Somehow ordering "a half litre" doesn't role off the tongue that way "pint" does. Ditto for cup of coffee. I just can't see myself saying, "I'm just not awake until I've had my first 250 ml of coffee in the morning."
Cheers,
Dave
Colloquial names have not disappeared in countries that use the metric system. 250ml is a cup, 500ml is a pint (so is 450ml, 560ml and 600ml, depending on where you live).
However performing calculations is a lot easier. I know how to divide a Kilogram into 10,8,6,4 or 2 pieces easily. I know a litre is 1000 Cubic Centimetres (CC). It's easy to tell how many 3x3 millimetre pieces I can get out of 1 x 1 meter sheet of metal with a 1mm divide between each piece.
Colloquial names are good for conversation, a cup, a teaspoon, a pint, pot, pony or middy as they are easily recognised amounts but they are still arbitrary. When it comes to actually doing anything with numbers dealing with millimetres and kilometres is easier than inches and miles as metric is computationally convenient.
0 C - point at which water freezes, 100 C - point at which water boils.
Yep, totally arbitrary. Lets not even start with Kelvin.
it's just a bit easier to do unit conversions with them.
By "a bit" you mean an imperial shitload (2.4358 Metric fucktons) easier. I know there is 1000 millimetres in a metre, 1000 millilitres in a litre, 1000 milligrams in a gram. Same with centi, deci, kilo, mega and so forth. How many furlongs are there in a mile, inches in a furlong? How do we start dealing with tiny fractions of an inch or many hundreds of thousands of miles?
It's also a lot easier to convert between different measurements in metric. 1 millilitre is 1 cubic centimetre (CC) of water (1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm), 1 litre is 1000 CC's.
This is why we have laws, so that idiots who don't think DUI is wrong can be expressly told it is.
What if they overestimated their ability to drive while under the influence? Would that not be classified as a "mistake"?
No, the keys did not mistakenly fall into his hand, mistakenly start the ignition nor did he mistakenly consume alcohol.
If you drink, you cannot accurately judge your ability to do complex things, if you drink and cant recognise or stop yourself this you need to stop drinking.
That said, they get the same result whatever market share Linux gets. The reason they must run on Linux is not because everybody will sudenly switch, it is because they can use it to threaten Microsoft in the case MS extends their PC monopoly into the game distribution market.
Not really,
MS cant do that, they've already tried with Games For Windows Live and that failed miserably. MS cant stop the Steam Juggernaut.
What Valve is afraid of is Microsoft screwing up Windows so much that Windows stops being a viable gaming platform and if MS continues down the path it started on with Windows 8 they will do that. This is not an attempt to blackmail MS, rather it's a direct reaction to the awfulness of Windows 8. Also, Mac was never a viable gaming platform and OS X is going to be depreciated over the next few versions into IOS.
Also, DRM is useless to delay piracy for the first month of game release.
There, fixed that for you.
There is yet to be a release day DRM system that lasts a few days, let alone a month. Bioshock, Assassins Creed, all those bollocks online only systems were broken within days if not before release day.
Most current triple A games flop or barely make even
This is because of the way most Triple A games are designed. 1/3 of the budget goes on marketing, not to mention that console games in general don't make money as they have to pay a per disk fee as well as extra fees to push patches out via Xbox Live or PSN. The PC version is more profitable per unit, the problem is they do everything to prevent people from buying the game on PC.
"Triple A games" are build on a fundamentally flawed system that will fall over in the near future. Too much is spent on marketing and costs that add nothing to the game itself, like DRM.
I'm generally fine with the DRM encountered with Steam. Only issue has been the Steam client frequently crashing on quit, which in the past meant it won't allow offline mode when I relaunch it. That's been a pain when I'm travelling and would fancy a quick bout of zombie hunting before my battery dies, and have no Internet access.
Overall the balance between usability and DRM has been pretty good.
The DRM in Steam is acceptable because it doesn't work.
The DRM in Steam is like security guard checking ID at the front door whilst the back door is unlocked and wide open. All the games that aren't Vavle produced games have their executables in %steam dir%\apps\common\ (from memory). These.exe's can be run without Steam even running. There was a time where steam was so crashy that I'd just set it not to run on startup and had just created shortcuts to the EXE's themselves.
