I'll throw that right back at you. I have a Dell (yes a DELL) laptop running that is about the same age as your G3. It can still to this day perform every function it was purchased for in 1999.
Here is the problem though. Why should I trust a signed certificate? If I go to a website and am prompted by an un-signed certificate, I need to determine if I trust that that web site.
If I go to a web site and their certificate is signed so no prompt but I have just blindly put my trust in the web site and in the nameless CA.
Personally, I don't trust the CA's any more than I trust some random website.
Actually, just about everybody involved is a dime a dozen. The people that are probably the best paid and worth being paid that are the people who pull all that talent together to make something great.
Well, one could point out that many of these people are direct employees of the company and were paid.
However, what if some of the artwork was contracted out. To me, creative talent is creative talent, be it a modeler, texture artist, musician or voice actor. Should all the other contracted artists be paid royalties?
Lets say for example Rockstar contracted out to an artist to create all the Cars. Should that individual be paid royalties? I say no.
I agree that the Human performances go a long way towards driving the success of the game. But it's the game as a whole that sells, not a piece of it. I don't wish to downplay Michael Hollick's performance, I think he did a wonderful job. Had Rockstar done all the voice acting in house by people with no formal voice acting training the game may very well have suffered. But no more than if other aspects of the game not been up to snuff.
I have to disagree with you on the duct tape mods. I actually thought they provided an improved experience. Now I don't mean a flood light, but the same power the default flashlight had.
The reason is, it isn't scary being killed by some creature you can't see. But if you see glimps of it in the beam of your light, it's much more interesting. Seeing the creature, then switching to your gun and all the sudden not being able to see it took a lot of the 'fear' out of it.
Nope. Doom 3 was in my opinion an excellent game. Many paint it as a glorified tech demo but it did a good job for what it was. Not too much plot to get in the way of the action. And I think it settled well with the original Doom story.
But then again, I made a decision before it came out to ignore the hype. All of it. I judged the game on it's own merits, not some gushing reviewer who was either a gushing fanboy or a cynical grouch who would come with witty remarks bashing a game to make themselves feel cool.
This is beyond brain dead. It is complete stupidity. I'm really not interested in Spore, but I'm very disappointed in the turn Bioware has taken.I bought Mass Effect on the Xbox 360 but I very nearly didn't as shortly before the release of the game EA bought up Bioware.
The forums over at Bioware erupted with negative responses. With this new turn of events, the same thing has happened. I don't know if Bioware has any say in the matter or not but such this is killing their core audience from what I can tell. The pre-EA Mass Effect may very well have been the last Bioware game I'll ever purchase. I had a bit of hope that EA was changing it's tune a bit with developers and customers but I guess I was wrong.
That's OK though. There are a number of game studios who don't treat all of there customers as criminals.
Indeed. I like Blizzard (though I frequently curse their existence for doing stupid shit) and I really dislike cheaters in WOW. This is however something Bliz needs to lose. This is a cold dark path they are taking.
Hopefully people will start to become aware of this issue more. I've read similar stories where people show up dressed as IT staff and just walk off with servers and witnesses simply assumed they were legit and just doing maintenance.
Interesting. I wonder if MADD played the game. If you can't control your vehicle you risk hitting pedestrians and killing them. You risk personal harm as well. There are consequences though they are admittedly minor.
Now I don't know if there is any point in the game where you are required to drive drunk. However I've been presented with the choice of doing so. Last night I was playing and the characters 'girlfriend' called up wanting to hang out. I took her to a bar. Afterwards it was apparent that the character had a bit too much to drink. The game simulated this in a sorta convincing manner with him staggering around and babbling a little. I decided I didn't want to get my characters date sent to the hospital so I called a cab and got her home safely.
One of the things I love about GTA4 is some of the choices present. Now I didn't know that my toon would have a few too many at the bar. But the fact that I was able to make the decision to not drive drunk and take a cab pretty much throws any argument MADD has out the window.
