Well, Windows 7 eliminates the choice between XP and Vista by giving us the best of both worlds and with a price cut on top, what's *not* to like?
Sure, I use Linux as my main desktop and have been for the past 6-7 years, but I like PC gaming so I still need a Windows install somewhere and 7 is the best there is for that purpose.
Sure, you're supposed to check the hardware support for yourself, but this doesn't apply on Windows because everything has drivers unless it's really old.
Or really new and your OS isn't, or not old but you're just using a newer CPU architecture, or you're using an old OS/new arch combo (XP64 and such).
As somebody who's been doing tech support on-and-off for the last 15 years I'm telling you, Windows' driver situation is nowhere near as good as people pretend it to be. Its surprising how many people are effectively locked into a given version of Windows, because if you go forwards or back a single generation you're already out of drivers for *something*.
Otherwise, anyone could wrap a simple browser wrapper around IE's rendering engine and still get the effect of shutting out browser competitors.
No, they don't because they don't get to ride on Windows' huge market share. Thin wrapper or not, you still start from zero market-share and work your way up instead of the other way around.
Microsoft is completely right in this, and the EU is simply wrong. A modern operating system includes a bundled browser.
And if they make a standards-compliant browser that can be easily uninstalled by OEMs and end-users with no ill effects, I'm sure the EU will allow them to bundle it with their OS. Until then, however, the EU is right and IE has to go.
The main change is that Microsoft goes back to marketing a product people actually want. From what I can see, pushing Vista damaged their credibility pretty strongly, but with 7 they'll likely regain much of that trust, and in fact already have with the open beta/RC.
Other than that, nothing really, OSX isn't a contender and won't be for as long as Apple continues to ignore the business market, and Linux' freedom is far too tempting to OEMs to avoid fragmenting it and make it a viable long-term replacement for Windows.
I can't remember where I got it from, but IIRC EA was now moving away from DRM after seeing how incredibly useless it was with Spore. At the very least, they didn't use it for The Sims 3 which is their most popular franchise, so odds are good that C&C4 won't be crippled either.
Yeah, sucks that they didn't see the light 'til now and all that, but I prefer not to hold a grudge against a company if they start doing the right thing. Plus, that gives me good RTSs to play;)
The fact that posts like yours get modded up here ashames me.
So the facts that Qt and Java's licensing were problematic due to copyright concerns (y'know, those things pretty much the entire world recognizes thanks to the Berne Convention) are just a triviality best ignored, while Mono's alleged "patent threat" is a serious problem despite being at *best* limited solely to the US and Japan?
And somehow the fact that the NIH poster-child Apple isn't using Mono is supposed to support your point, despite the fact that they've got the WORST support for Java in the entire industry, prefering instead to push their own little C fork?
Its obvious you have an axe to grind, but thats no excuse to ignore factual information and logical arguments.
"Graphics are meaningless" != "good graphics detract from gameplay". And I can't see why a 3D Pacman wouldn't work, as long as you keep the same gameplay and the same perspective (i.e. not try to show off the fact that its 3D) it'd still be the same thing except less blocky and with requirements three orders of magnitude higher.
Personally I'm in the 'middle' camp. Technical excellence gives your artists more freedom (I doubt something like Shadow of the Colossus would be feasible with Quake's engine), but what matters in a game and what helps inmersion is artistic design, and you can still get top-notch design with an inferior engine. For instance, I wholly believe Chrono Trigger's graphics are superior to those of Crysis, sure Crysis may use state-of-the-art 3D rendering techniques and effects but at the end of the day its, artistically, just a shameless copy of your average Michael Bay film, whereas Chrono Trigger had its own look, its own feel, and succeeded IMHO in creating a world that felt believable despite running on a mere SNES.
But technical excellence doesn't detract from the game either. Both Red Orchestra and Call of Duty: World at War feel fairly close to me in terms of graphics, the fact that one is a game made by an 'indie' dev over the UE2.5 engine and the other one is a professional studio working with UE3 is meaningless either way. Both draw artistic inspiration from the same source and that's what I compare when I see their graphics, not whether they use advanced DX9 shaders or whatever.
