Specifically, the Hindenberg of an experiment where they coded the costs of weapons and equipment to shift based on their cross-server popularity.
The experiment broke down immediately. Prices skewed so high on some weapons that they were literally unattainable. People coded and loaded servers full of bots to do nothing but buy weapons and further fuck with the algorithm. People figured out how to turn it off and voted with their feet.
The funniest thing about this whole 'give bennies to 'good' players' thing is? When they did it in TF2, with the halo hat for not having hacked or botted one's way through the achievements, wearing the thing just became another tool in the griefer arsenal. Likewise the Mac edition earbuds, and the weapons for pre-ordering RIFT, and anything else of the like that comes down the pipe.
Just think about it: People are getting their undies bunched in droves over a few polygons and some limited special effects. Imagine what they'll do when there's actual money on the line.
I'd ask myself the same thing, but apparently class photos and yearbook sales are booming!
And Twitter is a perfectly good name. It's an actual word for one thing, without a superfluous Z to be seen. Besides that, who hasn't heard someone say 'A little bird told me...'
I've seen stories similar to this one, several times over the last year-- mostly wedding photo contests thrown into disarray by contestants with contacts in large web communities.
I know that wedding photos can be extremely expensive-- there's equipment, labour, expertise, and covering for dry spells between commissions.
Speaking as someone who's done commercial photography, how much repeat or word-of-mouth business would you say that photographers see, on average? Situations like this always make me wonder how much damage a photographer does to their bottom line with offers like these.
I use a Windows desktop gadget to keep an eye on current activity and a rough tally of accumulated usage, since my roommate doesn't do much besides watch Youtube videos and chat with her boyfriend.
For specific details, like how much my ISP thinks I've been using, and plans to charge me for, I go to their web page and bring up my account.
He's definitely real, I remember reading his voluminous output on the topic of web filters during the Nineties. Time has apparently only made him more verbose.
I don't see a huge movement toward the cloud-- small stuff is a no-brainer, and things like saves would definitely be cool, but with the steady jackbooted march toward bandwidth caps (and all of the people who are still sorely underserved by broadband suppliers) going in with Steam-style stores could easily piss-off consumers and retailers. As a sideline sure, but not a primary stream.
What, you're expecting multi-TB hard drives? Come on, they sell these things at a loss already. If they put 1 TB drives in, it'll be because they can't get 500 GB ones cheaper.
There is literally no good reason for them to shove more RAM in, let alone something ridiculous like eight gigabytes. Consoles don't have the overhead of multitasking multiple RAM-hogging applications and drivers, or the inherent size of a modern Windows operating system. They have a game, they have a dashboard, and that's it.
If you're upset about load times, complain to the developers for not streaming or caching data effectively.
Somehow, I don't think a tip jar on the Internet would be particularly enticing. Good on PJ for getting out while the getting is good. With the SCO thing out of the way, everyone with a cause would be battering down her door and then, knowing people, launching into character assassination when she chose to champion someone else's project.
No, but being able to play with friends is irrelevant-- it seems obvious that they're going for a casual, single-player or internet-enabled 'social' market rather than anything traditionally console-oriented.
I don't think this is going to work, because I don't think Gamestop has any idea what the Hell they're doing. A tablet's a bloody hefty investment for an end user, nevermind the costs for a developer who's basically admitted total inexperience in the market. Selling games through a modified Impulse storefront will require them to cut the same deals that Steam, and the Apple App Store, and the Android Store and everyone else has-- and they'll totally screw themselves if they end up using some completely off the wall architecture.
I rarely play multiplayer modes for single-player games, but I got DS2 off of Steam at the beginning of the month and poked at the multiplayer maps after finishing the campaign the first time. All of them corresponded to sequences in the game where there would have been armed soldiers battling through endless(ly respawning) waves of necromorphs and against the clock. As for weapon potency and wackiness-- come on, Jesus. There's a gun that lets you hold a spinning circular sawblade at the end of a tractor beam, or fire them into the distance, and goofier weapons besides. Plus the weapon modification system makes it easy for the devs to tweak multiplayer properties and keeps the players from assuming too much from the single-player campaign.
Homefront is another bad example, because it was a shitty game with an amazingly terrible design philosophy, and focusing on single player or multiplayer would have been polishing one turd instead of squeezing out two.
Probably about as uncomfortable as she'd feel among any other group of creepy nerds.
Seriously though, part of the point of naturism is to demystify the human body and de-sexualize nudity. A group of serious naturists isn't going to be leering at the Office Chick, hiding their chubbies behind cans of Red Bull.
I do think it's silly, and I doubt requiring employees to work au naturel would stand up to a legal challenge, but hey. More power to them if they can make it work.
Besides Red Hat, how many other companies are in the 'OSS industry'? RH is a golden example of success, but how many others can claim to be more than merely scraping along, or haven't completely folded? One successful company isn't an industry, it's a niche.
Alas, I'm not paid to play editor on Slashdot, any more than I am on Wikipedia. I have better things to do with my time, like drink from real fire hoses.
Because seriously, that cute little jab at the end reads more like a Wikipederast getting shirty over academics telling Jimbo and arbcom to take a collective flying leap, than it does as an actual criticism of their refusal to get involved.
The Blizzard patcher service, which is Bittorrent based, can be set to run in the background while you're in game: you play, and a portion of your bandwidth gets pinched off to update other players who haven't got the latest patch. It spells that out immediately after the portion you've bolded, actually: don't let the patcher run while you're in game, if you don't want it (or Rogers, by extension) fucking around with your throughput.
Hell, this can be a problem even without caps: if you saturate your upstream with a torrent seed or twenty, or don't think to throttle that big queue of Linux ISOs you're uploading to an FTP, your ping times will go through the roof and Warcraft performance will go straight into the Dalaran sewer.
