They're looking at it the wrong way. If someone quits before the end of the game, you've failed to make the game compelling enough to finish.
I didn't really like Oblivion, and never got more than 10hrs into Morrowind (which imo was much better). I love Fallout, but don't have the inclination to do everything. I probably got 30hrs out of 3 and a little more out of New Vegas.
Personally I would prefer most of these games if they were ~25% smaller but had that effort spent on making whats left better. I'm not saying they should do it for that reason (the market has varied tastes after all). I am saying that different users want different things. Players who like FPS games aren't less 'discerning' they have different tastes. The first Gears game was great (again imo) because it was so well executed, the fact that I completed it in coop with a mate in a day (~7hours) didn't bother me because it was a great 7 hours.
Think of yourself in terms of having a customer and your competition is the cloud. Do you think the "cloud" provider is rude and surly? Do you think that they push back and make it seem like this whole idea is putting them out and making their life harder?
A lot of people in IT would benefit from thinking about other departments as customers, even more so if they consider the competition as you suggest. If I'm in a decision making role, and think my IT department is hindering my business, why wouldn't I try moving more of the work to external firms? If they turn out to be as bad, then I can always try another.
There is no way the chinese are building rail lines as part of a cunning military plan. Transporting military assets by rail makes locating, tracking and targetting them far too easy for your opponents. Rail worked back in WW2 in the pre-sat and pre-guided missile era.
No, your insurance company refuses to offer insurance products which don't require a level of security to be maintained. They aren't judging the morality of the theft, they are making a profit/loss decision that has nothing to do with whether the theft was legal/moral/ethical etc.
Nope. Where I live, if you lose your phone you better make tracks and report it ASAP. Many horror stories about lost phones.
Generally stories about, I left my phone at a bar and went back later to collect it don't spread as well as the horror stories.
I've left a wallet in a bar and dropped it outside of a shop. I've left a phone on a train, another in a cinema and yet another at a club. Every single one was handed in, with nothing taken. I've also found wallets and phones, and either phoned the owner or taken them to the staff/owner of the place where they were found.
Perhaps us Brits are just honest, perhaps this is a case of exceptional good luck, or perhaps people don't steal everything when given the chance.
Using impure data to make real world decisions is just plain wrong.
To call someone an idiot because you're too blinkered to comprehend that the importance of accuracy can vary depending on the decision you appear like an ignorant idiot yourself.
There is nothing wrong with a search engine making an educated guess about the colour of shoes based on an expert system or similar methodology. It might be annoying when it gets it wrong, but most users would prefer to have the option than not. His point, and it was well made, was that with large and/or diverse data sources it is impossible to answer some important questions with 100.000000%+ reliability.
Good luck trying to make a decision on whether you should respond. I expect the answer will be "I don't know" unless you know how to interpret information like my post, your reaction to my post, your background knowledge and current circumstance in a way you define as 'pure data', because if you can't then making that decision is "just plain wrong".
What a pack of pricks. That ain't cool, that's fucked up and selfish.
You've summed them up pretty nicely. Sadly, far too many people are still ignorant to the fact thay are looking for victims, and it's a lucky coincidence if they happen to target people you don't like, rather than you or people you do like.
The internet hasn't changed the fact that if someone doesn't want to be tied to an 'attack' they can make it hard to tell it was them, or even look like it was someone else.
Chinese hackers using systems located in Russia to hack NSA assets is just as hard to 'prove' as China launching a Russian made ICBM from a submarine disguised as Russian in a location the Russians would likely use etc. Unless the person who attacks you basically tells you they did it to your face (and even then potentially) you're making a judgement as to what happened based on evidence.
It's not fair to compare the outright purchase price of a brand new game to a subscription game like WOW (not that I have any issue with WOW). If you buy a brand new game, you could get your 1,2,3 or whatever out of it and then still trade it in. In the UK most game retailers will offer new titles for £5 when you trade in a title from the last couple of months. After the initial ~£30 purchase you could get a new AAA title each month for £5. At the end you could still sell whatever title you had left.
WOW is great if that's what you want, but I find that the people who talk about value for money aren't thinking things through. WOW has a lot of content, but by the time you've played it for 2 years and 1000+ hours you've seen it all and are replaying content because of the social aspects, and enjoyment of the game engine. Titles like counter-strike don't include the vastness of content, but they include the social apects and some people prefer that game style, and they didn't need to pay a subscription to get years worth of enjoyment.
