Mod me down if you must, but in my opinion if you're doing any sort of really complex web app you're already Doing It Wrong(tm), regardless of the language you use for it.
I understand the appeal of thin clients and all, but there's a point where it becomes a mere fetish.
And just to add insult to the injury, ':=' is *also* mathematically well defined as something very similar to an assignment already, check here, around the middle of the page.
You know, one imagines that if Apple's products were really as great as the loyalists claim they are rather than depending solely on marketing, they'd be just as successful outside the US as they are inside it. And yet, the only Apple product that's even nearly as popular is the iPhone, and only because its pre-existing hype and extensive lockdown make it an attractive product for ISPs who foot the bill for the marketing expenses in their respective countries.
What about the people who think these documents should have been released, but only after real professionals redacted names?
Like whom? the US government? given the past nine years, if you really believed that you'd be in the same camp as those who wish for a free pony courtesy of Obama.
Nah, it's just they were great games. Daikatana is as old as those you mentioned, but I don't think there's a single Slashdotter that'd submit himself to play it again if they even finished it the first time around.
However, how much corruption is too much to overlook? Where do you draw that line?
I draw it at "is a reasonable expense for the person involved" (which implies "small relative to his actual monthly salary"). You and I may not, but the folk at the upper end of the corporate ladder can and do spend over a thousand dollars in dinner, though even they aren't able to just go out and spend a million on a whim.
Same reason why I don't think a regular worker should be fired for using the company phone to call his family for instance. Yes, it's technically a misuse of corporate resources and all that, but for God's sake, firing him for that is just excesive and stupid from a PR and HR standpoint.
What you don't seem to get is that WikiLeaks has no allegiance to the US government and, therefore, hold no more responsability to US informants than they do to those of the Taliban, their only responsability is to their own informants and, as far as I know, they've yet to leak the names of any of them.
And please stop it with the "Free World" crap, you sound like Bush. The actual Free World is staying *out* of this goddamned mess you imperialists created.
When you take an invitation to help as being "aggresive, unhelpful and [...] rude", I'd say the problem doesn't quite lie with the one that extended it.
I hear ya, man. Rainbow Six? Doom clone. Red Orchestra? Doom clone. Portal? Doom clone!
It's so easy to dismiss a whole genre as non-innovating, particularly when you (by your own admission) haven't played any of the games that belong to it.
Actually he said US$20 per *day* which, assuming it's a monthly average would be around US$600 per month which in turn is above the minimum wage in most (all?) South American countries. And since you're posting on Slashdot I'm assuming you work in the IT sector, but try finding out the salaries of people working in a call center for instance, or at a small bakery and you'd see a very different situation.
Another nice thing of Guild Wars was that, if you spent two months building up your pimped-out sword-focused Warrior and suddenly decided axes looked kinda cool, all you had to do was to enter an outpost, take the points you spent on sword specialization and put them in axes rather than spend another two months building up *another* Warrior on your account from scratch, only this time with axes rather than swords.
But then again, Guild Wars has always been focused on 'casual' playing, preventing any 'hardcore' from gaining too much of an advantage over a casual player, while EVE goes pretty much the other way, pampering its hardcore playerbase and encouraging its casual players to become part of it, with PLEX are one of the main ways they do that. I'm not saying either approach is better, but they are different enough that it feels like an "apples vs oranges" comparison.
Yeah, or I could say that WoW is for dull idiots who love to simply click a button endlessly til a virtual candy pops out, while EVE is for those that prefer having a simulation of real-world economies, with all the risks and opportunities it entails, in a virtual world.
In short, don't be so fucking biased with your descriptions, if you couldn't get into EVE it doesn't mean it's just for "griefers" and people who "derive their pleasure from causing pain to others".
Disclaimer: I don't play either of them and prefer Guild Wars instead, its just I've enough common sense not to offend people just because they don't play my favorite game.
Then you're too young to remember animated starry backgrounds. Imagine a page-wide blink tag and you'd get a rough initial approximation. Remember most people couldn't be bothered to change the text's color from its default black, and you'd be starting to imagine the pain one felt when that was the only even remotely-related website Altavista could find.
Besides, for all the evils Flash has brought us, it also gave us Portal: The Flash Version which helps balance things out.
People, especially PC games pirates, want to play the games that are hot right now. They don't sit down and say, well gee, pirating Call of Duty is kind of hard so I guess I'll download Bubble Pop instead. They sit down and say, well gee, pirating Call of Dity is kind of hard so I guess I'll buy it.
Citation needed, as it doesn't match my personal observations.
The assumption that every CEO of (nearly) every games company is an idiot is amazing. They use DRM because they have accumulated lots of evidence that it's worth the cost.