Further, how does the action of drunk driving make this an Adult Only game? Are they somehow suggesting that driving drunk is an Adult activity? I sure that's not their intent but that's what the idea that the game should be rated AO suggests.
"What's required to fix it is a wholesale change in CPU architecture along with mandatory licencing and regulation for anyone who wants to program anything in any language and sell it. (If you put up a dividing wall in your house, you can get the supplies at Home Depot and DIY. If you want to sell a wall-building service to the public, you have to be licenced.)
Only once we take programming as seriously as we take bridge construction and land surveying will we start to see safer computing."
Such suggestions are worse than the problem. Suggesting that people should need a licence to program and comparing it to bridge builders and surveyors is like suggesting people should have to get a licence to walk, just like they need a licence to drive a car.
Sometimes I think that too, but then I look at some of the more graphic intensive games and some of the most financially successful games and come to the conclusion that few programmers deliberately hobble their games just to push the hardware venders sales.
Let's take for example Doom3 and John Carmack. Listen to the guy talk about game engines sometimes. Peformance is king. And while when it hit the market the machine I played it with was fairly mid range but performed very well at high resolutions at close to the highest detail settings.
Same thing goes for Half-Life2. Except HL2 scaled even better with older hardware (playing doom3 without shaders and shadows ruins it).
Or lets take a loook at World of Warcraft. It does not have a technologically advanced engine. Though it still looks fairly nice. A tribute to the artists. There are performance problems but these are constant across a range of hardware, from low to high end. Buying the latest greatest won't help you a lot here.
No the issue is chosen technology and how its quality scales with hardware and where the majority of the market is with their hardware. Lets use Never Winter nights one and two. The first one ran very well on most machines. It really didn't have a lot of fancy graphics and what little it did have could be shut off to increase performance without a tremendous reduction in quality.
Now take Never Winter Nights 2. Take that same hardware and to make the game run remotely well, you have to turn the graphics down so the graphics are worse than the original games. The graphics didn't scale well. And again, the people with high end machines were not enjoying much of a speed benefit over those with lower end systems.
Game Developers are going to pick a target of acceptable play ability and work to hit that target. They want things to scale well so more people will play and enjoy their game. It's just time they miss the target and the people with the slower systems are out of luck.
I haven't found Vista to be particularly sluggish with just two gigs of memory. The sales clerks were handing you a line. The thing that disgusts me is the file copy speed. What's especially bad is the included zip utility. This is with SP1. It got better, but not by much. I don't think more ram is going to fix any of the issues Vista has. I'm curios how XP would run on that machine. I'm guessing for just email and such, I wouldn't notice the difference.
Now I also have Xubuntu (8.04 beta) on the machine. The general responsiveness of the system is a bit higher. I suggest waiting for the release version of 8.04 (using the desktop of your preference) and installing using the wubi installer so you don't muck any partitioning up. That way you can give your step dad a taste of linux and if he doesn't like it, you've lost nothing but a little time.
This is quite true. I have a PC and Xbox 360 and one game I have on both is Oblivion. I prefer Oblivion on the Xbox as I get a much better frame rate. However the PC version has far better graphics. I've also played the demo of Episode 2 for Half Life2 on the Xbox and have the full game on the PC. Again, the PC has much better graphics though to keep the frame rate above 30 I have to drop the detail settings down substantially.
Now speaking of frame rate, having played a good number of games on the 360, I've noticed that a good number of them have some real speed issues in many situations. Though these typically have been 'older' games and I think newer ones have managed to be much better optimized for the 360 and get higher frame rates at the same time as having better graphics as the older games. An example of this would be Gears of War or Oblivion compared to Assassins Creed or Bioshock. That's sort of typical as developers learn to squeeze more performance out of a particular console.
PC games tend to suffer from a lack of optimization and developers depend on the latest greatest hardware. It's really a bummer when a new game looks worse than an old one because you have to turn the detail down and play at a lower resolution whereas with the older game, you do not. For example, Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2.
