Re:PC gaming IS dying, at Valve's hand, so are PCs
on
The Orange Box Review
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· Score: 1
Clearly PCs haven't helped you to read. This is my employer's PC I referred to in my post.
PC gaming IS dying, at Valve's hand, so are PCs
on
The Orange Box Review
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
PC Gaming is dying because companies like Valve want to turn our PCs into consoles before they let us use their precious content. I still haven't played HL2 because the price is still too high for what amounts to a software rental with included remote control of my PC.
Fuck it. I have a console now. It's locked down and doesn't do a god damned thing but what the manufacturer wants it to, and I'm fine with that. It was far cheaper than a PC and didn't sell itself as a general purpose device, so my low expectations were easily exceeded, and I'm happy with it.
I also have a HD-DVD player attached to my console. So I don't need to play high definition content on my PC either.
Fuck it, MMO are the only reasons I still have a PC at all. Improved graphics aren't a reason to keep playing games on a PC when all you get is more detail on the painted plywood sets that all games have looked like for over a decade. Wake me up when I can do something like kick the dirt, and it looks somewhat close to real, instead of just not even being there. Yawn. That rant made me tired.
(Think Al Qaeda in Iraq - things are turning around over there at the grassroots level, mainly because AQI was chopping off people's heads and serving roasted children on platters to parents, and the public outcry has been enormous.)
Embarassing anal leakage? Eating that fake Olestra stuff will do that to you and at the most inappropriate times, like in the middle of dinner, or during a totally un-political discussion. Best stick with the real thing, not that Faux stuff.
Way to not read the article. Especially those of you who modded the parent Insightful. The charge is that there was a organized criminal ring to avoid import taxes, involving shipment from tax havens and the involvement of several Brazilian nationals. If you think someone is engaged in a multi-million dollar racketeering operation, you don't send them a tax bill, you call in the SWAT team, just like we do in America.
Huh? URLs weren't meant to be exposed? I thought the whole point was that they were easier to remember (and more transportable as a side effect) than plain IP addresses.
They are. But that doesn't mean they should have been, or had to have been, exposed to the user all the time, to the extent that commercial-use domain names need to be branded and trademarked. It was a mistake. Besides, URLs are not easy to remember for most non-techies. Even short ones. Browsers actually did a good thing by automatically adding "http://" if you forgot it. Really, why should any casual user have to remember the protocol identifier, and the colon-slash-slash? They just didn't take this idea far enough.
If you did away with the address bar then how would you easily know where you were and that you hadn't suddenly been pushed to another site?
Why should you care? I thought that was one of the points of the web? And don't tell me about phishing, people still fall for phishing scams even when the URL is exposed. It's just not helpful.
Or how would you know what to enter into the popup box next time you wanted to visit the site, especially when you were visiting another computer?
That was easy. A good browser would recognize it without the protocol id, the colon-slash-slash and without the dots. Or you could just type "bookmarks" and it would locate a list of bookmark storage sites. If you are the type of user who wouldn't use a well-known bookmark site, then you are the type of user who knows how to find it without a search engine.
That is exactly my point: bad UI design is leading to a balkanized and/or variously borked DNS. There should have been another layer or so of indirection/abstraction above domain names. There was no need to expose layer 4 information to layer 7. This is what happens when you toss aside basic principles like the network layer model. Show me some part of the internet that you think is borked, and I'll show you a part of the internet where a higher layer reached down and dragged a lower layer up into it.
Re:I've seen the trickle down effects of piracy
on
RIAA Sues Usenet.com
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So by your +5 Interesting logic, if instead you had a clothing store and your competition was selling counterfeit designer labels and hurting your business, the proper response response by the designer would be to sue the trucking company that delivered the counterfeit clothing?
URLs weren't meant to be exposed. They weren't meant to be branded. It was a mistake for the first browsers to have an address bar displaying the URL, once they left alpha-testing. Most people navigate by selecting bookmarks or clicking links to other sites. Seldom do people type in a URL, and if they need too, a pop-up dialog, which went away after taking input, would have been enough. There never was a need to show all the URLs that for a page element flying by in the status bar, or to shoe the site's URL in the unnecessary address bar. People weren't supposed to need to know those things to use the WWW.
