I guess you didn't watch the video ( nor did the guys who moded you insightful) : they do track the position of the driver's eyes with camera pointing toward him.
Mod this up. It's been known for years that IBM and others hardware companies need software to sell their machines and therefore it makes sense for them to be involved in Open Source. By reducing the cost of software to zero, they manage to get more hardware sales.
Software companies on the other hand don't have such incentive to go Open Source, since that reduce the dollar value of their product. And therefore you see MS opposing Open Source.
The odd one is/was...Sun, a company that never decided whether it was a hardware (servers) or software company (Java, Solaris,...).
Quoted from your article "By Luke Smith, 09/20/2006"
Considering we're in 2009, that the game still isn't out, and that they're was multiple changes made to the game and it's release schedule during theses years, i wouldn't put much faith in that article now.
I'm a developper, so I'm pretty computer-savvy, but have been using Ubuntu like a standard user (for tasks such as email, Internet, chat) for several years. That means I don't want to have to type console commands to set up standard things (like being able to share my files with my Windows PC with Samba...Ubuntu 7.x was a pain for that, Ubuntu 8.04 made this disappear and made me happy). Therefore, I don't read Ubuntu forums, and don't follow planned evolutions but I do update to each new Ubuntu version on release.
All this to say that I didn't know about this bug report/controversy for automatic update version. However this change was one of the first things I noticed on 9.04 and was very happy about it. Although I always clicked on the little icon to update my softwares in previous versions (i know how important updates are), this change makes updating easier, therefore it makes my life as a basic user easier and it's one more step in the right direction (and an important one that increases the likelihood i will one day recommends Ubuntu for less computer-savvy people, because it will help them keep their software updated).
So IMHO Shuttleworth was right on that one, and you should have used the STFU testing method before complaining.
MySQL is a brand which started to get well-known for entreprises. Look at PostGreSQL for another open-source database which for now doesn't have the marketshare nor the recognition it could have based solely on his technical merits.
So, MySQL is/was more than a bunch of code files that can be forked, it's a real company that started to make a dent in the database market, driving cost down for customers of such products, and producing incentive for both Oracle and MS to lower the prices of their products/enhance them to keep them competitive. By buying MySQL, Oracle removed one of its two competitors.
Sure, a newcomer may step in later on, and others open-source projects are likely candidates, but for now the market has only 3 players.
I don't know anything about Left 4 Dead, but it is a known fact that MS can fix prices for at least some of the DLC : i know the (awesome) Castle Crashers' team wanted their DLC free, but MS decided people should pay for it. Here is a proof : http://devblog.thebehemoth.com/?p=516 . The team even offered some MS points to counter this for their most loyal fans : http://devblog.thebehemoth.com/?p=1095
Sorry but that depends on people. I've been a book lover since the age of six, but if you tell me the end of a book before i finish it, you almost kill the book for me. It will be hard for me to finish reading the book.
What i like in the book is to see things unravel one by one in a process that leads you from a starting situation till the unknown final situation. I like to ask myself "hmm this will probably ends like this", "will that character survives ? I'm not sure", or "can the character get out of this pinch ?". It doesn't need to be a major plot twist, it happens for every book from great classics to cheap moderns thrillers. Sure you have violent deaths, plot twists in any spy book, but you also have character/relationship evolutions in War and Peace.
If you tell me the final situation before hand, I won't care anymore about what happens, because I don't think "I'm at instant X with the main character, what happens next ?" anymore, I'm already at the final moment, instant X is past and no longer relevant.
That's also why i can't read the same book twice, or why i hate flashback books (Dark Tower IV, i'm looking at you).
That looks like a good idea, and many people are already expecting Jumpgate Evolution as something fresh and new. However, every single MMORPG to date, has claimed before release to have new ideas, good balance between classes, interesting PvP and PvE. Most of them failed one of theses areas, and many failed all. That's why I take theses new claims with a big grain of salt.
So i say let's wait till the game is released and thoroughly tested by everyone...then we will see if this is more than marketing talk.
Hey...Am I not talking English ? I talk about global playtime, and I get two answers about speed runs.