So I guess the CEOs of game companies that *don't* use DRM are the idiots, right? and again, Citation needed on your "evidence", because IIRC Ubisoft's sales of AC2 were considerably lower than the first one, and (according to reviews) it's a superior game in every way outside of its DRM, and after Spore et al EA has actually pushed *back* on the DRM, preferring to spend their time fighting the second-hand market instead.
Wrong. It'd probably surprise you, being a US citizen land of the marketing giants, but elsewhere normal people do build their own PCs or pay $10 for their local geek to do so, and one of the advantages of that is that it puts computers on the hands of those that wouldn't otherwise have access to them. And a side effect of that in turn is that ISPs see a potential market and try to cater to them, not competing on speed as usual but on price instead.
The rest of the world isn't covered in favelas, you know, there's plenty of economic stratas between absolute poverty and Porsche-owner, and since the costs of living in places like South America and Eastern Europe are much lower than the US there *are* in fact plenty of mid-to-low income families that live relatively comfortably,do have computers, do have internet connection, and still can't really afford paying $20 for an indie game they're interested in. For mainstream titles like MW2, however, that there's no way in hell a mid-income family's computer would run sometime this decade, the "pirates" have no excuse so feel free to flame them instead.
The second group are those who pirate the games because they have no money. They are a large part of the games audience. The third group are those who have money, would have bought it but preferred to warez it instead. Those two groups together are 90% of the games market. If the game had strong DRM, so that you could not pirate it, people in the third group would be enticed to buy the game. Assuming as little as 10% are in the third group, using DRM would almost double the number of sales the game makes.
First off, no, people in the third group would most likely be enticed to pirate something else instead. And secondly, you're neglecting the loss of sales from the first group when you apply DRM to them.
But then again, your overly simplistic analysis is likely what the Ubisoft CxOs are thinking and the reason we even have this kind of crap in the first place.
Well, they're not just developers but also publishers for a few other small devs like Graviteam (Achtung Panzer), Kerberos (Sword of the Stars) and Nitro Games (C:CotA) which is why you may see so many releases from them, the number of titles they actually develop in-house aren't as many.
The quality of their end-product however is just as the OP stated, brilliant strategy games but if you like your games relatively bug-free, you're better off waiting at least a couple months after its release.
Me? I don't have an hypePod, thankyouverymuch, I own a standards-compliant, easy to use music player that, I assure you, cost me an order of magnitude less than your Apple toy did;) I'm merely pointing out the logical flaws in your argument, that's all.
Windows laptops, unless they happen to be a Mac, are good for about a year and a half. Then they get pretty annoying. After 3 years, they are nearly unusable. By year 5, lets be honest, they collect dust and prevent papers from blowing away, and nothing else.
Complete and utter bullshit. The IBM Thinkpad I'm typing this now and has been my main computer since the day I bought it is testament to that, and believe me, the equivalent Mac was more than double its price way back then.
Perhaps Toshiba doesn't make reliable laptops (though my friends who own them may disagree on that), but you certainly cannot generalize that to the entirety of Windows-based computers.
Maybe I've just been lucky. But Apple seems to put the same Quality controls on their laptops as the others do their business lines.
Yeah, that's exactly what scares me the most about Apple products. A few years back I thought that, since I had plenty of experience with both Linux and Windows, I'd spend some money on an used Mac and try to get some experience with it as well, just in case. Well, over half the models I was looking at reported serious heating issues, even melted-down keyboards after leaving them on overnight. In fact, they've built up a reputation for such issues. Ended up buying one of the few models that actually didn't, and despised the Mac's UI and plasticky keyboard so I threw it in a corner and went back to my Thinkpads.
It's a pity IBM got out of the PC business, they were second to none in the laptop arena. Reliable, comfortable, beautiful and, for what you got out of them, reasonably priced as well. Ahh well, Lenovos ain't that bad either, and at least I know I'll be able to use them for more than a few hours without burning my lap.
How the hell were you modded Interesting is simply beyond me. It's not about supporting Linux, let alone doing OSS work, even my friend's Sony player works fine under Linux/BSD and Sony ain't the most open company out there.
Do you know why it works? it's because it supports pre-existing industry standards and doesn't require a particular app under a particular platform talking a particular protocol to build a particular database, none of which documented anywhere, to put a goddamned song into a goddamned music player. Yes, Sony is better at following standards than Apple, go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh. You're still stuck with Windows whether you (or your customer) likes it or not.
From the post you replied to:
The fact that I could run C#.NET on Linux (Windows Forms included-- there's even a GTK# interface!) was just icing on the cake.
But thanks for proving the GP's point that C#'s critics are, by and large, people who've never actually used the damn thing.