For my part the buying into the console gaming scene has been a really good idea. I'm kinda disappointed with Computer Gaming as of late. The problem being game performance. The problem is similar to the transition from 2D gaming to 3D gaming. 3D games were really great but honestly had substantially less detail than many of their 2D brethren. We honestly ended up with games that looked and performed worse for a number of years. But as we have finally moved beyond that problem, we are suffering the same issue all over again as more and more games really up the ante on graphical quality but do not scale well on older hardware with regards to quality of graphics.
I agree with your statement but I think the disappointing Quad SLI illustrates a different point. NVIDIA is pushing the whole multi-card thing too much. They need to focus on single card solutions to provide top performance. I suppose the argument is that if what card kicks ass, through another three into the mix and you kick more ass but it all just seems to me to be a waste of energy (not talking just about power consumption).
I had the same problem. At home there are a number of wireless networks, a few of them are not secured. I'd turn my laptop on and it would automatically connect to the net. When I looked I found that I connected to my neighbours router and not my own. So now I do not allow the system to automatically connect to anything. I really don't want to connect to accidentally connect to a system I don't trust anyway.
Sorta. Much of their pirating concerns are over people who get their hands on the movies prior or during its theatre release. Then all those pirates don't drive up box office sales.
And everybody but the execs get screwed regardless.
Is there some sort of surprise here? Didn't Jobs already say that something like Skype would be locked out of using the cell network but could be used over wifi? The java thing is a bummer for those who were looking forward to that.
Re:Comics as real literature
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Reading Comics
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Don't forget In the Shadow of No Towers. Look up Art Spiegelman.
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I'll throw that right back at you. I have a Dell (yes a DELL) laptop running that is about the same age as your G3. It can still to this day perform every function it was purchased for in 1999.
Here is the problem though. Why should I trust a signed certificate? If I go to a website and am prompted by an un-signed certificate, I need to determine if I trust that that web site.
If I go to a web site and their certificate is signed so no prompt but I have just blindly put my trust in the web site and in the nameless CA.
Personally, I don't trust the CA's any more than I trust some random website.
It is the CA's who provide a false sense of security, not a website using an unsigned certificate.
Actually, just about everybody involved is a dime a dozen. The people that are probably the best paid and worth being paid that are the people who pull all that talent together to make something great.
Well, one could point out that many of these people are direct employees of the company and were paid.
However, what if some of the artwork was contracted out. To me, creative talent is creative talent, be it a modeler, texture artist, musician or voice actor. Should all the other contracted artists be paid royalties?
Lets say for example Rockstar contracted out to an artist to create all the Cars. Should that individual be paid royalties? I say no.
I agree that the Human performances go a long way towards driving the success of the game. But it's the game as a whole that sells, not a piece of it. I don't wish to downplay Michael Hollick's performance, I think he did a wonderful job. Had Rockstar done all the voice acting in house by people with no formal voice acting training the game may very well have suffered. But no more than if other aspects of the game not been up to snuff.
Get over it. If the US rampaging through the middle east was an effort to secure oil, you can bet more Americans would support the effort.
I have to disagree with you on the duct tape mods. I actually thought they provided an improved experience. Now I don't mean a flood light, but the same power the default flashlight had.
The reason is, it isn't scary being killed by some creature you can't see. But if you see glimps of it in the beam of your light, it's much more interesting. Seeing the creature, then switching to your gun and all the sudden not being able to see it took a lot of the 'fear' out of it.
Nope. Doom 3 was in my opinion an excellent game. Many paint it as a glorified tech demo but it did a good job for what it was. Not too much plot to get in the way of the action. And I think it settled well with the original Doom story.
But then again, I made a decision before it came out to ignore the hype. All of it. I judged the game on it's own merits, not some gushing reviewer who was either a gushing fanboy or a cynical grouch who would come with witty remarks bashing a game to make themselves feel cool.