Nope, up here in Canada, gas is still sold in cents/litre. But when they get rid of the penny, they'll round the total. Watch as millions of Canadians pump just the right amount of gas into their tank so that the price is always rounded down.
In Australia it's sold the same way but you still find fuel priced at all prices, not just multiples of 5 cents. We even use the thrid decimal point (1/10 of a cent).
But because pumps read out dollar amounts as well as volume in litres you can still put in $20.00 worth of petrol when the unit price is $1.245.
There was a popular conspiracy theory in Australia that said if you put in an extra 2 cents (as in $20.02) you get a free tank of fuel every year. That's pretty much bollocks. Assume petrol is A$1.25 per litre, you have an average 50L tank and you buy petrol every week. So 0.02 goes into $1.25 62 = times. Then 1.25 goes into 50 = 62.2 times. So 62 x 62.5 is 3875, 52 weeks in a year so that's a whole tank of fuel every 74.5 years.
The really ironic thing about this is the only people who still do it, don't pay cash. They use their card where the 0.02 doesn't get rounded down (rounding was only ever with cash payments, EFT always charged the exact amount).
Large stores will get a non taxable "profit" from raising to the nearest nickel, small ones probably will get some loss from raising to the lowest nickel.
How so? The entire transaction is rounded up or down, to the nearest nickel. If you buy more than one item, that screws the 1 or 2 cent price fixing scheme.
Exactly, You have a can of cola priced at $0.43 at Bigmart and $0.47 at Smallway, A customer buying 2 pays $0.95 (rounded down by 1 cent) at Bigmart and 1.05 (rounded up by 1 cent) at Smallway. Anyone with half a brain knows how to get around pricing like this using odd and even volumes. In Australia, stores saw this immediately and just started pricing almost everything at $0.05 intervals (so "Only $0.99" became "Only $0.95").
2. Worn? You're talking about a steel disc. Pennies don't wear out, they get considered worthless and tossed in jars (or worse, the trash) and more need to be made to maintain its availability for circulation.
How many have gone up vacuum cleaners?
This is clearly an attempt to forestall the inevitable robot revolution which is being funded by 1 and 2 cent pieces sucked up by Roombas.
Invoices that you had to dial in to an online service to receive
Invoices with EBCIDIC encoding
Invoices sent as MS Word formatted files
Fly-by-night startup of the month's proprietary invoice system, that places contextual ads in your invoices
So really, be glad that the worst of your problems is that one company uses PDF, another encrypts the PDF, another encrypts the email, and another makes you go to a website on the Internet. We could live in a much worse world.
I say we should create a new invoice standards, lets say a.IVN to unify all of these standards.
Tell that to AMD. They have been trying to outsource CPU manufacturing for years and they kept failing along the way. First AMD wanted to outsource to Chartered which was supposedly using the same manufacturing process (developed jointly by IBM, AMD, Samsung, Chartered) but it turned out they couldn't just trivially port their design over. Then they considered switching to TSMC. Another fail. They also considered switching GPU manufacturing from TSMC to GlobalFoundries after purchasing ATI. Yet another fail. The more low level optimizations the chip has the harder it is to port it. You don't just hit a compile button and then the thing magically works. Each manufacturing process has its own little details you have to work around in order for the design to be manufactureable and hit the right performance and power consumption targets.
But Apple doesn't make their own GPU or CPU, they buy off the shelf CPU's and GPU's and combine them into their own SOC. So it's someone else's CPU design (someone like Qualcom, TI or Samsung who design ARM chips). Intrinsity who Apple bought to get the first A4 SOC was based on a Samsung design using a Samsung core (Hummingbird).
So Apple are going to buy chips from other sources, then assemble them into their own SOC. It's completely different to someone like Samsung or Qualcom who design their own CPU's and their own SOC's.
This is slightly different. The same chip is being produced (it's Samsung's design), it's just a different manufacturer.