Mod me down if you must, but in my opinion if you're doing any sort of really complex web app you're already Doing It Wrong(tm), regardless of the language you use for it.
I understand the appeal of thin clients and all, but there's a point where it becomes a mere fetish.
And just to add insult to the injury, ':=' is *also* mathematically well defined as something very similar to an assignment already, check here, around the middle of the page.
You know, one imagines that if Apple's products were really as great as the loyalists claim they are rather than depending solely on marketing, they'd be just as successful outside the US as they are inside it. And yet, the only Apple product that's even nearly as popular is the iPhone, and only because its pre-existing hype and extensive lockdown make it an attractive product for ISPs who foot the bill for the marketing expenses in their respective countries.
Who watches the watchmen? Seriously.
Hence the need for Wikileaks and Assange's work.
What about the people who think these documents should have been released, but only after real professionals redacted names?
Like whom? the US government? given the past nine years, if you really believed that you'd be in the same camp as those who wish for a free pony courtesy of Obama.
Nah, it's just they were great games. Daikatana is as old as those you mentioned, but I don't think there's a single Slashdotter that'd submit himself to play it again if they even finished it the first time around.
It'd only have to surpass the ~5% of OSX to make it an attractive target, though.
However, how much corruption is too much to overlook? Where do you draw that line?
I draw it at "is a reasonable expense for the person involved" (which implies "small relative to his actual monthly salary"). You and I may not, but the folk at the upper end of the corporate ladder can and do spend over a thousand dollars in dinner, though even they aren't able to just go out and spend a million on a whim.
Same reason why I don't think a regular worker should be fired for using the company phone to call his family for instance. Yes, it's technically a misuse of corporate resources and all that, but for God's sake, firing him for that is just excesive and stupid from a PR and HR standpoint.
What you don't seem to get is that WikiLeaks has no allegiance to the US government and, therefore, hold no more responsability to US informants than they do to those of the Taliban, their only responsability is to their own informants and, as far as I know, they've yet to leak the names of any of them.
And please stop it with the "Free World" crap, you sound like Bush. The actual Free World is staying *out* of this goddamned mess you imperialists created.
When you take an invitation to help as being "aggresive, unhelpful and [...] rude", I'd say the problem doesn't quite lie with the one that extended it.
I hear ya, man. Rainbow Six? Doom clone. Red Orchestra? Doom clone. Portal? Doom clone!
It's so easy to dismiss a whole genre as non-innovating, particularly when you (by your own admission) haven't played any of the games that belong to it.
Actually he said US$20 per *day* which, assuming it's a monthly average would be around US$600 per month which in turn is above the minimum wage in most (all?) South American countries. And since you're posting on Slashdot I'm assuming you work in the IT sector, but try finding out the salaries of people working in a call center for instance, or at a small bakery and you'd see a very different situation.
Another nice thing of Guild Wars was that, if you spent two months building up your pimped-out sword-focused Warrior and suddenly decided axes looked kinda cool, all you had to do was to enter an outpost, take the points you spent on sword specialization and put them in axes rather than spend another two months building up *another* Warrior on your account from scratch, only this time with axes rather than swords.
But then again, Guild Wars has always been focused on 'casual' playing, preventing any 'hardcore' from gaining too much of an advantage over a casual player, while EVE goes pretty much the other way, pampering its hardcore playerbase and encouraging its casual players to become part of it, with PLEX are one of the main ways they do that. I'm not saying either approach is better, but they are different enough that it feels like an "apples vs oranges" comparison.
Yeah, or I could say that WoW is for dull idiots who love to simply click a button endlessly til a virtual candy pops out, while EVE is for those that prefer having a simulation of real-world economies, with all the risks and opportunities it entails, in a virtual world.
In short, don't be so fucking biased with your descriptions, if you couldn't get into EVE it doesn't mean it's just for "griefers" and people who "derive their pleasure from causing pain to others".
Disclaimer: I don't play either of them and prefer Guild Wars instead, its just I've enough common sense not to offend people just because they don't play my favorite game.
Then you're too young to remember animated starry backgrounds. Imagine a page-wide blink tag and you'd get a rough initial approximation. Remember most people couldn't be bothered to change the text's color from its default black, and you'd be starting to imagine the pain one felt when that was the only even remotely-related website Altavista could find.
Besides, for all the evils Flash has brought us, it also gave us Portal: The Flash Version which helps balance things out.
Funny doesn't give karma, Insightful does.
At least that's what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.
People, especially PC games pirates, want to play the games that are hot right now. They don't sit down and say, well gee, pirating Call of Duty is kind of hard so I guess I'll download Bubble Pop instead. They sit down and say, well gee, pirating Call of Dity is kind of hard so I guess I'll buy it.