This is beyond brain dead. It is complete stupidity. I'm really not interested in Spore, but I'm very disappointed in the turn Bioware has taken.I bought Mass Effect on the Xbox 360 but I very nearly didn't as shortly before the release of the game EA bought up Bioware.
The forums over at Bioware erupted with negative responses. With this new turn of events, the same thing has happened. I don't know if Bioware has any say in the matter or not but such this is killing their core audience from what I can tell. The pre-EA Mass Effect may very well have been the last Bioware game I'll ever purchase. I had a bit of hope that EA was changing it's tune a bit with developers and customers but I guess I was wrong.
That's OK though. There are a number of game studios who don't treat all of there customers as criminals.
Indeed. I like Blizzard (though I frequently curse their existence for doing stupid shit) and I really dislike cheaters in WOW. This is however something Bliz needs to lose. This is a cold dark path they are taking.
Hopefully people will start to become aware of this issue more. I've read similar stories where people show up dressed as IT staff and just walk off with servers and witnesses simply assumed they were legit and just doing maintenance.
Interesting. I wonder if MADD played the game. If you can't control your vehicle you risk hitting pedestrians and killing them. You risk personal harm as well. There are consequences though they are admittedly minor.
Now I don't know if there is any point in the game where you are required to drive drunk. However I've been presented with the choice of doing so. Last night I was playing and the characters 'girlfriend' called up wanting to hang out. I took her to a bar. Afterwards it was apparent that the character had a bit too much to drink. The game simulated this in a sorta convincing manner with him staggering around and babbling a little. I decided I didn't want to get my characters date sent to the hospital so I called a cab and got her home safely.
One of the things I love about GTA4 is some of the choices present. Now I didn't know that my toon would have a few too many at the bar. But the fact that I was able to make the decision to not drive drunk and take a cab pretty much throws any argument MADD has out the window.
Further, how does the action of drunk driving make this an Adult Only game? Are they somehow suggesting that driving drunk is an Adult activity? I sure that's not their intent but that's what the idea that the game should be rated AO suggests.
Sorry MADD. Epic fail.
Wow, you just coined a great new term. 'Free as in kidney.' I must go use this wonderful gem.
Perhaps that is the point. The RIAA lawyers are sloppy and there is no excuse for them.
You had a great post up until the end.
"What's required to fix it is a wholesale change in CPU architecture along with mandatory licencing and regulation for anyone who wants to program anything in any language and sell it. (If you put up a dividing wall in your house, you can get the supplies at Home Depot and DIY. If you want to sell a wall-building service to the public, you have to be licenced.)
Only once we take programming as seriously as we take bridge construction and land surveying will we start to see safer computing."
Such suggestions are worse than the problem. Suggesting that people should need a licence to program and comparing it to bridge builders and surveyors is like suggesting people should have to get a licence to walk, just like they need a licence to drive a car.
Sometimes I think that too, but then I look at some of the more graphic intensive games and some of the most financially successful games and come to the conclusion that few programmers deliberately hobble their games just to push the hardware venders sales.
Let's take for example Doom3 and John Carmack. Listen to the guy talk about game engines sometimes. Peformance is king. And while when it hit the market the machine I played it with was fairly mid range but performed very well at high resolutions at close to the highest detail settings.
Same thing goes for Half-Life2. Except HL2 scaled even better with older hardware (playing doom3 without shaders and shadows ruins it).
Or lets take a loook at World of Warcraft. It does not have a technologically advanced engine. Though it still looks fairly nice. A tribute to the artists. There are performance problems but these are constant across a range of hardware, from low to high end. Buying the latest greatest won't help you a lot here.
No the issue is chosen technology and how its quality scales with hardware and where the majority of the market is with their hardware. Lets use Never Winter nights one and two. The first one ran very well on most machines. It really didn't have a lot of fancy graphics and what little it did have could be shut off to increase performance without a tremendous reduction in quality.