Fixed that for you. The Ax series chips were not designed by Apple, they were designed by Intrinsity in collaboration with Samsung based on their Hummingbird chip. Intrinsity was acquired by Apple after the design was completed.
Copyright infringement is walking into a fancy department store, making a clone of anything you want and walking out with the cloned object leaving the original untouched.
And if everyone cloned the original rather than buying it, the creator would make no money from their work, which would be the same result as if someone had simply stolen all the originals.
This is why copyright infringement is similar to, but not identical with theft.
Wrong.
According to your theory, I could be making $50 an hour now, but for every hour I'm not making that money I'm being robbed of $50. Is this correct?
Of course it isn't because I don't have an intrinsic right to receive money. Copyright is an artificial construct, it is not an intrinsic right to make money.
Aslo, and I hate repeating myself copyright does not protect a physical product, ergo it cannot be stolen and equated to theft.
In an environment where flawless cloning is cheap and readily available the idea of scarcity does not exist. Economies based on scarcity do not work here, when you can make infinite flawless copies of something the value of that object approaches zero. This is why copyright has failed in the digital age.
Finally, you mentioned the creator. You should know that out of the $1 you spend on the "works" the artist sees about $0.05. So you're not the one robbing them, the "rights holders" (I.E. record companies) are. Technically they're robbing both the customer and the artist. If you want to support an artist (I wont call them creators) go to their concerts, exhibitions et al. Hell, writers get more money from making appearances, talks and seminars then from their books (I know this as a published author).
I compare it to a gaming rig at the time of it's release.
In November 2007 I could have built a Athlon X2 (brisbane) or Core 2 Duo (Conroe) machine with a Geforce 8800. In fact I did have a Athlon X2 (Brisbane) rig with a Geforce 8800, 2 GB of RAM and a 320GB 7200 RPM HDD, in 2008 I upgraded to 4 GB RAM.
So in November 2007, the PS3 was not equal to the PC of the day, let alone to a PC of modern times (i7, Geforece 6 series, 16 and 32 GB RAM systems, SSD's). No need to compare it to SLI systems, it was quite inferior to single GPU systems.
And both the PS3 and Xbox 360 are real old next to to days pc's.
What do you mean "todays PC"?
They were real old compared to PC's on their release day.
They didn't have the CPU power, maybe, but they had competitive graphics, unlike the PS2 and the Xbox.
Might want to check that one.
The PS3 had a Geforce 7800 based GPU, the 7000 series went from 2005 to 2006. By the release of the PS3 2006 the Geforce 8000 series was out. The PS3's "Reality Synthesiser" chip was based on the earliest model of the 7000 series the G70 (NV47) chip. Its the same with the Xbox360's Xenos GPU.
As well as weak CPU and GPU power, the consoles had a serious dearth of RAM. Thats why PC games that get consolised need to have their levels cut up into pieces (DX:IW is a good example).
"Think of it as being able to walk into a fancy department store, steal anything you want, and never get caught"
Thye figure if they keep using this analogy long enough, they will just hammer it intos
downloading a "pirate app" is not the same as stealing something from a department store.
Its the same as instead of buying something from a knockoff store, buying a rip off from china town.
Still a terrible analogy. This implies a transaction of physical goods.
Copyright infringement is walking into a fancy department store, making a clone of anything you want and walking out with the cloned object leaving the original untouched.
In Australia we pay about US$5.50 to US$6.00 a gallon. A$1.30 per litre (cheap petrol) is about $3.40 for a US gallon.
How do you get $3.40/US gal?
3.78L/US gal * AU$1.30 * 1.04 (exchange rate) = US$5.10
Whoops,
I had the conversion backwards, 0.26 gallons in a litre == 3.78 litres in a gallon.
In my defence, it's first thing in the morning after New Years.
Civ is very different and does quite a few "traditional gaming elements". You can win a game of Civ. You can be beaten in a game of Civ. You can be removed from the game before the game is over, you can win the game but not beat your high score etc. etc.
All of that doesn't apply to either SC or TT. In those games, you simply build until you don't feel like building anymore.