I got crazy amounts of game time on Starcraft, and Halo 2 multiplayer, and didnt have to pay the game devs a subscription to do it. That's a bargain.
1) Why limit yourself to models that pay for something AFTER it has been produced?
I expect it is because many consumers given the choice of buying a game at the point of retail, or putting money into producing the game, which if the project doesn't fail, they will receive in 2-5 years prefer buying the end product.
Similarly, some game makers distribute the game for free and make their money solely from paid subscription to access a managed online environment for that game.
This is where gaming is going. Produce your games so that they can only be used with an authorised account and an internet connection. It has nothing to do with consumers liking the subscription model though, it is entirely because 1) It's harder to pirate 2) Very few people would drop £500+ on a game, but will willingly pay that in total in subscription costs over a long period.
It makes perfect sense, if users are given the some control over which SMS are charged. You 'pay' for receiving an email (although most people do so via the effectively unlimited bandwidth they have pre-purchased). Not paying for incoming phone and text communications is why we haven't got services like google voice in the UK. It also means that their is no motivation for mobile operators to decrease the sms delivery charge because their customer isn't paying for it anyway
Apple will make your book available through a specific program for 30% revenue. You could already avoid a publisher if you wanted without having to pay 30% so I'm not sure what you're lauding apple for. Going without a publisher is probably no issue for a major author, and frankly I'm not sure why more haven't tried it yet. For less well known names I expect it will be difficult to generate enough visibility without support or a lot of luck, even if the book is really good.
What's the alternative? Have the judge hear 132 different cases with say 20 cases of prior art each? Assuming that it takes a week to hear each claim, and a 1/2 for each prior art that would be 1,500 days, factor in holidays and weekends and you're talking about ~2,500 days (7-8 years). Obviously these numbers are pulled out of my ass, but I would be suprised if a case of such scale wouldn't take years. The other options are rush the process giving each claim and the prior art a mere fraction of the time they should, or decrease the scope of the case.
Given that a years long case would suit no one other than the lawyers I think the judge was right to force a limitation of scope. Asking Oracle to limit themselves to 3 claims is probably a little extreme, but anything more than single digits would become extremely unwieldy. Oracle should be able to show Googles wrong doing using its 3 strongest claims, it it can't it is unlikely that the other 129 would make any difference. Additionally Google should be able to show prior art by presenting its best 3 examples, if these aren't valid then the others were unlikely to be.
If you 'already' own an Xbox/PS3 then you can't buy a PC for the same price. If your console breaks, you've still got the games library so are likely to stick with it. You quote lack of hardware updates as a flaw, which is odd given that most people who buy consoles find the idea that they don't have to consider hardware upgrades a massive bonus.
Consoles are doing well because people can buy it, stick it under the TV and 'know' it will run anything branded for that console without any worries about performance. A large portion of the market is massively put off by the idea of having to consider the 'specs' of their games device when buying a game. I've been a PC gamer for years, but I still buy titles for consoles more often than not because I have no inclination to even look up what GFX card I last installed and how that will handle a new game. Nor do I intend to move my desktop into the lounge to use the TV, or buy a new living room friendly rig, or buy a monitor that will provide an equivalent image quality.
Surely the very definition of civilisation is founded on the idea that everyone is not an island unto themselves? We don't all have to have an extensive understanding and experience of every single thing that takes place for society to function. Obviously it helps if we have a basic understanding, otherwise people are afraid of things they don't understand, or open to their ignorance being manipulated.
You already are competing with people for food. Coexisting diversity without competition is known as collusion. When you say resources spent competing are better spent cooperating, what exactly do you mean. You expect Coke and Pepsi to sign a pact to not compete, then spend their advertising budget on charity? Price cuts would be a competitive use of resources. Why would they? They have owners, who invested money intending to profit, they would take the saved expenditure in increased share dividends, or use it to buy out other smaller players, leaving the cartel of 'coexisting diversity' as a monopoly.
Personally perhaps not. However on almost any forum where pc gaming is represented and you'll have a large proportion of members filling the 'sigs' with pc specs, benchmarks etc. Many questions about performance issues are responded to with posts that do nothing to resolve the issue, and are simply the poster using it as an excuse to say they don't have any issues on there massively over-specced ePeen... computer.