Now take Never Winter Nights 2. Take that same hardware and to make the game run remotely well, you have to turn the graphics down so the graphics are worse than the original games. The graphics didn't scale well. And again, the people with high end machines were not enjoying much of a speed benefit over those with lower end systems.
Game Developers are going to pick a target of acceptable play ability and work to hit that target. They want things to scale well so more people will play and enjoy their game. It's just time they miss the target and the people with the slower systems are out of luck.
The Matrix reference was definitely lame. I would have preferred some sort of reference to the holodeck from Start Trek: The Next Generation.
I haven't found Vista to be particularly sluggish with just two gigs of memory. The sales clerks were handing you a line. The thing that disgusts me is the file copy speed. What's especially bad is the included zip utility. This is with SP1. It got better, but not by much. I don't think more ram is going to fix any of the issues Vista has. I'm curios how XP would run on that machine. I'm guessing for just email and such, I wouldn't notice the difference.
Now I also have Xubuntu (8.04 beta) on the machine. The general responsiveness of the system is a bit higher. I suggest waiting for the release version of 8.04 (using the desktop of your preference) and installing using the wubi installer so you don't muck any partitioning up. That way you can give your step dad a taste of linux and if he doesn't like it, you've lost nothing but a little time.
This is quite true. I have a PC and Xbox 360 and one game I have on both is Oblivion. I prefer Oblivion on the Xbox as I get a much better frame rate. However the PC version has far better graphics. I've also played the demo of Episode 2 for Half Life2 on the Xbox and have the full game on the PC. Again, the PC has much better graphics though to keep the frame rate above 30 I have to drop the detail settings down substantially. Now speaking of frame rate, having played a good number of games on the 360, I've noticed that a good number of them have some real speed issues in many situations. Though these typically have been 'older' games and I think newer ones have managed to be much better optimized for the 360 and get higher frame rates at the same time as having better graphics as the older games. An example of this would be Gears of War or Oblivion compared to Assassins Creed or Bioshock. That's sort of typical as developers learn to squeeze more performance out of a particular console. PC games tend to suffer from a lack of optimization and developers depend on the latest greatest hardware. It's really a bummer when a new game looks worse than an old one because you have to turn the detail down and play at a lower resolution whereas with the older game, you do not. For example, Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2. For my part the buying into the console gaming scene has been a really good idea. I'm kinda disappointed with Computer Gaming as of late. The problem being game performance. The problem is similar to the transition from 2D gaming to 3D gaming. 3D games were really great but honestly had substantially less detail than many of their 2D brethren. We honestly ended up with games that looked and performed worse for a number of years. But as we have finally moved beyond that problem, we are suffering the same issue all over again as more and more games really up the ante on graphical quality but do not scale well on older hardware with regards to quality of graphics.
I agree with your statement but I think the disappointing Quad SLI illustrates a different point. NVIDIA is pushing the whole multi-card thing too much. They need to focus on single card solutions to provide top performance. I suppose the argument is that if what card kicks ass, through another three into the mix and you kick more ass but it all just seems to me to be a waste of energy (not talking just about power consumption).
I had the same problem. At home there are a number of wireless networks, a few of them are not secured. I'd turn my laptop on and it would automatically connect to the net. When I looked I found that I connected to my neighbours router and not my own. So now I do not allow the system to automatically connect to anything. I really don't want to connect to accidentally connect to a system I don't trust anyway.
fogetta bout it
Sorta. Much of their pirating concerns are over people who get their hands on the movies prior or during its theatre release. Then all those pirates don't drive up box office sales.
And everybody but the execs get screwed regardless.
Is there some sort of surprise here? Didn't Jobs already say that something like Skype would be locked out of using the cell network but could be used over wifi? The java thing is a bummer for those who were looking forward to that.
Don't forget In the Shadow of No Towers. Look up Art Spiegelman.