Mein Gott in Himmel,
Kids these days. I should cane you until you start to remember the good old days. You could never win a game of Asteroids or Tetris, you kept going until the game beat you and made you it's bitch (yes Romero, Tetris beat you at that too). It beat you, it beat you and you liked it so much you immediately started again.
Farmville et al. are games, just like Civ or Tetris, they just aren't very good games but mediocrity seems to be the yard stick that the gaming industry measures itself with these days. COD, Halo, even the latest Civ game is a testament to making a game as simple as possible in an attempt to pander to people incapable of breathing through their nose. COD coddles gamers with regenerating health and near infinite ammo, basically holding their hands and saying, there, there, you cant screw up no matter how bad you are, just sit in cover for a second and everything will be just fine and even though you're a useless failure here's a medal for trying.
Sure. Maybe you should include the Taoists, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains. Unless you only mean Abrahamic religions, in which case you should say so and not ALL.
Buddhism isn't as rosy as people make it out to be. Much like Hinduism, Buddhism has been used to enforce caste systems and lower the status of women. Even today women are considered to be less clean because they are objects of desire (often monks wont talk to women, most will refuse to directly take an object from a woman, the woman will need to place the object in a cloth and pass it to the monk).
Most religions on their own, including Islam, Judaism and Christianity are not bad. It's people misusing these religions for their own aim. Look at the Islamic state of Iran, it's not Islam that is doing evil, it's the leaders of Iran, Islam is a convenient excuse and tool for oppressing the people. Same with paedophile priests, Christianity isn't forcing them to have sex with little boys, but it sure does make a convenient excuse after the fact.
Religion in general has two problems, it's used by people in power to restrict thinking (Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism do this very well, they just preach that people do it in a non-violent way) and make people more pliable and secondly, people who believe in religion too deeply, unwilling to question the religion or their actions in the name of religion.
In Australia we pay about US$5.50 to US$6.00 a gallon. A$1.30 per litre (cheap petrol) is about $3.40 for a US gallon.
The excise on petrol is about A$0.40 per litre and that pays for roads, the US has to pay for roads via taxation. Personally I'd rather have the consumption tax as it punishes the heaviest users (I.E. the bogans in V8 utes that get around 18L/100 KM). Also like everything else, fuel is subject to 10% GST.
Still cheaper than my country (Colombia) We extract oil in our land, and yet we have quite high prices. On average ~4.65 US for low octane fuel (81 ~ 84!!!) and the high octane fuel (which is really a joke by international standards) is ~5.50 US for 87~90 in octane scale
Do you mean RON (Research Octane Number) or AKI (Anti-Knock Index)... Because most cars are designed to run on 91 RON. Most performance cars run 95 RON.
RON is used in most of the world to grade fuel with RON 91 being standard, RON 95 is premium and RON 98 is super (RON 94 and RON 100 are used by some countries). AKI is used in North America.
The answer to making PC games better isn't to make them MORE like a consoles.
It's to make them LESS like consoles.
This.
Toyota wont sell as many 86's as they will sell Camry's. So should Toyota stop selling the FT-86 then?
The answer is no because there are a lot of people who would prefer an 86 over a Camry and are willing to pay the premium cost for the 86 because the 86 is a better performer, faster, more manoeuvrable and lighter.
It's the same with the glorious bronze-fingered PC Gaming master race, we want a better gaming experience than consoles provide. Much like sports car owners we're willing to pay the extra for the superior experience. Consoles will always sell more because they are generic, low powered devices designed for the masses (much like a Camry) but the cutting edge and better games will always be on the PC (much like the FT-86).
Linux isn't a gaming platform because it's not shoved down everyone throats despite it's flaws.
Windows isn't any bed of roses either. The article should have made that much obvious. You wouldn't even have this opportunity to troll if someone didn't think Windows gaming is a mess.
This,
People don't whinge when the wireless on Windows or the PlayBox 330 doesn't work. They get a free pass because they have a shitload of marketing that makes feel people self conscious when criticising them.
Personally I have less wireless problems on Linux (Linux Mint) than I do on Windows 7. Not that I have a lot of wireless problems with Win7, it just goes to show that Linux is a lot more stable than the old trolls would like you to think.