Citation needed, as it doesn't match my personal observations.
The assumption that every CEO of (nearly) every games company is an idiot is amazing. They use DRM because they have accumulated lots of evidence that it's worth the cost.
So I guess the CEOs of game companies that *don't* use DRM are the idiots, right? and again, Citation needed on your "evidence", because IIRC Ubisoft's sales of AC2 were considerably lower than the first one, and (according to reviews) it's a superior game in every way outside of its DRM, and after Spore et al EA has actually pushed *back* on the DRM, preferring to spend their time fighting the second-hand market instead.
Wrong. It'd probably surprise you, being a US citizen land of the marketing giants, but elsewhere normal people do build their own PCs or pay $10 for their local geek to do so, and one of the advantages of that is that it puts computers on the hands of those that wouldn't otherwise have access to them. And a side effect of that in turn is that ISPs see a potential market and try to cater to them, not competing on speed as usual but on price instead.
The rest of the world isn't covered in favelas, you know, there's plenty of economic stratas between absolute poverty and Porsche-owner, and since the costs of living in places like South America and Eastern Europe are much lower than the US there *are* in fact plenty of mid-to-low income families that live relatively comfortably,do have computers, do have internet connection, and still can't really afford paying $20 for an indie game they're interested in. For mainstream titles like MW2, however, that there's no way in hell a mid-income family's computer would run sometime this decade, the "pirates" have no excuse so feel free to flame them instead.
The second group are those who pirate the games because they have no money. They are a large part of the games audience. The third group are those who have money, would have bought it but preferred to warez it instead. Those two groups together are 90% of the games market. If the game had strong DRM, so that you could not pirate it, people in the third group would be enticed to buy the game. Assuming as little as 10% are in the third group, using DRM would almost double the number of sales the game makes.
First off, no, people in the third group would most likely be enticed to pirate something else instead. And secondly, you're neglecting the loss of sales from the first group when you apply DRM to them.
But then again, your overly simplistic analysis is likely what the Ubisoft CxOs are thinking and the reason we even have this kind of crap in the first place.
Well, they're not just developers but also publishers for a few other small devs like Graviteam (Achtung Panzer), Kerberos (Sword of the Stars) and Nitro Games (C:CotA) which is why you may see so many releases from them, the number of titles they actually develop in-house aren't as many.
The quality of their end-product however is just as the OP stated, brilliant strategy games but if you like your games relatively bug-free, you're better off waiting at least a couple months after its release.
Me? I don't have an hypePod, thankyouverymuch, I own a standards-compliant, easy to use music player that, I assure you, cost me an order of magnitude less than your Apple toy did ;) I'm merely pointing out the logical flaws in your argument, that's all.
Windows laptops, unless they happen to be a Mac, are good for about a year and a half. Then they get pretty annoying. After 3 years, they are nearly unusable. By year 5, lets be honest, they collect dust and prevent papers from blowing away, and nothing else.
Complete and utter bullshit. The IBM Thinkpad I'm typing this now and has been my main computer since the day I bought it is testament to that, and believe me, the equivalent Mac was more than double its price way back then.
Perhaps Toshiba doesn't make reliable laptops (though my friends who own them may disagree on that), but you certainly cannot generalize that to the entirety of Windows-based computers.
Maybe I've just been lucky. But Apple seems to put the same Quality controls on their laptops as the others do their business lines.
Yeah, that's exactly what scares me the most about Apple products. A few years back I thought that, since I had plenty of experience with both Linux and Windows, I'd spend some money on an used Mac and try to get some experience with it as well, just in case. Well, over half the models I was looking at reported serious heating issues, even melted-down keyboards after leaving them on overnight. In fact, they've built up a reputation for such issues. Ended up buying one of the few models that actually didn't, and despised the Mac's UI and plasticky keyboard so I threw it in a corner and went back to my Thinkpads.
It's a pity IBM got out of the PC business, they were second to none in the laptop arena. Reliable, comfortable, beautiful and, for what you got out of them, reasonably priced as well. Ahh well, Lenovos ain't that bad either, and at least I know I'll be able to use them for more than a few hours without burning my lap.
How the hell were you modded Interesting is simply beyond me. It's not about supporting Linux, let alone doing OSS work, even my friend's Sony player works fine under Linux/BSD and Sony ain't the most open company out there.
Do you know why it works? it's because it supports pre-existing industry standards and doesn't require a particular app under a particular platform talking a particular protocol to build a particular database, none of which documented anywhere, to put a goddamned song into a goddamned music player. Yes, Sony is better at following standards than Apple, go figure.