I'm curious, why do you consider Pandora to be on *our* side? I haven't followed this situation closely, but it seems to me they've only done their best to stay afloat and nothing else. That's to be expected from any business, but it isn't something to be praised either.
I haven't played ADOM but another game that mixes both level-based and skill-based was Morrowind (and presumably Oblivion as well), which gave you a level after you had advanced some of your skills far enough, and gave you extra points on the attributes that governed those skills.
The problem came with the fact that, if you were like every other normal person and liked to go quickly from A to B, you'd run the whole way through. That, in turn, meant you leveled the Athetics skill *far* faster than anything else, which in turn meant that after what? 5-10 hours? you had a lv20 character that could run very, very fast but sucked at anything else and since the monsters leveled up with you...
That's one of the reasons I prefered Fallout 3, no matter *how* I gained the experience I could still have a well-balanced character. Though perhaps if Morrowind et al had been purely skill-based instead of mixing it up with levels, it would've worked just as well.
I really think Guild Wars is the only MMO where something like skill, as opposed to bunny hopping, loot gathering, and spending 3 weeks of your life getting a character up to 80, only to discover the class categorically sucks at PvP.
Or spending 3 weeks of your life grinding for consumables. The reason I stopped playing Runescape was when I realized I lost two-thirds of PvP encounters merely because I used bread as my main healing item, and everyone else used the far more effective healing potions (why bread? 'cause the process for making it was cute as heck so we did it almost everyday with my girlfriend), and in fact it was a testament to my skill and reflexes that I didn't lose the remaining third.
Which is one of the reasons I love Guild Wars so much. I lose in PvP when I suck, I win when I don't, and that's how it should be. Not because my guild is swimming in money and the other guy is a virtual bum.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't RAR covered by patents? I seem to recall that was the reason for Ubuntu having both an 'unrar' and an 'unrar-nonfree' package in the repositories. And while the cynics may point that VLC opens patented video/audio formats just fine, I'm under the impression they simply let ffmpeg decode those instead of doing it themselves and if so, RAR's patent liability would still be a valid reason to reject it from VLC itself.
Charge them for the service, even something small like $5-per-issue works. Unless you're forced to use the same machines, in which case charge them and always keep a Xubuntu LiveCD on your backpack.
You wouldn't believe how careful people are with their computers when it starts affecting their bottom line.
If you consider the structure of a 'for' loop important (did you *really* read your own link?) yet dismiss lambda expressions as 'minutiae', you clearly have an agenda to push because not even a complete newbie would say such.
Yes, it is. Its Java except someone found a way to make it not-so-goddamned-verbose, and add some stuff from Functional languages in a way that fits with the rest of the language.
But one thing you're missing is that the controversy itself isn't as big as these discusions make it out to be. Microsoft's hypothetical patent portfolio is only a problem if you live in the US (and, I believe, Japan as well) but for the rest of us its just 'features vs features' and that's how we judge, legal safety doesn't come into the picture as both have implementations under the GPL.
No, your link only proves that anything that Java has, C# has an equivalent, it does not prove the converse holds. For instance, where in your link are C#'s lambda expressions? or Properties? two of my favorite C# features, and while the latter may be considered 'trivial' (though boy does it help with Java's terrible readability), the former certainly isn't.
No, I bet H.264 has more decoders out there than MPEG-4 ASP. There're certainly much more content, and more authoring tools.
Wrong. Pretty much all DVD players by LG, Samsung and Sony support DivX, not to mention every video-capable portable media player from the PSP to chinese-made "MP4 players", none of which support h.264. And to say it "only" caught on the piracy scene is like saying IE is "only" dominant among Windows users, the piracy scene is what made MP3 what it is today.
I know about the licensing schemes, but when comparing it to h.264 its meaningless: everyone who demands the better codec over the more widely supported one *today* will likely still prefer the better one tomorrow when h.264 is the 'more popular but worse performing' one, and then we'll be stuck with a codec that's both inferior *and* has per-user licensing, the worst of both worlds. If widespread availability was the main concern, then this discussion would be between DivX and Theora and h.264 wouldn't even enter into the picture.