Now that the visible address bar has led to domain branding, of course countries with languages than can't be represented in left-right ASCII want to brand their superfluous address bars in their native scripts, too.
All this needless internationalization of the DNS could have been avoided if only the first browsers had hidden the URLs, like they were supposed to do.
I don't see where the disagreement is. I said promoters would rather offer ticket buyers one price, and ticket buyers would rather see that too. It is your state and local legislatures that have forced disclosure of the components of a ticket's cost, and where the laws are most strict and disclosure of ticket cost components is most complete, the ticket buyers are most unhappy.
You do realize that Ticketmaster sells tickets exclusively (not including box office) for the vast majority of major venues across the US, don't you?
You will very soon get to see what a world with more than one Ticketmaster is like. I predict it will be much like today, but half the concert-going public will be cursing Live Nation fees instead of Ticketmaster fees. And I bet a pretty good number of them will be wishing for the good old days when they could get their tickets from Ticketmaster instead of those greedy Live Nation retards.
Live Nation Inc.'s Chief Executive Michael Rapino said that by ending a long-term contract with Ticketmaster, the company will gain additional control over the distribution of tickets to its shows, confirming speculation that the company was moving to form its own ticket selling business.
You will soon get your wish. My guess is you will still be unhappy.
You do realize that the promoter for the event negotiates the service fee Ticketmaster will be allowed to collect? TM doesn't get to charge just any old fee they want without the promoter's explicit OK. If the promoter had his way, your ticket would have one figure on it, the face value, and all the fees and extras would be hidden in that single figure, and you'd not know there was anything to complain about. But state and local laws require varying degrees of itemization from place to place, and where disclosure requirements are most stringent, fans are most unhappy about ticket prices. Ignorance really is bliss sometimes.
It's not like RS232 and NMEA0183 are hard. Why isn't there an OSS mapping/navigation application that handles GPS waypoints and mapping using these industry-standard, publicly documented and royalty-free protocols? Every GPS device supports these protocols. The only reason I can think of is that there aren't that many GPS map users on Linux for that itch to have been scratched. So if there aren't many Linux GPS users, why should TomTom release a Linux version?
Alas, you're very much mistaken. The several images on the Wiki page for the 737 are all images of 737s, and none of them are same image as in the Wired article. The image in the Wired article is indeed a 787 in Aeroflot livery, probably this very image from Boeing's PR site: http://boeingmedia.com/imageDetail.cfm?id=14990&clr=release
Re:The story is my biggest gripe
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
You know, no one forces you to look out windows, either.
Wow. Just, wow. Like a thunderclap, you have opened my mind. I'll close my eyes, then.
Re:The story is my biggest gripe
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
This is the worst review I have ever seen anywhere.
Ummm, it wasn't a review. It was a gripe. Got literacy?
We're not oceanography nerds, we don't care.
Speak for yourself. If the sea looks fake, the the immersion is destroyed. It doesn't look like an underwater city of horror, it looks and feels like a carnival fun house under a fake ocean. That's potentially a fine premise for a game, but it isn't the one they wanted to present. So the environment seems to be a failure. It's silly rather than ominous. But maybe they were going for silly. You tell me.
By the way, where are the Little Brothers?
The story is my biggest gripe
on
BioShock Review
·
· Score: 0
There's no "but the story could have been better" or "the weapons didn't feel right", or "the enemies got boring" to mar the experience of playing this through for the first time.
Story? What story? The story is that I'm a random nameless plane crash victim thrust into a makes-no-sense cliche-ridden art-deco horror story, without much horror, to be honest. Science fiction? There's no science here, the protagonist has magical powers. If he had a flowing grey beard and pointy hat, it would be more immersive. Still cliche-ridden, but more immersive. I just can't get past the silly notion that gene therapy can make you shoot flames out of your hand. It's fun so far, but the story is just preposterous and unbelievable, and the setting is ridiculous. An underwater city with no architectural accomodations for being sited underwater? It looks like a flooded land-based city, not something purpose-built for the bottom of the sea. And is there a setting to turn off the wave distortion when you look out a window? You wouldn't see anything like that looking out the window of an actual underwater city unless there were severe temperature gradients flowing past the window. The view of the ocean outside should be steady, not wavy. It's very distracting.