When I say playtime, I'm not talking about the length of one game. I'm talking about how long it took you to beat the game including all the Save/Reload or all the Game Over/Start Again you did before reaching the end for the first time. You don't beat Diablo (or Strider) on the first try, nor does your first victory happens in 3 min. Sure, there are people who can speed run games in a few min, but it took them hundred of hours to get this good (or find all the tricks/exploits/shortcut to skip areas).
It took 7 hours for my friend to reach the end point. He probably didn't get all the collectibles and didn't play on the hardest difficulty, but he doesn't see enough value in that to replay the solo mode (the multiplayer mode somewhat saves the game for him). Casual gamers aren't the ones who like to waste their time collecting stuff.
I admit some games offer lot of replay value and/or additional challenges and you may argue on that. But most of them just ask you to "find the 400 shorcuts" or "shoot the 200 hidden pigeons". IMHO theses kind of trick aren't replay value, but just a cheap trick from the devs to bump the time you need to get a 100% completion score.
On the other hand, despite my 30H of play in normal mode (harder difficulties must be unlocked), I'm still far from the end of NGB yet (and I'm neither looking for the best grades nor collecting all the items in each level).
If this means game companies can stop worrying about frustrated casual gamers and start making their game harder and longer then I say "go for it".
I'm sick and tired of both the debilitating trend and shortening trend in the video game industry. I've got a friend which enjoys video game but isn't good at it and even him was disappointed that he finished Star Wars Force Unleashed in only 7 hours. I thought it couldn't be worse, but I've been proved wrong with a test I saw on the latest Terminator video game : apparently, you can finish it in 4 hours (and I'm not even talking about the price/hours ratio). Sure theses two games use well-known licenses, but this trend is occuring for almost every video game serie.
On the other hand, I'm currently playing Ninja Gaiden Black, which is reputed for its difficulty. I'm at the 2/3 point, it took me 30h to get there, and I've enjoyed every minute of it.
I wonder why i try replying to an anon troll, but I will bite.
Your rant is nice and long (and partially true, for example i hate the way they charge for Live), but could you back it up by facts ? For example, how is the Xbox a train wreck ? how is it dying ?
The original Xbox was a real money sink, but it was a way to get a foothold in the console market. Now the Xbox 360, while still outpaced by the Wii, is the real deal and a money maker for Microsoft. Moreover, despite being the oldest console, its growth keeps increasing over the past 2 years.
I never heard before of the FIRST competition. From what i get from Wikipedia, robot are radio-controlled (6 weeks to make an autonomous robot would be quite a miracle)?
However, that scoring system seems really convoluted.
In France, there is a quite popular robotic competition, the French Cup of Robotics. In 1998 they extended it to become an European competition called Eurobot www.eurobot.org . Robots are smaller but autonomous.
This mean you have to get reliable sensors (beware of infrared sensors under 1000 watts lights !), and a very reliable IA.
Because of that, teams work a full year to get a working robots, and many can't pass the homologation (that ensures the robot is able to score at least one point under optimal condition). Moreover, during the competition many robots won't start at the beginning of a game or end up stuck in a corner because of bad input from a sensor, collision, or glitch in the IA.
Therefore, a robot who can reliably score on every one of his 5 qualifying matches as a good chance of reaching the final 16. Best robots win:). No need for a strange scoring system.
If you really believe this, you clearly didn't edit Wikipedia much or did recent changes patrol. When there is a big news (like the death of someone), the related pages are watched carefully for a short period.
On the other hand, most of the pages don't have at least one guardian angel to keep them accurate all year long.
I'm sure anyone who have dealt with vandalism on Wikipedia has seen some clever/sneaky vandalism along the way or some stupid edits kept for months.
Although it doesnt seem to be the norm on/., some people (myself included), don't find necessary to have a computer running or even sleeping idle (and consuming electricity) for 10-15h/day when nobody is here to use it (during night and work hours).
It makes sense to keep a computer running 24/24 if it's a server, otherwise, it's useless. Moreover, if computer were fast to boot, hibernating would be almost useless.
I was waiting for the argument saying that movie are still expensive 10 years later. The main difference is the evolution of the medium.