You can say (and it may be true for some) that it is not boasting, just sharing information with those who have a shared interest. However, if I posted on a home buyers forum with a sig saying "Owner of £1,400k London townhouse, bespoke kitchen and room decor, underground car port and 4 luxury bedrooms" I'd be bragging (and lieing!) no matter how much I like discussing housing.
I'd say the opposite is true. Digital services like Google allow us to be more effective, social services like Facebook are beginning to utilise our networks to provide us with an added layer of filtering for the near endless information now available via these tools.
In essence, although facebook etc can just be used as a way to play crap web games. The combination of vast amounts of readily available data, and information on our, and our social groups, preferences is allowing us to find what we need and do so more quickly and effectively. I guess it all depends on your definition of inherent value. I find the inherent value in anything that helps people obtain or retain information to be inherently valuable. Henry Ford learnt how to build an engine from a magazine, and that sounds like a pretty compelling example of the value inherent in sharing information to me.
Your ignorance is your own problem. Both WebM or WebP will be known to most/. as they're technologically noteworthy and have featured in stories regularly.
Who's whining (beyond you whining about people sharing their opinion)? I'm fine with them offering whatever service they want, I just won't be paying £10pm for the service as it stands. And where does this stupid idea that just because you can afford something, you shouldn't care about whether it offers value for money? I can buy (as in own a physical copy of, not rent) many of the albums I like for £3-5. Given the choice of paying £120pa for Spotify or buying ~30 albums a year, I'll take buying the albums thanks.
That is just ridicilous. In Norwegian money, one month of spotify membership costs less than a beer bought at a pub*:
In fairness, the price of beer in Norwegian money is fucking ridiculous. The only thing that’s stopped me going for a pay version of spotify is the fact I don’t use it all that much and the catalogue has a number of holes. I can let the holes go, but I can (and do) get better value buying albums with the money I could spend on spotify.
If it ever gets near £5pm with support for mobiles I’d subscribe without thinking about it.
It's little better than forcing rape victims to watch films implying it is all their fault because they didn't dress appropriately. But if it serves to appease the idiotic copyright extremists
You're comparing asking people not to breach copyright with blaming victims for the occurrence of crime.... talking of idiotic extremism.
What, so people are disappointed that Geohot didn't wreck his life to fulfill their armchair fantasies?
They are angry that someone talked about how they were going to fight Sony over this, asked them for money and then settled. People didn't offer him money if he agreed to do something stupid, he said he was going to do something 'brave' and people gave him money to support him in that action.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't really like Oblivion, and never got more than 10hrs into Morrowind (which imo was much better). I love Fallout, but don't have the inclination to do everything. I probably got 30hrs out of 3 and a little more out of New Vegas.
Personally I would prefer most of these games if they were ~25% smaller but had that effort spent on making whats left better. I'm not saying they should do it for that reason (the market has varied tastes after all). I am saying that different users want different things. Players who like FPS games aren't less 'discerning' they have different tastes. The first Gears game was great (again imo) because it was so well executed, the fact that I completed it in coop with a mate in a day (~7hours) didn't bother me because it was a great 7 hours.
A lot of people in IT would benefit from thinking about other departments as customers, even more so if they consider the competition as you suggest. If I'm in a decision making role, and think my IT department is hindering my business, why wouldn't I try moving more of the work to external firms? If they turn out to be as bad, then I can always try another.
There is no way the chinese are building rail lines as part of a cunning military plan. Transporting military assets by rail makes locating, tracking and targetting them far too easy for your opponents. Rail worked back in WW2 in the pre-sat and pre-guided missile era.
No, your insurance company refuses to offer insurance products which don't require a level of security to be maintained. They aren't judging the morality of the theft, they are making a profit/loss decision that has nothing to do with whether the theft was legal/moral/ethical etc.
Good show old chap.
Generally stories about, I left my phone at a bar and went back later to collect it don't spread as well as the horror stories.
I've left a wallet in a bar and dropped it outside of a shop. I've left a phone on a train, another in a cinema and yet another at a club. Every single one was handed in, with nothing taken. I've also found wallets and phones, and either phoned the owner or taken them to the staff/owner of the place where they were found.