The last I heard of these things, they were big, vehicle-mounted jobs that were next to useless in anything but flat, empty terrain.
Of course, it remains to be seen if this iteration is of any use either, or if minor quibbles like echoes from buildings and gully walls are still rendering them expensive porkbarrel fodder.
...how many people here racked up multiple hundreds of dollars on their parents' credit card, playing premium games on Compuserve and its competitors or dialing long-distance BBS numbers.
Flash in the pan says: Oh, fuck! Throw more money and attention at me, before all of my silly spinoffs die on the vine!
I'm not going to debate that mobile gaming has the potential to be a hugely lucrative market, but going all Khrushchev and trumpeting the demise of another medium is just gauche. It doesn't do anything but make console 'pundits' look stupid year after year, and it certainly won't help this guy.
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Brace for werewolves, everyone.
I dunno, being forced to do tech support for random people seems like cruel and unusual punishment to me.
The experiment broke down immediately. Prices skewed so high on some weapons that they were literally unattainable. People coded and loaded servers full of bots to do nothing but buy weapons and further fuck with the algorithm. People figured out how to turn it off and voted with their feet.
The funniest thing about this whole 'give bennies to 'good' players' thing is? When they did it in TF2, with the halo hat for not having hacked or botted one's way through the achievements, wearing the thing just became another tool in the griefer arsenal. Likewise the Mac edition earbuds, and the weapons for pre-ordering RIFT, and anything else of the like that comes down the pipe.
Just think about it: People are getting their undies bunched in droves over a few polygons and some limited special effects. Imagine what they'll do when there's actual money on the line.
And Twitter is a perfectly good name. It's an actual word for one thing, without a superfluous Z to be seen. Besides that, who hasn't heard someone say 'A little bird told me...'
Can I borrow some of the tinfoil from your hat? I need to cover a casserole dish.
I know that wedding photos can be extremely expensive-- there's equipment, labour, expertise, and covering for dry spells between commissions.
Speaking as someone who's done commercial photography, how much repeat or word-of-mouth business would you say that photographers see, on average? Situations like this always make me wonder how much damage a photographer does to their bottom line with offers like these.
Except Europe. Attempt no landing there.
For specific details, like how much my ISP thinks I've been using, and plans to charge me for, I go to their web page and bring up my account.
I hear they overclock when you play Yakkety Sax-- and you can tell them, that's what I said!
He's definitely real, I remember reading his voluminous output on the topic of web filters during the Nineties. Time has apparently only made him more verbose.
To wit, the scent of failure.
I don't see a huge movement toward the cloud-- small stuff is a no-brainer, and things like saves would definitely be cool, but with the steady jackbooted march toward bandwidth caps (and all of the people who are still sorely underserved by broadband suppliers) going in with Steam-style stores could easily piss-off consumers and retailers. As a sideline sure, but not a primary stream.
What, you're expecting multi-TB hard drives? Come on, they sell these things at a loss already. If they put 1 TB drives in, it'll be because they can't get 500 GB ones cheaper.
If you're upset about load times, complain to the developers for not streaming or caching data effectively.
Somehow, I don't think a tip jar on the Internet would be particularly enticing. Good on PJ for getting out while the getting is good. With the SCO thing out of the way, everyone with a cause would be battering down her door and then, knowing people, launching into character assassination when she chose to champion someone else's project.
I don't think this is going to work, because I don't think Gamestop has any idea what the Hell they're doing. A tablet's a bloody hefty investment for an end user, nevermind the costs for a developer who's basically admitted total inexperience in the market. Selling games through a modified Impulse storefront will require them to cut the same deals that Steam, and the Apple App Store, and the Android Store and everyone else has-- and they'll totally screw themselves if they end up using some completely off the wall architecture.
Homefront is another bad example, because it was a shitty game with an amazingly terrible design philosophy, and focusing on single player or multiplayer would have been polishing one turd instead of squeezing out two.
Seriously though, part of the point of naturism is to demystify the human body and de-sexualize nudity. A group of serious naturists isn't going to be leering at the Office Chick, hiding their chubbies behind cans of Red Bull.
I do think it's silly, and I doubt requiring employees to work au naturel would stand up to a legal challenge, but hey. More power to them if they can make it work.
Besides Red Hat, how many other companies are in the 'OSS industry'? RH is a golden example of success, but how many others can claim to be more than merely scraping along, or haven't completely folded? One successful company isn't an industry, it's a niche.
Alas, I'm not paid to play editor on Slashdot, any more than I am on Wikipedia. I have better things to do with my time, like drink from real fire hoses.
Because seriously, that cute little jab at the end reads more like a Wikipederast getting shirty over academics telling Jimbo and arbcom to take a collective flying leap, than it does as an actual criticism of their refusal to get involved.
Hell, this can be a problem even without caps: if you saturate your upstream with a torrent seed or twenty, or don't think to throttle that big queue of Linux ISOs you're uploading to an FTP, your ping times will go through the roof and Warcraft performance will go straight into the Dalaran sewer.
Of course, it remains to be seen if this iteration is of any use either, or if minor quibbles like echoes from buildings and gully walls are still rendering them expensive porkbarrel fodder.
...how many people here racked up multiple hundreds of dollars on their parents' credit card, playing premium games on Compuserve and its competitors or dialing long-distance BBS numbers.
I'm not going to debate that mobile gaming has the potential to be a hugely lucrative market, but going all Khrushchev and trumpeting the demise of another medium is just gauche. It doesn't do anything but make console 'pundits' look stupid year after year, and it certainly won't help this guy.