I've never played WoW (I'll hand over my geek card at the exit), but I'd say its due to the 'scrambling' Blizzard does for the chats between different faction. So, effectively, the only thing an alliance and a horde player can do if they meet is beat each other up.
You want a good social experiment? make some software that reverses it, a "Babelfish" of sorts for WoW, then hang back and watch the results.
Read TFA. He didn't just attack people from the other faction, he abused the bots meant to protect players uninterested in PvP to grief players of the opposing faction, engaged in verbal abuse (which is prohibited by pretty much all MMO EULAs) and various other issues above and beyond simply "engaging in PvP". And that's just from his own and extremely biased version of the story, reality is likely even worse.
People lament that you can't actually role play in a computer RPG, but here's a guy doing that, and he's an outcast. Heros don't hang out and chat with villains. They fight.
Err, no they don't. Heroes only fight villians to prevent them from doing evil stuff, that's why they're *heroes* and not 'villians employed by our own side'. And if the villians decided to drop the baby-eating stuff and have a nice chat over coffee, a proper hero would go and join them, not beat them up just because "dude, he's like, a villian".
That's the thing with roleplayers I despise the most, that they all 'roleplay' as genocidal maniacs brainwashed into an "us vs them" ideology. No, just because goblins are part of the 'monster' class doesn't mean you should go and chop them up, and just because some guy was classified as part of the 'villians' faction means you're a hero if you go and kick his ass while he's chatting with a friend.
Which is why I and most people playing online don't "roleplay". Its hard, its usually not that fun, and most people who try fail completely at it and become worse players, in the community sense, than those that play it as a mere game. Like TFA.
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Well, Windows 7 eliminates the choice between XP and Vista by giving us the best of both worlds and with a price cut on top, what's *not* to like?
Sure, I use Linux as my main desktop and have been for the past 6-7 years, but I like PC gaming so I still need a Windows install somewhere and 7 is the best there is for that purpose.
Sure, you're supposed to check the hardware support for yourself, but this doesn't apply on Windows because everything has drivers unless it's really old.
Or really new and your OS isn't, or not old but you're just using a newer CPU architecture, or you're using an old OS/new arch combo (XP64 and such).
As somebody who's been doing tech support on-and-off for the last 15 years I'm telling you, Windows' driver situation is nowhere near as good as people pretend it to be. Its surprising how many people are effectively locked into a given version of Windows, because if you go forwards or back a single generation you're already out of drivers for *something*.
Otherwise, anyone could wrap a simple browser wrapper around IE's rendering engine and still get the effect of shutting out browser competitors.
No, they don't because they don't get to ride on Windows' huge market share. Thin wrapper or not, you still start from zero market-share and work your way up instead of the other way around.
Microsoft is completely right in this, and the EU is simply wrong. A modern operating system includes a bundled browser.
And if they make a standards-compliant browser that can be easily uninstalled by OEMs and end-users with no ill effects, I'm sure the EU will allow them to bundle it with their OS. Until then, however, the EU is right and IE has to go.
Somehow, as I was reading your post I misread "Apple" as "Microsoft", "iTunes" as "Internet Explorer" and "Pre" as "Netscape".
I wonder why.
Shame on you, Apple. Have you gotten so big that you've forgotten what it was like to be under IBM's thumb?
Fixed that for you. And yes, they've forgotten already, in case you didn't notice this past decade.
The main change is that Microsoft goes back to marketing a product people actually want. From what I can see, pushing Vista damaged their credibility pretty strongly, but with 7 they'll likely regain much of that trust, and in fact already have with the open beta/RC.
Other than that, nothing really, OSX isn't a contender and won't be for as long as Apple continues to ignore the business market, and Linux' freedom is far too tempting to OEMs to avoid fragmenting it and make it a viable long-term replacement for Windows.
I can't remember where I got it from, but IIRC EA was now moving away from DRM after seeing how incredibly useless it was with Spore. At the very least, they didn't use it for The Sims 3 which is their most popular franchise, so odds are good that C&C4 won't be crippled either.
Yeah, sucks that they didn't see the light 'til now and all that, but I prefer not to hold a grudge against a company if they start doing the right thing. Plus, that gives me good RTSs to play ;)
The fact that posts like yours get modded up here ashames me.