Perhaps us Brits are just honest, perhaps this is a case of exceptional good luck, or perhaps people don't steal everything when given the chance.
To call someone an idiot because you're too blinkered to comprehend that the importance of accuracy can vary depending on the decision you appear like an ignorant idiot yourself.
There is nothing wrong with a search engine making an educated guess about the colour of shoes based on an expert system or similar methodology. It might be annoying when it gets it wrong, but most users would prefer to have the option than not. His point, and it was well made, was that with large and/or diverse data sources it is impossible to answer some important questions with 100.000000%+ reliability.
Good luck trying to make a decision on whether you should respond. I expect the answer will be "I don't know" unless you know how to interpret information like my post, your reaction to my post, your background knowledge and current circumstance in a way you define as 'pure data', because if you can't then making that decision is "just plain wrong".
You've summed them up pretty nicely. Sadly, far too many people are still ignorant to the fact thay are looking for victims, and it's a lucky coincidence if they happen to target people you don't like, rather than you or people you do like.
The internet hasn't changed the fact that if someone doesn't want to be tied to an 'attack' they can make it hard to tell it was them, or even look like it was someone else.
Chinese hackers using systems located in Russia to hack NSA assets is just as hard to 'prove' as China launching a Russian made ICBM from a submarine disguised as Russian in a location the Russians would likely use etc. Unless the person who attacks you basically tells you they did it to your face (and even then potentially) you're making a judgement as to what happened based on evidence.
It's not fair to compare the outright purchase price of a brand new game to a subscription game like WOW (not that I have any issue with WOW). If you buy a brand new game, you could get your 1,2,3 or whatever out of it and then still trade it in. In the UK most game retailers will offer new titles for £5 when you trade in a title from the last couple of months. After the initial ~£30 purchase you could get a new AAA title each month for £5. At the end you could still sell whatever title you had left.
WOW is great if that's what you want, but I find that the people who talk about value for money aren't thinking things through. WOW has a lot of content, but by the time you've played it for 2 years and 1000+ hours you've seen it all and are replaying content because of the social aspects, and enjoyment of the game engine. Titles like counter-strike don't include the vastness of content, but they include the social apects and some people prefer that game style, and they didn't need to pay a subscription to get years worth of enjoyment.
I got crazy amounts of game time on Starcraft, and Halo 2 multiplayer, and didnt have to pay the game devs a subscription to do it. That's a bargain.
I expect it is because many consumers given the choice of buying a game at the point of retail, or putting money into producing the game, which if the project doesn't fail, they will receive in 2-5 years prefer buying the end product.
This is where gaming is going. Produce your games so that they can only be used with an authorised account and an internet connection. It has nothing to do with consumers liking the subscription model though, it is entirely because 1) It's harder to pirate 2) Very few people would drop £500+ on a game, but will willingly pay that in total in subscription costs over a long period.
Or how this article relates to Maddie or Princess Di...
It makes perfect sense, if users are given the some control over which SMS are charged. You 'pay' for receiving an email (although most people do so via the effectively unlimited bandwidth they have pre-purchased). Not paying for incoming phone and text communications is why we haven't got services like google voice in the UK. It also means that their is no motivation for mobile operators to decrease the sms delivery charge because their customer isn't paying for it anyway
Apple will make your book available through a specific program for 30% revenue. You could already avoid a publisher if you wanted without having to pay 30% so I'm not sure what you're lauding apple for. Going without a publisher is probably no issue for a major author, and frankly I'm not sure why more haven't tried it yet. For less well known names I expect it will be difficult to generate enough visibility without support or a lot of luck, even if the book is really good.
What's the alternative? Have the judge hear 132 different cases with say 20 cases of prior art each? Assuming that it takes a week to hear each claim, and a 1/2 for each prior art that would be 1,500 days, factor in holidays and weekends and you're talking about ~2,500 days (7-8 years). Obviously these numbers are pulled out of my ass, but I would be suprised if a case of such scale wouldn't take years. The other options are rush the process giving each claim and the prior art a mere fraction of the time they should, or decrease the scope of the case.
Given that a years long case would suit no one other than the lawyers I think the judge was right to force a limitation of scope. Asking Oracle to limit themselves to 3 claims is probably a little extreme, but anything more than single digits would become extremely unwieldy. Oracle should be able to show Googles wrong doing using its 3 strongest claims, it it can't it is unlikely that the other 129 would make any difference. Additionally Google should be able to show prior art by presenting its best 3 examples, if these aren't valid then the others were unlikely to be.