And yeah, the enemies are already boring. I haven't finished the game, but fighting so far is mostly tedious. It's fun to kill a Slicer by throwing a body at him, or whatever is handy, but only for the first few times. Then it's a bore. The Big Daddies are just a slog fest. Maybe I haven't yet discovered the finishing blow you can use on them to end it right now. If there isn't one, I'll be annoyed.
And the Little Sisters? There was no dilemma. I get more ADAM, you say? Fuck 'em. They're harvested. The graphics are still on the canny side of Uncanny Valley so there wasn't any charge to seeing them cower. And the harvesting animation is getting tedious every time I do it. Come on.
And whose bright idea was it to stick a stupid puzzle game in the middle of a shooter? If I wanted that, I'd have bought Tetris 2007 or whatever. The hacking game is STUPID STUPID STUPID. Thankfully you can avoid it, which I do at every opportunity. So why put something in the game ever player but your Mom is gonna skip as soon as possible?
This game makes no sense on so many levels. The result for me, so far, is that the whole is less than the sum of its many inventive and also pointless and annoying parts. It would be improved if, like DOOM, there was no back story, no diaries, no Atlas, no Ryan. Just shoot the baddies and get on with it.
I was more frightened and involved by Prince of Persia.
A software license is something the publisher's lawyers make him put in the box. It doesn't affect the disk contents at all, and cannot disable the software at the publisher's discretion.
What I'm upset about, is that as a loyal Valve customer for years, I'm actually being treated worse than someone who has never owned the game before.
Don't worry, I'm still not buying their Stream-powered crap. Not until it gets into the $9.99 bargain bin. That's a fee more appropriate for software rental, which is what Steam/HL2 really is.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly PCs haven't helped you to read. This is my employer's PC I referred to in my post.
PC Gaming is dying because companies like Valve want to turn our PCs into consoles before they let us use their precious content. I still haven't played HL2 because the price is still too high for what amounts to a software rental with included remote control of my PC.
Fuck it. I have a console now. It's locked down and doesn't do a god damned thing but what the manufacturer wants it to, and I'm fine with that. It was far cheaper than a PC and didn't sell itself as a general purpose device, so my low expectations were easily exceeded, and I'm happy with it.
I also have a HD-DVD player attached to my console. So I don't need to play high definition content on my PC either.
Fuck it, MMO are the only reasons I still have a PC at all. Improved graphics aren't a reason to keep playing games on a PC when all you get is more detail on the painted plywood sets that all games have looked like for over a decade. Wake me up when I can do something like kick the dirt, and it looks somewhat close to real, instead of just not even being there. Yawn. That rant made me tired.
Storm infects between 1 and 50 million PCs;
What is the difference between that statement and "I have no idea how many, so I'll toss out scary numbers."
(hint: the second statement is honest)
(Think Al Qaeda in Iraq - things are turning around over there at the grassroots level, mainly because AQI was chopping off people's heads and serving roasted children on platters to parents, and the public outcry has been enormous.)
Embarassing anal leakage? Eating that fake Olestra stuff will do that to you and at the most inappropriate times, like in the middle of dinner, or during a totally un-political discussion. Best stick with the real thing, not that Faux stuff.
Way to not read the article. Especially those of you who modded the parent Insightful. The charge is that there was a organized criminal ring to avoid import taxes, involving shipment from tax havens and the involvement of several Brazilian nationals. If you think someone is engaged in a multi-million dollar racketeering operation, you don't send them a tax bill, you call in the SWAT team, just like we do in America.
Huh? URLs weren't meant to be exposed? I thought the whole point was that they were easier to remember (and more transportable as a side effect) than plain IP addresses.