Video Game is a new industry, which is getting bigger every year. Moreover the technology behind it is booming. 10 years old games looks like crap by today's standards (even though they are still very good). 10 years old games were done by smallers teams (credits get longer and longer...i just saw the endless credits of Gears of war 2 last month).
On the other hand, movie still have a lot to tell but technology and budgets doesn't evolve as fast as the ones for video games (except maybe for the ones using a lot of special effects). So a 10 years old movie doesn't seem as old as a 10 years old video game (The "Tekken" series is a great example for that). But still, very old movies tends to have lower prices.
That's why i think the price of games should decrease faster than the price for movies.
Last thing that maybe wasn't clear from my earlier posts : I'm all in favor of copyrights law and i believe that companies should make money from their older games. But I still think their pricing scheme for retro-gaming are often (but not always, see above my mention of the Sega pack) ridiculous.
Beneath a Steel Sky is a freeware since 2003. That's why it is the only game (with "Flight of the Amazon Queen") the ScummVM crew can distribute with their engine.
I m very happy they are re-releasing hit games. But they are clearly overpriced. A 2 years-old PC game ends up in the bargain bin for 10 dollars/euros.
So how do you justify the fact that a 10 years old game is worth 15 dollars/euros ?
On the other hand, Sega did a very sensible thing with the Sega Megadrive Collection with 20 hit games in one pack for a reasonable price
However, it worries me when i see Pikmin (a Gamecube game) re-released as a Wii Game for no reason (Wiimote add nothing to this game). I fear that game companies will sell us again all of their games with each new console
Every time i see headlines like "ScummVM add new games" or something similar, i'm disappointed. It only adds support for theses games.
You still need to have an old working version of the game or find it in the grey realm of abandonware.
I wish companies would release theses old games for free (so that they can join "Flight of the Amazon Queen" or "Beneath a Steel Sky"), or sell them all as a single compilation.
But it doesn't seem to be going that way. Instead companies now offer each of their hit as overpriced DLC (1200 MS Points for R-Type 1&2 ?! WTF ??). The sad thing is that people seem to be stupid enough to buy them...:/
Then you wouldn't port Nethack, you'd make a Nethack-inspired game that wouldn't be Nethack. The whole point of Nethack is having a seemingly "open" gameplay : tons of availables actions, your imagination is most often than not the limit.
Hell, Nethack's motto is "if you think something is possible, do it, the devs probably thought it about it before". Actually, limitating you to the obvious would probably prevent you from finishing the game (which is already insanely hard as it is).
However, mentioning Nethack is clearly very relevent to the debate here. That's the only game i know that give you this sensation of freedom with a predefined set of commands.
PS : I tried Final Fantasy XI on a PC I know first-hand how console RPG's interface can be frustrating.
Not to be mean, but have you ever played Nethack seriously ?
What you say is wrong because, Nethack doesnt limit you, you can try any action with any object (it may lead to nothing but at least you can try to do it). You select an action, it suggests obvious choices but you can also try everything else.
For example, if you want to "wield a weapon" (== "equip a weapon"), the game suggest items that obviously qualify as weapons (sword, bow,...) but if you want to wield another object such as a potion, a monster corpse, or anything else, you can do it and you may discover interesting effects with this.
My point is, if you go from action->object to object->action, you would still have to display all the objects available and then display all the actions available : you didn't reduce choice or the difficulty to navigate the interface at all.
A Fujitsu Siemens spokesperson assured PC Pro today that the scheme is a profitable venture, once the sale of future warranties and upgrades is taken into account. Only Fujitsu Siemens modifications are allowed, so upgrading with cheap third-party RAM is out of the question.
I can understand that overpriced hardware upgrades can make up for the lack of sales. And they wouldn't be the first ones to offer these kind of upgrades.
We're very lucky regarding Internet access : If you don't live in a remote area, standard price is 30 euros/month for triple play (DSL Internet access up to 20 Mbits/s + free call to fixed phones nationwide and some others countries + TV)
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you didn't watch the video ( nor did the guys who moded you insightful) : they do track the position of the driver's eyes with camera pointing toward him.