So the facts that Qt and Java's licensing were problematic due to copyright concerns (y'know, those things pretty much the entire world recognizes thanks to the Berne Convention) are just a triviality best ignored, while Mono's alleged "patent threat" is a serious problem despite being at *best* limited solely to the US and Japan?
And somehow the fact that the NIH poster-child Apple isn't using Mono is supposed to support your point, despite the fact that they've got the WORST support for Java in the entire industry, prefering instead to push their own little C fork?
Its obvious you have an axe to grind, but thats no excuse to ignore factual information and logical arguments.
"Graphics are meaningless" != "good graphics detract from gameplay". And I can't see why a 3D Pacman wouldn't work, as long as you keep the same gameplay and the same perspective (i.e. not try to show off the fact that its 3D) it'd still be the same thing except less blocky and with requirements three orders of magnitude higher.
Personally I'm in the 'middle' camp. Technical excellence gives your artists more freedom (I doubt something like Shadow of the Colossus would be feasible with Quake's engine), but what matters in a game and what helps inmersion is artistic design, and you can still get top-notch design with an inferior engine. For instance, I wholly believe Chrono Trigger's graphics are superior to those of Crysis, sure Crysis may use state-of-the-art 3D rendering techniques and effects but at the end of the day its, artistically, just a shameless copy of your average Michael Bay film, whereas Chrono Trigger had its own look, its own feel, and succeeded IMHO in creating a world that felt believable despite running on a mere SNES.
But technical excellence doesn't detract from the game either. Both Red Orchestra and Call of Duty: World at War feel fairly close to me in terms of graphics, the fact that one is a game made by an 'indie' dev over the UE2.5 engine and the other one is a professional studio working with UE3 is meaningless either way. Both draw artistic inspiration from the same source and that's what I compare when I see their graphics, not whether they use advanced DX9 shaders or whatever.
I'm curious, why do you consider Pandora to be on *our* side? I haven't followed this situation closely, but it seems to me they've only done their best to stay afloat and nothing else. That's to be expected from any business, but it isn't something to be praised either.
Too Good To Be True == 200 tracks for $2. They didn't sell that because they don't want to give stuff away so cheaply. How is that hard to understand?
Read the link, it says nothing about number of tracks or price, only about the diversity of the artists.
I haven't played ADOM but another game that mixes both level-based and skill-based was Morrowind (and presumably Oblivion as well), which gave you a level after you had advanced some of your skills far enough, and gave you extra points on the attributes that governed those skills.
The problem came with the fact that, if you were like every other normal person and liked to go quickly from A to B, you'd run the whole way through. That, in turn, meant you leveled the Athetics skill *far* faster than anything else, which in turn meant that after what? 5-10 hours? you had a lv20 character that could run very, very fast but sucked at anything else and since the monsters leveled up with you...
That's one of the reasons I prefered Fallout 3, no matter *how* I gained the experience I could still have a well-balanced character. Though perhaps if Morrowind et al had been purely skill-based instead of mixing it up with levels, it would've worked just as well.
I really think Guild Wars is the only MMO where something like skill, as opposed to bunny hopping, loot gathering, and spending 3 weeks of your life getting a character up to 80, only to discover the class categorically sucks at PvP.
Or spending 3 weeks of your life grinding for consumables. The reason I stopped playing Runescape was when I realized I lost two-thirds of PvP encounters merely because I used bread as my main healing item, and everyone else used the far more effective healing potions (why bread? 'cause the process for making it was cute as heck so we did it almost everyday with my girlfriend), and in fact it was a testament to my skill and reflexes that I didn't lose the remaining third.
Which is one of the reasons I love Guild Wars so much. I lose in PvP when I suck, I win when I don't, and that's how it should be. Not because my guild is swimming in money and the other guy is a virtual bum.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't RAR covered by patents? I seem to recall that was the reason for Ubuntu having both an 'unrar' and an 'unrar-nonfree' package in the repositories. And while the cynics may point that VLC opens patented video/audio formats just fine, I'm under the impression they simply let ffmpeg decode those instead of doing it themselves and if so, RAR's patent liability would still be a valid reason to reject it from VLC itself.