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Somehow ordering "a half litre" doesn't role off the tongue that way "pint" does. Ditto for cup of coffee. I just can't see myself saying, "I'm just not awake until I've had my first 250 ml of coffee in the morning."
Cheers,
Dave
Colloquial names have not disappeared in countries that use the metric system. 250ml is a cup, 500ml is a pint (so is 450ml, 560ml and 600ml, depending on where you live).
However performing calculations is a lot easier. I know how to divide a Kilogram into 10,8,6,4 or 2 pieces easily. I know a litre is 1000 Cubic Centimetres (CC). It's easy to tell how many 3x3 millimetre pieces I can get out of 1 x 1 meter sheet of metal with a 1mm divide between each piece.
Colloquial names are good for conversation, a cup, a teaspoon, a pint, pot, pony or middy as they are easily recognised amounts but they are still arbitrary. When it comes to actually doing anything with numbers dealing with millimetres and kilometres is easier than inches and miles as metric is computationally convenient.
0 C - point at which water freezes, 100 C - point at which water boils.
Yep, totally arbitrary. Lets not even start with Kelvin.
By "a bit" you mean an imperial shitload (2.4358 Metric fucktons) easier. I know there is 1000 millimetres in a metre, 1000 millilitres in a litre, 1000 milligrams in a gram. Same with centi, deci, kilo, mega and so forth. How many furlongs are there in a mile, inches in a furlong? How do we start dealing with tiny fractions of an inch or many hundreds of thousands of miles?
It's also a lot easier to convert between different measurements in metric. 1 millilitre is 1 cubic centimetre (CC) of water (1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm), 1 litre is 1000 CC's.
You know it's wrong.
What if they don't think it's wrong?
That doesn't matter.
This is why we have laws, so that idiots who don't think DUI is wrong can be expressly told it is.
What if they overestimated their ability to drive while under the influence? Would that not be classified as a "mistake"?
No, the keys did not mistakenly fall into his hand, mistakenly start the ignition nor did he mistakenly consume alcohol.
If you drink, you cannot accurately judge your ability to do complex things, if you drink and cant recognise or stop yourself this you need to stop drinking.
Not really,
MS cant do that, they've already tried with Games For Windows Live and that failed miserably. MS cant stop the Steam Juggernaut.
What Valve is afraid of is Microsoft screwing up Windows so much that Windows stops being a viable gaming platform and if MS continues down the path it started on with Windows 8 they will do that. This is not an attempt to blackmail MS, rather it's a direct reaction to the awfulness of Windows 8. Also, Mac was never a viable gaming platform and OS X is going to be depreciated over the next few versions into IOS.
There, fixed that for you.
There is yet to be a release day DRM system that lasts a few days, let alone a month. Bioshock, Assassins Creed, all those bollocks online only systems were broken within days if not before release day.
This is because of the way most Triple A games are designed. 1/3 of the budget goes on marketing, not to mention that console games in general don't make money as they have to pay a per disk fee as well as extra fees to push patches out via Xbox Live or PSN. The PC version is more profitable per unit, the problem is they do everything to prevent people from buying the game on PC.
"Triple A games" are build on a fundamentally flawed system that will fall over in the near future. Too much is spent on marketing and costs that add nothing to the game itself, like DRM.
I'm generally fine with the DRM encountered with Steam. Only issue has been the Steam client frequently crashing on quit, which in the past meant it won't allow offline mode when I relaunch it. That's been a pain when I'm travelling and would fancy a quick bout of zombie hunting before my battery dies, and have no Internet access.
Overall the balance between usability and DRM has been pretty good.
The DRM in Steam is acceptable because it doesn't work.
.exe's can be run without Steam even running. There was a time where steam was so crashy that I'd just set it not to run on startup and had just created shortcuts to the EXE's themselves.
The DRM in Steam is like security guard checking ID at the front door whilst the back door is unlocked and wide open. All the games that aren't Vavle produced games have their executables in %steam dir%\apps\common\ (from memory). These
Nope, up here in Canada, gas is still sold in cents/litre. But when they get rid of the penny, they'll round the total. Watch as millions of Canadians pump just the right amount of gas into their tank so that the price is always rounded down.