Mod this up. It's been known for years that IBM and others hardware companies need software to sell their machines and therefore it makes sense for them to be involved in Open Source. By reducing the cost of software to zero, they manage to get more hardware sales. ...).
Software companies on the other hand don't have such incentive to go Open Source, since that reduce the dollar value of their product. And therefore you see MS opposing Open Source.
The odd one is/was...Sun, a company that never decided whether it was a hardware (servers) or software company (Java, Solaris,
Quoted from your article "By Luke Smith, 09/20/2006"
Considering we're in 2009, that the game still isn't out, and that they're was multiple changes made to the game and it's release schedule during theses years, i wouldn't put much faith in that article now.
I'm a developper, so I'm pretty computer-savvy, but have been using Ubuntu like a standard user (for tasks such as email, Internet, chat) for several years. That means I don't want to have to type console commands to set up standard things (like being able to share my files with my Windows PC with Samba...Ubuntu 7.x was a pain for that, Ubuntu 8.04 made this disappear and made me happy). Therefore, I don't read Ubuntu forums, and don't follow planned evolutions but I do update to each new Ubuntu version on release.
All this to say that I didn't know about this bug report/controversy for automatic update version. However this change was one of the first things I noticed on 9.04 and was very happy about it. Although I always clicked on the little icon to update my softwares in previous versions (i know how important updates are), this change makes updating easier, therefore it makes my life as a basic user easier and it's one more step in the right direction (and an important one that increases the likelihood i will one day recommends Ubuntu for less computer-savvy people, because it will help them keep their software updated).
So IMHO Shuttleworth was right on that one, and you should have used the STFU testing method before complaining.
MySQL is a brand which started to get well-known for entreprises. Look at PostGreSQL for another open-source database which for now doesn't have the marketshare nor the recognition it could have based solely on his technical merits.
So, MySQL is/was more than a bunch of code files that can be forked, it's a real company that started to make a dent in the database market, driving cost down for customers of such products, and producing incentive for both Oracle and MS to lower the prices of their products/enhance them to keep them competitive. By buying MySQL, Oracle removed one of its two competitors.
Sure, a newcomer may step in later on, and others open-source projects are likely candidates, but for now the market has only 3 players.
I don't know anything about Left 4 Dead, but it is a known fact that MS can fix prices for at least some of the DLC : i know the (awesome) Castle Crashers' team wanted their DLC free, but MS decided people should pay for it. Here is a proof : http://devblog.thebehemoth.com/?p=516 . The team even offered some MS points to counter this for their most loyal fans : http://devblog.thebehemoth.com/?p=1095
Sorry but that depends on people. I've been a book lover since the age of six, but if you tell me the end of a book before i finish it, you almost kill the book for me. It will be hard for me to finish reading the book.
What i like in the book is to see things unravel one by one in a process that leads you from a starting situation till the unknown final situation. I like to ask myself "hmm this will probably ends like this", "will that character survives ? I'm not sure", or "can the character get out of this pinch ?". It doesn't need to be a major plot twist, it happens for every book from great classics to cheap moderns thrillers. Sure you have violent deaths, plot twists in any spy book, but you also have character/relationship evolutions in War and Peace.
If you tell me the final situation before hand, I won't care anymore about what happens, because I don't think "I'm at instant X with the main character, what happens next ?" anymore, I'm already at the final moment, instant X is past and no longer relevant.
That's also why i can't read the same book twice, or why i hate flashback books (Dark Tower IV, i'm looking at you).
That looks like a good idea, and many people are already expecting Jumpgate Evolution as something fresh and new. However, every single MMORPG to date, has claimed before release to have new ideas, good balance between classes, interesting PvP and PvE. Most of them failed one of theses areas, and many failed all. That's why I take theses new claims with a big grain of salt.
So i say let's wait till the game is released and thoroughly tested by everyone...then we will see if this is more than marketing talk.
You probably didn't read my answer to effigiate's post... -_-
Hey...Am I not talking English ? I talk about global playtime, and I get two answers about speed runs.