They are. But that doesn't mean they should have been, or had to have been, exposed to the user all the time, to the extent that commercial-use domain names need to be branded and trademarked. It was a mistake. Besides, URLs are not easy to remember for most non-techies. Even short ones. Browsers actually did a good thing by automatically adding "http://" if you forgot it. Really, why should any casual user have to remember the protocol identifier, and the colon-slash-slash? They just didn't take this idea far enough.
If you did away with the address bar then how would you easily know where you were and that you hadn't suddenly been pushed to another site?
Why should you care? I thought that was one of the points of the web? And don't tell me about phishing, people still fall for phishing scams even when the URL is exposed. It's just not helpful.
Or how would you know what to enter into the popup box next time you wanted to visit the site, especially when you were visiting another computer?
http://del.icio.us/
That was easy. A good browser would recognize it without the protocol id, the colon-slash-slash and without the dots. Or you could just type "bookmarks" and it would locate a list of bookmark storage sites. If you are the type of user who wouldn't use a well-known bookmark site, then you are the type of user who knows how to find it without a search engine.
That is exactly my point: bad UI design is leading to a balkanized and/or variously borked DNS. There should have been another layer or so of indirection/abstraction above domain names. There was no need to expose layer 4 information to layer 7. This is what happens when you toss aside basic principles like the network layer model. Show me some part of the internet that you think is borked, and I'll show you a part of the internet where a higher layer reached down and dragged a lower layer up into it.
http://del.icio.us/
http://www.google.com/bookmarks/
http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/
Gee, that was easy.
So by your +5 Interesting logic, if instead you had a clothing store and your competition was selling counterfeit designer labels and hurting your business, the proper response response by the designer would be to sue the trucking company that delivered the counterfeit clothing?
URLs weren't meant to be exposed. They weren't meant to be branded. It was a mistake for the first browsers to have an address bar displaying the URL, once they left alpha-testing. Most people navigate by selecting bookmarks or clicking links to other sites. Seldom do people type in a URL, and if they need too, a pop-up dialog, which went away after taking input, would have been enough. There never was a need to show all the URLs that for a page element flying by in the status bar, or to shoe the site's URL in the unnecessary address bar. People weren't supposed to need to know those things to use the WWW.
Now that the visible address bar has led to domain branding, of course countries with languages than can't be represented in left-right ASCII want to brand their superfluous address bars in their native scripts, too.
All this needless internationalization of the DNS could have been avoided if only the first browsers had hidden the URLs, like they were supposed to do.
What, no zombie jokes yet? They've already eaten your branes?
I don't see where the disagreement is. I said promoters would rather offer ticket buyers one price, and ticket buyers would rather see that too. It is your state and local legislatures that have forced disclosure of the components of a ticket's cost, and where the laws are most strict and disclosure of ticket cost components is most complete, the ticket buyers are most unhappy.
We seem to be in violent agreement.
You do realize that Ticketmaster sells tickets exclusively (not including box office) for the vast majority of major venues across the US, don't you?
You will very soon get to see what a world with more than one Ticketmaster is like. I predict it will be much like today, but half the concert-going public will be cursing Live Nation fees instead of Ticketmaster fees. And I bet a pretty good number of them will be wishing for the good old days when they could get their tickets from Ticketmaster instead of those greedy Live Nation retards.
Live Nation Hints at Shift in Strategy
You will soon get your wish. My guess is you will still be unhappy.
You do realize that the promoter for the event negotiates the service fee Ticketmaster will be allowed to collect? TM doesn't get to charge just any old fee they want without the promoter's explicit OK. If the promoter had his way, your ticket would have one figure on it, the face value, and all the fees and extras would be hidden in that single figure, and you'd not know there was anything to complain about. But state and local laws require varying degrees of itemization from place to place, and where disclosure requirements are most stringent, fans are most unhappy about ticket prices. Ignorance really is bliss sometimes.
Stop bashing software patents.
If software patents are so great, then patents on books and music should be even better. Same thing.
Yes it does! Why do you hate America and love terrorists, you left-wing commie sonofabitch!