In Australia it's sold the same way but you still find fuel priced at all prices, not just multiples of 5 cents. We even use the thrid decimal point (1/10 of a cent).
But because pumps read out dollar amounts as well as volume in litres you can still put in $20.00 worth of petrol when the unit price is $1.245.
There was a popular conspiracy theory in Australia that said if you put in an extra 2 cents (as in $20.02) you get a free tank of fuel every year. That's pretty much bollocks. Assume petrol is A$1.25 per litre, you have an average 50L tank and you buy petrol every week. So 0.02 goes into $1.25 62 = times. Then 1.25 goes into 50 = 62.2 times. So 62 x 62.5 is 3875, 52 weeks in a year so that's a whole tank of fuel every 74.5 years.
The really ironic thing about this is the only people who still do it, don't pay cash. They use their card where the 0.02 doesn't get rounded down (rounding was only ever with cash payments, EFT always charged the exact amount).
Large stores will get a non taxable "profit" from raising to the nearest nickel, small ones probably will get some loss from raising to the lowest nickel.
How so? The entire transaction is rounded up or down, to the nearest nickel. If you buy more than one item, that screws the 1 or 2 cent price fixing scheme.
Exactly, You have a can of cola priced at $0.43 at Bigmart and $0.47 at Smallway, A customer buying 2 pays $0.95 (rounded down by 1 cent) at Bigmart and 1.05 (rounded up by 1 cent) at Smallway. Anyone with half a brain knows how to get around pricing like this using odd and even volumes. In Australia, stores saw this immediately and just started pricing almost everything at $0.05 intervals (so "Only $0.99" became "Only $0.95").
2. Worn? You're talking about a steel disc. Pennies don't wear out, they get considered worthless and tossed in jars (or worse, the trash) and more need to be made to maintain its availability for circulation.
How many have gone up vacuum cleaners?
This is clearly an attempt to forestall the inevitable robot revolution which is being funded by 1 and 2 cent pieces sucked up by Roombas.
1.03 this morning but I will assume you rounded to the nearest .05 as you Don't have Pennies.
Australia has never had pennies.
They were always called the 1 or 2 cent piece.
BTW, it's back to 1.04.
Can we all just standardize and get along?
You mentioned the relevant standards already:
Imagine a world where instead, you dealt with:
So really, be glad that the worst of your problems is that one company uses PDF, another encrypts the PDF, another encrypts the email, and another makes you go to a website on the Internet. We could live in a much worse world.
I say we should create a new invoice standards, lets say a .IVN to unify all of these standards.
Tell that to AMD. They have been trying to outsource CPU manufacturing for years and they kept failing along the way. First AMD wanted to outsource to Chartered which was supposedly using the same manufacturing process (developed jointly by IBM, AMD, Samsung, Chartered) but it turned out they couldn't just trivially port their design over. Then they considered switching to TSMC. Another fail. They also considered switching GPU manufacturing from TSMC to GlobalFoundries after purchasing ATI. Yet another fail. The more low level optimizations the chip has the harder it is to port it. You don't just hit a compile button and then the thing magically works. Each manufacturing process has its own little details you have to work around in order for the design to be manufactureable and hit the right performance and power consumption targets.
But Apple doesn't make their own GPU or CPU, they buy off the shelf CPU's and GPU's and combine them into their own SOC. So it's someone else's CPU design (someone like Qualcom, TI or Samsung who design ARM chips). Intrinsity who Apple bought to get the first A4 SOC was based on a Samsung design using a Samsung core (Hummingbird). So Apple are going to buy chips from other sources, then assemble them into their own SOC. It's completely different to someone like Samsung or Qualcom who design their own CPU's and their own SOC's.
This is slightly different. The same chip is being produced (it's Samsung's design), it's just a different manufacturer.
Fixed that for you. The Ax series chips were not designed by Apple, they were designed by Intrinsity in collaboration with Samsung based on their Hummingbird chip. Intrinsity was acquired by Apple after the design was completed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A4#Design
Copyright infringement is walking into a fancy department store, making a clone of anything you want and walking out with the cloned object leaving the original untouched.