Charge them for the service, even something small like $5-per-issue works. Unless you're forced to use the same machines, in which case charge them and always keep a Xubuntu LiveCD on your backpack.
You wouldn't believe how careful people are with their computers when it starts affecting their bottom line.
The simplest way to make your argument irrelevant is complain about the work you need to get a feature practically nobody cares about.
When grandma says 'I expect my h.264-encoded videos to be hardware accelerated' I'll start worrying about having to compile it in, but not before.
If you consider the structure of a 'for' loop important (did you *really* read your own link?) yet dismiss lambda expressions as 'minutiae', you clearly have an agenda to push because not even a complete newbie would say such.
Yes, it is. Its Java except someone found a way to make it not-so-goddamned-verbose, and add some stuff from Functional languages in a way that fits with the rest of the language.
But one thing you're missing is that the controversy itself isn't as big as these discusions make it out to be. Microsoft's hypothetical patent portfolio is only a problem if you live in the US (and, I believe, Japan as well) but for the rest of us its just 'features vs features' and that's how we judge, legal safety doesn't come into the picture as both have implementations under the GPL.
No, your link only proves that anything that Java has, C# has an equivalent, it does not prove the converse holds. For instance, where in your link are C#'s lambda expressions? or Properties? two of my favorite C# features, and while the latter may be considered 'trivial' (though boy does it help with Java's terrible readability), the former certainly isn't.
Not old school enough, obviously, to avoid using an IBM-designed platform.
Only the former, gonna check out the latter, thanks for the link ;)
No, I bet H.264 has more decoders out there than MPEG-4 ASP. There're certainly much more content, and more authoring tools.
Wrong. Pretty much all DVD players by LG, Samsung and Sony support DivX, not to mention every video-capable portable media player from the PSP to chinese-made "MP4 players", none of which support h.264. And to say it "only" caught on the piracy scene is like saying IE is "only" dominant among Windows users, the piracy scene is what made MP3 what it is today.
I know about the licensing schemes, but when comparing it to h.264 its meaningless: everyone who demands the better codec over the more widely supported one *today* will likely still prefer the better one tomorrow when h.264 is the 'more popular but worse performing' one, and then we'll be stuck with a codec that's both inferior *and* has per-user licensing, the worst of both worlds. If widespread availability was the main concern, then this discussion would be between DivX and Theora and h.264 wouldn't even enter into the picture.
I've never played WoW (I'll hand over my geek card at the exit), but I'd say its due to the 'scrambling' Blizzard does for the chats between different faction. So, effectively, the only thing an alliance and a horde player can do if they meet is beat each other up.
You want a good social experiment? make some software that reverses it, a "Babelfish" of sorts for WoW, then hang back and watch the results.
Read TFA. He didn't just attack people from the other faction, he abused the bots meant to protect players uninterested in PvP to grief players of the opposing faction, engaged in verbal abuse (which is prohibited by pretty much all MMO EULAs) and various other issues above and beyond simply "engaging in PvP". And that's just from his own and extremely biased version of the story, reality is likely even worse.
People lament that you can't actually role play in a computer RPG, but here's a guy doing that, and he's an outcast. Heros don't hang out and chat with villains. They fight.
Err, no they don't. Heroes only fight villians to prevent them from doing evil stuff, that's why they're *heroes* and not 'villians employed by our own side'. And if the villians decided to drop the baby-eating stuff and have a nice chat over coffee, a proper hero would go and join them, not beat them up just because "dude, he's like, a villian".
That's the thing with roleplayers I despise the most, that they all 'roleplay' as genocidal maniacs brainwashed into an "us vs them" ideology. No, just because goblins are part of the 'monster' class doesn't mean you should go and chop them up, and just because some guy was classified as part of the 'villians' faction means you're a hero if you go and kick his ass while he's chatting with a friend.
Which is why I and most people playing online don't "roleplay". Its hard, its usually not that fun, and most people who try fail completely at it and become worse players, in the community sense, than those that play it as a mere game. Like TFA.