It's not like RS232 and NMEA0183 are hard. Why isn't there an OSS mapping/navigation application that handles GPS waypoints and mapping using these industry-standard, publicly documented and royalty-free protocols? Every GPS device supports these protocols. The only reason I can think of is that there aren't that many GPS map users on Linux for that itch to have been scratched. So if there aren't many Linux GPS users, why should TomTom release a Linux version?
Do they get to see the vagina? It won't work otherwise.
It's stupider than that. Get a female friend or neighbor, your daughter, your wife, or your mom to stand in front of the webcam for you. Duh.
That women cannot compete with men as women? Call Gloria Steinem!
However if I'm not very much mistaken...
Alas, you're very much mistaken. The several images on the Wiki page for the 737 are all images of 737s, and none of them are same image as in the Wired article. The image in the Wired article is indeed a 787 in Aeroflot livery, probably this very image from Boeing's PR site: http://boeingmedia.com/imageDetail.cfm?id=14990&clr=release
You know, no one forces you to look out windows, either.
Wow. Just, wow. Like a thunderclap, you have opened my mind. I'll close my eyes, then.
This is the worst review I have ever seen anywhere.
Ummm, it wasn't a review. It was a gripe. Got literacy?
We're not oceanography nerds, we don't care.
Speak for yourself. If the sea looks fake, the the immersion is destroyed. It doesn't look like an underwater city of horror, it looks and feels like a carnival fun house under a fake ocean. That's potentially a fine premise for a game, but it isn't the one they wanted to present. So the environment seems to be a failure. It's silly rather than ominous. But maybe they were going for silly. You tell me.
By the way, where are the Little Brothers?
Story? What story? The story is that I'm a random nameless plane crash victim thrust into a makes-no-sense cliche-ridden art-deco horror story, without much horror, to be honest. Science fiction? There's no science here, the protagonist has magical powers. If he had a flowing grey beard and pointy hat, it would be more immersive. Still cliche-ridden, but more immersive. I just can't get past the silly notion that gene therapy can make you shoot flames out of your hand. It's fun so far, but the story is just preposterous and unbelievable, and the setting is ridiculous. An underwater city with no architectural accomodations for being sited underwater? It looks like a flooded land-based city, not something purpose-built for the bottom of the sea. And is there a setting to turn off the wave distortion when you look out a window? You wouldn't see anything like that looking out the window of an actual underwater city unless there were severe temperature gradients flowing past the window. The view of the ocean outside should be steady, not wavy. It's very distracting.
And yeah, the enemies are already boring. I haven't finished the game, but fighting so far is mostly tedious. It's fun to kill a Slicer by throwing a body at him, or whatever is handy, but only for the first few times. Then it's a bore. The Big Daddies are just a slog fest. Maybe I haven't yet discovered the finishing blow you can use on them to end it right now. If there isn't one, I'll be annoyed.
And the Little Sisters? There was no dilemma. I get more ADAM, you say? Fuck 'em. They're harvested. The graphics are still on the canny side of Uncanny Valley so there wasn't any charge to seeing them cower. And the harvesting animation is getting tedious every time I do it. Come on.
And whose bright idea was it to stick a stupid puzzle game in the middle of a shooter? If I wanted that, I'd have bought Tetris 2007 or whatever. The hacking game is STUPID STUPID STUPID. Thankfully you can avoid it, which I do at every opportunity. So why put something in the game ever player but your Mom is gonna skip as soon as possible?
This game makes no sense on so many levels. The result for me, so far, is that the whole is less than the sum of its many inventive and also pointless and annoying parts. It would be improved if, like DOOM, there was no back story, no diaries, no Atlas, no Ryan. Just shoot the baddies and get on with it.
I was more frightened and involved by Prince of Persia.
A software license is something the publisher's lawyers make him put in the box. It doesn't affect the disk contents at all, and cannot disable the software at the publisher's discretion.
What I'm upset about, is that as a loyal Valve customer for years, I'm actually being treated worse than someone who has never owned the game before.
Don't worry, I'm still not buying their Stream-powered crap. Not until it gets into the $9.99 bargain bin. That's a fee more appropriate for software rental, which is what Steam/HL2 really is.