And if everyone cloned the original rather than buying it, the creator would make no money from their work, which would be the same result as if someone had simply stolen all the originals.
This is why copyright infringement is similar to, but not identical with theft.
Wrong.
According to your theory, I could be making $50 an hour now, but for every hour I'm not making that money I'm being robbed of $50. Is this correct?
Of course it isn't because I don't have an intrinsic right to receive money. Copyright is an artificial construct, it is not an intrinsic right to make money.
Aslo, and I hate repeating myself copyright does not protect a physical product, ergo it cannot be stolen and equated to theft.
In an environment where flawless cloning is cheap and readily available the idea of scarcity does not exist. Economies based on scarcity do not work here, when you can make infinite flawless copies of something the value of that object approaches zero. This is why copyright has failed in the digital age.
Finally, you mentioned the creator. You should know that out of the $1 you spend on the "works" the artist sees about $0.05. So you're not the one robbing them, the "rights holders" (I.E. record companies) are. Technically they're robbing both the customer and the artist. If you want to support an artist (I wont call them creators) go to their concerts, exhibitions et al. Hell, writers get more money from making appearances, talks and seminars then from their books (I know this as a published author).
Depends on what kind of PC.
I compare it to a gaming rig at the time of it's release.
In November 2007 I could have built a Athlon X2 (brisbane) or Core 2 Duo (Conroe) machine with a Geforce 8800. In fact I did have a Athlon X2 (Brisbane) rig with a Geforce 8800, 2 GB of RAM and a 320GB 7200 RPM HDD, in 2008 I upgraded to 4 GB RAM.
So in November 2007, the PS3 was not equal to the PC of the day, let alone to a PC of modern times (i7, Geforece 6 series, 16 and 32 GB RAM systems, SSD's). No need to compare it to SLI systems, it was quite inferior to single GPU systems.
And both the PS3 and Xbox 360 are real old next to to days pc's.
What do you mean "todays PC"?
They were real old compared to PC's on their release day.
They didn't have the CPU power, maybe, but they had competitive graphics, unlike the PS2 and the Xbox.
Might want to check that one.
The PS3 had a Geforce 7800 based GPU, the 7000 series went from 2005 to 2006. By the release of the PS3 2006 the Geforce 8000 series was out. The PS3's "Reality Synthesiser" chip was based on the earliest model of the 7000 series the G70 (NV47) chip. Its the same with the Xbox360's Xenos GPU.
As well as weak CPU and GPU power, the consoles had a serious dearth of RAM. Thats why PC games that get consolised need to have their levels cut up into pieces (DX:IW is a good example).
And both the PS3 and Xbox 360 are real old next to to days pc's.
What do you mean "todays PC"?
They were real old compared to PC's on their release day.
"Think of it as being able to walk into a fancy department store, steal anything you want, and never get caught"
Thye figure if they keep using this analogy long enough, they will just hammer it intos
downloading a "pirate app" is not the same as stealing something from a department store.
Its the same as instead of buying something from a knockoff store, buying a rip off from china town.
Still a terrible analogy. This implies a transaction of physical goods.
Copyright infringement is walking into a fancy department store, making a clone of anything you want and walking out with the cloned object leaving the original untouched.
In Australia we pay about US$5.50 to US$6.00 a gallon. A$1.30 per litre (cheap petrol) is about $3.40 for a US gallon.
How do you get $3.40/US gal? 3.78L/US gal * AU$1.30 * 1.04 (exchange rate) = US$5.10
Whoops, I had the conversion backwards, 0.26 gallons in a litre == 3.78 litres in a gallon. In my defence, it's first thing in the morning after New Years.
Civ is very different and does quite a few "traditional gaming elements". You can win a game of Civ. You can be beaten in a game of Civ. You can be removed from the game before the game is over, you can win the game but not beat your high score etc. etc.
All of that doesn't apply to either SC or TT. In those games, you simply build until you don't feel like building anymore.
Mein Gott in Himmel,
Kids these days. I should cane you until you start to remember the good old days. You could never win a game of Asteroids or Tetris, you kept going until the game beat you and made you it's bitch (yes Romero, Tetris beat you at that too). It beat you, it beat you and you liked it so much you immediately started again.
