadable on most TVs out there. Should we REALLY be telling other developers to take notes from their behaviour?
I bought a VGA cable yesterday. As it turns out, my favorite game doesn't work with it. Project Gotham Racing 3 gets forced into widescreen mode on a normal 4:3 monitor. Makes playing almost impossible. The rest of my stuff works fine, but I have to go hook my Xbox back up to a standard TV to play PGR3 :(
The biggest insult keeps getting overlooked by EVERYONE on this. Capcom has refused to patch the game.... that's a slap in the face. The kick in the teeth comes from the fact that the SAME DAY that they announced they have absolutely no intentions of supporting the game.... they're throwing another $3million at the advertising budget to market the game. As long as DR keeps going out the doors, they don't give a crap.
TV Ad Buys Doubled to $6 Million to Increase National Exposure for Acclaimed Zombie Game
Crap... that was me and I'm too stupid to login. Let me post again so it doesn't get filtered out.
---------
I just set up CactiEZ from cactiusers.org to test out some stuff on my network. It's a basic distro built on CentOS 4 that installs just what you need, has most of the stuff pre-configured out of the box like the MySQL backend, the cron jobs, etc... and is just generally EASY to use.
Personally, I'm running it in a VMWare machine without seeing a very big performance hit on the Win2k3 server it's hosted on. Then again, I'm only using it to monitor a handfull of firewalls, routers, and UPSes.
Either way, don't let Cacti's complexity scare you off.... the CactiEZ distro is incredibly quick to get setup and going.
And going completely nutso over the incident to the point that the government tramples our rights means that the terrorists got exactly what they wanted, to change our way of life.
Remember the days when you could step foot in a public place without emptying your pockets and walking through metal detectors? Remember when you could take a flight somewhere without arriving 4 hours early to get through security and give you enough time to still make your flight if the random check pulls you aside for your body cavity search?
Are your papers in order?
But, most people DO only know as much about their cars as they do about their computers. You think the typical soccer mom driving along in her Chevy Yukon or Ford Exploder while talking on her cell phone and applying makeup knows how her engine works? You'd be lucky if she knew what the "check oil" light meant. Typical drivers understand how the key goes in the ignition, and what "D" and "R" on their shifter stand for. More and more kids are growing up now with no clue how to drive a straight drive, no clue how to do any standard maintenance on a car, or even how to change a flat tire. "What? Three pedals? OMG! What do I do?" Cars are nothing more than a lazy boy recliner with a funny wheel and some pedals to most people.
Idiot users outnumber us geeks the same way schmucks in SUVs outnumber those of us with a clue or even a desire for knowledge about cars.
Have you PLAYED since 1.10? For us, BWL is almost unlivable. Fight starts, lag spikes through the roof. Warriors can't sunder, healers can't heal, aggro goes crazy, people die... repeat process. It hangs at authentication, and after moving on from that... hangs at handshaking. If you're lucky, Retrieving Character List will only take 20 seconds during primetime. If not, it'll be 5 minutes like it did to me last night. This is not counting the fact that every Friday night, the entire server just starts dropping zones. If you're in an instance you're ok... if not.... buh-bye now.
For the last month, Windrunner has been absolutely atrocious. I don't know if you just play during the day and not during US primetime or what, but our server at least is in foul shape.
He's not talking about a problem with Gentoo or the Linux community, but a problem in society that pisses off many of us on a daily basis. That problem being political correctness run amuck.
I too believe if someone is sitting around thinking "OMG, that might offend someone!!" then yes, they ARE part of the problem.
Yes, I'm sure people are just JUMPING at the chance to pay their own money to fly to Moscow with thier own equipment to prove under Starforce's conditions that their product is flawed. They make it so easy, it's an absolute wonder that a ton of people haven't claimed it yet.
I'll offer $10,000 to anyone that can prove Katie Holmes isn't my sister, but to collect on it you have to meet me on the surface of Jupiter and perform all the necessary genealogical lookups there.
Yellow means proceed with caution down here. With the 18 wheeler that had been riding my bumper, I deemed going through a light to be more safe than trying to get on the brakes and hope he could slow down from 55mph as fast as I could.
I don't even think they review them.... they just mail them out. I got one in Monroe, NC last November for running a redlight by 0.017 seconds. Cost me $50 that I had to mail to some company up in Ohio. You figure out exactly how long 0.017 seconds is and tell me how much I was over the white line by. The sensors say you're over the line, and you get mailed a bill. City cops probably never even known an incident took place... they just receive a check every quarter or so, I bet.