When I say playtime, I'm not talking about the length of one game. I'm talking about how long it took you to beat the game including all the Save/Reload or all the Game Over/Start Again you did before reaching the end for the first time. You don't beat Diablo (or Strider) on the first try, nor does your first victory happens in 3 min. Sure, there are people who can speed run games in a few min, but it took them hundred of hours to get this good (or find all the tricks/exploits/shortcut to skip areas).
It took 7 hours for my friend to reach the end point. He probably didn't get all the collectibles and didn't play on the hardest difficulty, but he doesn't see enough value in that to replay the solo mode (the multiplayer mode somewhat saves the game for him). Casual gamers aren't the ones who like to waste their time collecting stuff.
I admit some games offer lot of replay value and/or additional challenges and you may argue on that. But most of them just ask you to "find the 400 shorcuts" or "shoot the 200 hidden pigeons". IMHO theses kind of trick aren't replay value, but just a cheap trick from the devs to bump the time you need to get a 100% completion score.
On the other hand, despite my 30H of play in normal mode (harder difficulties must be unlocked), I'm still far from the end of NGB yet (and I'm neither looking for the best grades nor collecting all the items in each level).
If this means game companies can stop worrying about frustrated casual gamers and start making their game harder and longer then I say "go for it".
I'm sick and tired of both the debilitating trend and shortening trend in the video game industry. I've got a friend which enjoys video game but isn't good at it and even him was disappointed that he finished Star Wars Force Unleashed in only 7 hours. I thought it couldn't be worse, but I've been proved wrong with a test I saw on the latest Terminator video game : apparently, you can finish it in 4 hours (and I'm not even talking about the price/hours ratio). Sure theses two games use well-known licenses, but this trend is occuring for almost every video game serie.
On the other hand, I'm currently playing Ninja Gaiden Black, which is reputed for its difficulty. I'm at the 2/3 point, it took me 30h to get there, and I've enjoyed every minute of it.
I wonder why i try replying to an anon troll, but I will bite.
:
Your rant is nice and long (and partially true, for example i hate the way they charge for Live), but could you back it up by facts ? For example, how is the Xbox a train wreck ? how is it dying ?
Quick and dirty google search
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/microsoft-games-profits-up-by-16-per-cent
The original Xbox was a real money sink, but it was a way to get a foothold in the console market. Now the Xbox 360, while still outpaced by the Wii, is the real deal and a money maker for Microsoft. Moreover, despite being the oldest console, its growth keeps increasing over the past 2 years.
I never heard before of the FIRST competition. From what i get from Wikipedia, robot are radio-controlled (6 weeks to make an autonomous robot would be quite a miracle)? :). No need for a strange scoring system.
However, that scoring system seems really convoluted.
In France, there is a quite popular robotic competition, the French Cup of Robotics. In 1998 they extended it to become an European competition called Eurobot www.eurobot.org . Robots are smaller but autonomous.
This mean you have to get reliable sensors (beware of infrared sensors under 1000 watts lights !), and a very reliable IA.
Because of that, teams work a full year to get a working robots, and many can't pass the homologation (that ensures the robot is able to score at least one point under optimal condition). Moreover, during the competition many robots won't start at the beginning of a game or end up stuck in a corner because of bad input from a sensor, collision, or glitch in the IA.
Therefore, a robot who can reliably score on every one of his 5 qualifying matches as a good chance of reaching the final 16. Best robots win
If you really believe this, you clearly didn't edit Wikipedia much or did recent changes patrol. When there is a big news (like the death of someone), the related pages are watched carefully for a short period.
On the other hand, most of the pages don't have at least one guardian angel to keep them accurate all year long.
I'm sure anyone who have dealt with vandalism on Wikipedia has seen some clever/sneaky vandalism along the way or some stupid edits kept for months.
Ever heard of MadWorld on Wii ? Extreme violence, with a clever gameplay that makes a good use of the Wiimote
I don't have the sales figures but it does show that the Wii accepts almost any game.
Although it doesnt seem to be the norm on /., some people (myself included), don't find necessary to have a computer running or even sleeping idle (and consuming electricity) for 10-15h/day when nobody is here to use it (during night and work hours).