If you 'already' own an Xbox/PS3 then you can't buy a PC for the same price. If your console breaks, you've still got the games library so are likely to stick with it. You quote lack of hardware updates as a flaw, which is odd given that most people who buy consoles find the idea that they don't have to consider hardware upgrades a massive bonus.
Consoles are doing well because people can buy it, stick it under the TV and 'know' it will run anything branded for that console without any worries about performance. A large portion of the market is massively put off by the idea of having to consider the 'specs' of their games device when buying a game. I've been a PC gamer for years, but I still buy titles for consoles more often than not because I have no inclination to even look up what GFX card I last installed and how that will handle a new game. Nor do I intend to move my desktop into the lounge to use the TV, or buy a new living room friendly rig, or buy a monitor that will provide an equivalent image quality.
Surely the very definition of civilisation is founded on the idea that everyone is not an island unto themselves? We don't all have to have an extensive understanding and experience of every single thing that takes place for society to function. Obviously it helps if we have a basic understanding, otherwise people are afraid of things they don't understand, or open to their ignorance being manipulated.
Coke & Pepsi compete. GM & Toyota compete.
You already are competing with people for food. Coexisting diversity without competition is known as collusion. When you say resources spent competing are better spent cooperating, what exactly do you mean. You expect Coke and Pepsi to sign a pact to not compete, then spend their advertising budget on charity? Price cuts would be a competitive use of resources. Why would they? They have owners, who invested money intending to profit, they would take the saved expenditure in increased share dividends, or use it to buy out other smaller players, leaving the cartel of 'coexisting diversity' as a monopoly.
Personally perhaps not. However on almost any forum where pc gaming is represented and you'll have a large proportion of members filling the 'sigs' with pc specs, benchmarks etc. Many questions about performance issues are responded to with posts that do nothing to resolve the issue, and are simply the poster using it as an excuse to say they don't have any issues on there massively over-specced ePeen... computer.
You can say (and it may be true for some) that it is not boasting, just sharing information with those who have a shared interest. However, if I posted on a home buyers forum with a sig saying "Owner of £1,400k London townhouse, bespoke kitchen and room decor, underground car port and 4 luxury bedrooms" I'd be bragging (and lieing!) no matter how much I like discussing housing.
I'd say the opposite is true. Digital services like Google allow us to be more effective, social services like Facebook are beginning to utilise our networks to provide us with an added layer of filtering for the near endless information now available via these tools.
In essence, although facebook etc can just be used as a way to play crap web games. The combination of vast amounts of readily available data, and information on our, and our social groups, preferences is allowing us to find what we need and do so more quickly and effectively. I guess it all depends on your definition of inherent value. I find the inherent value in anything that helps people obtain or retain information to be inherently valuable. Henry Ford learnt how to build an engine from a magazine, and that sounds like a pretty compelling example of the value inherent in sharing information to me.
Your ignorance is your own problem. Both WebM or WebP will be known to most /. as they're technologically noteworthy and have featured in stories regularly.
Who's whining (beyond you whining about people sharing their opinion)? I'm fine with them offering whatever service they want, I just won't be paying £10pm for the service as it stands. And where does this stupid idea that just because you can afford something, you shouldn't care about whether it offers value for money? I can buy (as in own a physical copy of, not rent) many of the albums I like for £3-5. Given the choice of paying £120pa for Spotify or buying ~30 albums a year, I'll take buying the albums thanks.
In fairness, the price of beer in Norwegian money is fucking ridiculous. The only thing that’s stopped me going for a pay version of spotify is the fact I don’t use it all that much and the catalogue has a number of holes. I can let the holes go, but I can (and do) get better value buying albums with the money I could spend on spotify.
If it ever gets near £5pm with support for mobiles I’d subscribe without thinking about it.
You're comparing asking people not to breach copyright with blaming victims for the occurrence of crime.... talking of idiotic extremism.
They are angry that someone talked about how they were going to fight Sony over this, asked them for money and then settled. People didn't offer him money if he agreed to do something stupid, he said he was going to do something 'brave' and people gave him money to support him in that action.