I'm pretty sure the rest would stay property of the scum^W reputable company that sells these revenue generating^W^W live-saving devices.
Some cities have traffic cameras outside of these things, and I would think THAT could be used as defense.
So.... even though I don't drink.... I should have to fork out $600 on a useless piece of junk, just so it can make whiny crybaby big-brother liberals like you feel happy?
I don't think so, skppy.
I would disagree. I work for a small community bank with two branches and a third under construction. We recently moved our ATM off of Star to another processor, and in the process switched from straight Frame Relay to a LAN hookup.... thus going from 911 to 912 software in the process.
The Diebold tech came out, I let him into the ATM room, gave him the IP, gateway, and the host IP and port... and he had the system converted in no time flat. Unfortunately, the problem was NOT with Diebold.
Once he had the system up and online, we had to get the software with the screens the public sees downloaded to the ATM. We spent about 5 hours on the phone off and on with a programmer from our processor and with a programmer from Diebold. They argued back and forth about whose fault it was, and finally the guy from Diebold convined them to email him the load they were sending us and the load from a working bank so he could compare. The next day I come in to work, the Diebold tech shows up about 20 minutes later (10 minutes earlier than he had told me he would)... and he immediately starts telling me what's going on. Apparently our processor is sending us an imcomplete load for some reason, less than half the size it should be. All that arguing yesterday, and they never actually took the time to check that they were sending us the right thing.
So we have to sit and wait for them to get into THEIR offices and send the correct and working load to our ATM. When they finally do, the Diebold guy finishes up the install by loading the admin card onto the HD, showing the CSR that will handle it how to balance both from the front of the ATM and from the rear screen, and he was done.
I lay absolutely NONE of the blame on Diebold for the incident. He even said that he wouldn't bill us for the hours that he sat around waiting on someone at the processor to fix the problem. Other than a few frame relay outages (not Diebold's fault) and this little conversion incident (again not Diebold's fault)... this ATM has been rock solid. Unfortunately, we can't get one like that anymore, so the ATM going into our new branch is going to be an Opteva running Windows TCS+.
Long story short, Diebold is a large company that sells everything; the cabinets, the actual vault and vault door, our security system and cameras, the ATM, and even the modular frame for the teller line. To dismiss the whole company because of issues that they have with e-voting is unfair and unfortunate. Yeah, I'm the IT guy.... but I've also helped oversee every aspect of both of our new branches, and have yet to find a complaint about Diebold.
You work at a bank.. you should know more about how much they charge for their services rather than just the hardware. We're using standard hardware, but paying out the arse for the connection to Starcom.
A friend of mine had an idea like this a while back and never went through with it. His house is stacked full of old Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Coleco, and even a few Jaguar games. He's bought a bit off of Ebay, but most of those have been because he personally wanted them. The rest came from flea markets, yard sales, etc. He's bought boxes full of games, 100+ Atari games for $5 one time. He's found some classic handheld games.. unopened Final Fantasy, etc at yard sales. If you're wanting to do this, you're gonna have to do some digging. Look around for yard sale signs and get there early, go out to the farmer's market (or whatever) on weekends. Most of the time, the people selling the stuff have no clue what they have, and will get rid of it dirt cheap. On a good day, $100 should bring you home a car load. :)
Good... so I'm not the only one? :)
And I would like to agree about buying stuff that I've tried out on Napster, but to be completely honest with you... I haven't bought a CD in the past year. Was it because I was stealing it off of Napster... uhh.. no. Was it because there hasn't been a single thing released in the last year that I've had any interest in? Yup.. that's the ticket.
I swear.. one more boy band in the next year, and I'm gonna have to hurt somebody.
Yeah, same problem with my DVD player as well. I had originally hooked up my DVD player to my parent's TV to let them watch something, and it was absolutely horrid... brightness would dim and get bright randomly, lines danced around the screen, and all kind of bad things. Then I hooked up the DVD player through my VCR and it's not as bad. There's an occasional place where it will get dim, and I have to turn the audio up.. but it's better than having to buy a new TV set when I'm already so far in debt.
Thank you again Macrovision... who cares how bad you screw the consumers as long as big businesses don't lose any money.
As a VAR, and someone the clients call when they screw something up, the ads I hate most are the ones that look like a Windows popup box. I've had 10 calls in the last week from people who clicked on the "Your connection is not optimized" ad somewhere... most of the time they were trying to click the little X in the corner to close it. The monkey I can live with... but the phone calls about those are driving me to the brink of insanity.