It makes sense to keep a computer running 24/24 if it's a server, otherwise, it's useless. Moreover, if computer were fast to boot, hibernating would be almost useless.
I was waiting for the argument saying that movie are still expensive 10 years later. The main difference is the evolution of the medium.
Video Game is a new industry, which is getting bigger every year. Moreover the technology behind it is booming. 10 years old games looks like crap by today's standards (even though they are still very good). 10 years old games were done by smallers teams (credits get longer and longer...i just saw the endless credits of Gears of war 2 last month).
On the other hand, movie still have a lot to tell but technology and budgets doesn't evolve as fast as the ones for video games (except maybe for the ones using a lot of special effects). So a 10 years old movie doesn't seem as old as a 10 years old video game (The "Tekken" series is a great example for that). But still, very old movies tends to have lower prices.
That's why i think the price of games should decrease faster than the price for movies.
Last thing that maybe wasn't clear from my earlier posts : I'm all in favor of copyrights law and i believe that companies should make money from their older games. But I still think their pricing scheme for retro-gaming are often (but not always, see above my mention of the Sega pack) ridiculous.
Beneath a Steel Sky is a freeware since 2003. That's why it is the only game (with "Flight of the Amazon Queen") the ScummVM crew can distribute with their engine.
So, it isn't hard for GoG to "offer" it...
I m very happy they are re-releasing hit games. But they are clearly overpriced. A 2 years-old PC game ends up in the bargain bin for 10 dollars/euros.
So how do you justify the fact that a 10 years old game is worth 15 dollars/euros ?
On the other hand, Sega did a very sensible thing with the Sega Megadrive Collection with 20 hit games in one pack for a reasonable price
However, it worries me when i see Pikmin (a Gamecube game) re-released as a Wii Game for no reason (Wiimote add nothing to this game). I fear that game companies will sell us again all of their games with each new console
Every time i see headlines like "ScummVM add new games" or something similar, i'm disappointed. It only adds support for theses games. :/
You still need to have an old working version of the game or find it in the grey realm of abandonware.
I wish companies would release theses old games for free (so that they can join "Flight of the Amazon Queen" or "Beneath a Steel Sky"), or sell them all as a single compilation.
But it doesn't seem to be going that way. Instead companies now offer each of their hit as overpriced DLC (1200 MS Points for R-Type 1&2 ?! WTF ??). The sad thing is that people seem to be stupid enough to buy them...
Then you wouldn't port Nethack, you'd make a Nethack-inspired game that wouldn't be Nethack. The whole point of Nethack is having a seemingly "open" gameplay : tons of availables actions, your imagination is most often than not the limit.
Hell, Nethack's motto is "if you think something is possible, do it, the devs probably thought it about it before". Actually, limitating you to the obvious would probably prevent you from finishing the game (which is already insanely hard as it is).
However, mentioning Nethack is clearly very relevent to the debate here. That's the only game i know that give you this sensation of freedom with a predefined set of commands.
PS : I tried Final Fantasy XI on a PC I know first-hand how console RPG's interface can be frustrating.
Not to be mean, but have you ever played Nethack seriously ? ...) but if you want to wield another object such as a potion, a monster corpse, or anything else, you can do it and you may discover interesting effects with this.
What you say is wrong because, Nethack doesnt limit you, you can try any action with any object (it may lead to nothing but at least you can try to do it). You select an action, it suggests obvious choices but you can also try everything else.
For example, if you want to "wield a weapon" (== "equip a weapon"), the game suggest items that obviously qualify as weapons (sword, bow,
My point is, if you go from action->object to object->action, you would still have to display all the objects available and then display all the actions available : you didn't reduce choice or the difficulty to navigate the interface at all.
I can understand that overpriced hardware upgrades can make up for the lack of sales. And they wouldn't be the first ones to offer these kind of upgrades.
France has uncapped access.
We're very lucky regarding Internet access : If you don't live in a remote area, standard price is 30 euros/month for triple play (DSL Internet access up to 20 Mbits/s + free call to fixed phones nationwide and some others countries + TV)
Your nickname remembered me a much more interesting sport...