Farmville et al. are games, just like Civ or Tetris, they just aren't very good games but mediocrity seems to be the yard stick that the gaming industry measures itself with these days. COD, Halo, even the latest Civ game is a testament to making a game as simple as possible in an attempt to pander to people incapable of breathing through their nose. COD coddles gamers with regenerating health and near infinite ammo, basically holding their hands and saying, there, there, you cant screw up no matter how bad you are, just sit in cover for a second and everything will be just fine and even though you're a useless failure here's a medal for trying.
lawn... vacate... damn kids.
Sure. Maybe you should include the Taoists, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains. Unless you only mean Abrahamic religions, in which case you should say so and not ALL.
Buddhism isn't as rosy as people make it out to be. Much like Hinduism, Buddhism has been used to enforce caste systems and lower the status of women. Even today women are considered to be less clean because they are objects of desire (often monks wont talk to women, most will refuse to directly take an object from a woman, the woman will need to place the object in a cloth and pass it to the monk). Most religions on their own, including Islam, Judaism and Christianity are not bad. It's people misusing these religions for their own aim. Look at the Islamic state of Iran, it's not Islam that is doing evil, it's the leaders of Iran, Islam is a convenient excuse and tool for oppressing the people. Same with paedophile priests, Christianity isn't forcing them to have sex with little boys, but it sure does make a convenient excuse after the fact.
Religion in general has two problems, it's used by people in power to restrict thinking (Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism do this very well, they just preach that people do it in a non-violent way) and make people more pliable and secondly, people who believe in religion too deeply, unwilling to question the religion or their actions in the name of religion.
...in Australia.
In Australia we pay about US$5.50 to US$6.00 a gallon. A$1.30 per litre (cheap petrol) is about $3.40 for a US gallon.
The excise on petrol is about A$0.40 per litre and that pays for roads, the US has to pay for roads via taxation. Personally I'd rather have the consumption tax as it punishes the heaviest users (I.E. the bogans in V8 utes that get around 18L/100 KM). Also like everything else, fuel is subject to 10% GST.
Still cheaper than my country (Colombia) We extract oil in our land, and yet we have quite high prices. On average ~4.65 US for low octane fuel (81 ~ 84!!!) and the high octane fuel (which is really a joke by international standards) is ~5.50 US for 87~90 in octane scale
Do you mean RON (Research Octane Number) or AKI (Anti-Knock Index)... Because most cars are designed to run on 91 RON. Most performance cars run 95 RON.
RON is used in most of the world to grade fuel with RON 91 being standard, RON 95 is premium and RON 98 is super (RON 94 and RON 100 are used by some countries). AKI is used in North America.
It's that simple.
The answer to making PC games better isn't to make them MORE like a consoles.
It's to make them LESS like consoles.
This.
Toyota wont sell as many 86's as they will sell Camry's. So should Toyota stop selling the FT-86 then?
The answer is no because there are a lot of people who would prefer an 86 over a Camry and are willing to pay the premium cost for the 86 because the 86 is a better performer, faster, more manoeuvrable and lighter.
It's the same with the glorious bronze-fingered PC Gaming master race, we want a better gaming experience than consoles provide. Much like sports car owners we're willing to pay the extra for the superior experience. Consoles will always sell more because they are generic, low powered devices designed for the masses (much like a Camry) but the cutting edge and better games will always be on the PC (much like the FT-86).
Linux isn't a gaming platform because it's not shoved down everyone throats despite it's flaws.
Windows isn't any bed of roses either. The article should have made that much obvious. You wouldn't even have this opportunity to troll if someone didn't think Windows gaming is a mess.
This, People don't whinge when the wireless on Windows or the PlayBox 330 doesn't work. They get a free pass because they have a shitload of marketing that makes feel people self conscious when criticising them.
Personally I have less wireless problems on Linux (Linux Mint) than I do on Windows 7. Not that I have a lot of wireless problems with Win7, it just goes to show that Linux is a lot more stable than the old trolls would like you to think.