Agreed. A few friends and I got together and got the Left 4 Dead 4-pack and having been playing the hell out of it - while an entirely separate group have pirated the game and seem incredulous that we chose to *buy* the game.
Piracy will continue to proper until we as a society start looking down on it with the same disdain we treat freeloaders.
And look at Mirror's Edge. A successful game by most measures, though not quite as successful as EA had hoped. But look at the review scores: those explain your problem.
Neither of those demos fit the bill: both Mirror's Edge and LittleBigPlanet did not give out so much content in the demos as to make the full game irrelevant.
Rather, we should look at Mirror's Edge specifically (it's the only one of the 3 named that I have played):
- Demo had incredible smooth-flowing motion, and awesome sense of immersion, is easy to pick up (but had hidden depth), and combat that added some spice without becoming overbearing.
- Full version had the same smooth-flowing motion and immersion, but now has levels where puzzles are difficult and sometimes downright obtuse. Combat becomes a huge part of the game, and honestly is simply not that well done. Level design broke up the "flow" of levels, which is what players were wanting to begin with. Add poor technical features such as clipping issues and you've got yourself a frustrating game to play.
Don't blame the demo. ME was a fine game, but the other 90% of the game that *wasn't* the demo was a sore disappointment compared to the polish demonstrated by the first level (i.e. the demo).
Laws *dont* exist to serve corperate interest... okay, okay laws *should* not exist to serve corperate interest.
No, we absolutely should cater to corporate interests on the caveat that those interests benefit the people. Creating employment is a net benefit to the people (depending on what you're giving up in exchange), and IMHO there shouldn't be opposition to lawmaking for the sake of companies simply because they are corporations. Let each proposal be judged on its own merit.
That's not "planned obsolescence" - that's just progress. Planned obsolescence is where my new TVs will refuse to play old DVDs, forcing me to buy all my content again in hi-def. Or, in a more precise example, forcing me to buy new memory cards if I want to use new cameras. Neither are true - my SD cards will work just as well in new cameras as they did in the old. The fact that storage is getting bigger has nothing to do with "planned obsolescence".
A "good company" is not the determinant for survival. Sun may be "good", but they have dwindling revenue, and their primary software products are free.
I'm glad you confirmed my theory about how the GE culture would work. The way I see it, employees would not have any idea of what type of performance they would need to give in order to remain "safe" from being axed, and this simply encourages a culture of one-upsmanship where employees scramble over each other and kiss their boss' ass relentlessly. Overtime will kick in and escalate as employees try to out-do the guy in the next cube over, until all you've got left are empty, burned-out, unhappy messes of employees.
The problem with laying off people based on reviews is that it obscures the true value of these people. Is your bottom 20 percent really that bad? Laying off the bottom 20 of a team of elite hackers seems ill-advised, and laying off the bottom 20 of a team of slackers seems to not go far enough.
If you're going to "clean house", target people with an absolute bar, and get rid of those who fail to make the cut. Using a proportional layoff like "bottom 20 percent" doesn't do much good, and only serves to overwork people and decrease morale dramatically as people scramble to out-do each other and cover their asses. Risk will become a dirty word as people stick to tried-and-true and easily-defensible actions instead of trying new innovative things.
This seems more likely. AFAIK Freescale's the guys who do low-power x86 chips, which is an idea that never really panned out. Most devices still use ARM chips, and MS probably joined the club with the 2nd and 3rd generations.
Right, which is why the exact cause of the problem was discovered within hours of the first reports. Imagine if MS was swarmed with angry Zune customers, and had to talk to Freescale to see if they could look in their code and solve it... For a lesser bug or lesser customer (smaller than MS) this could have taken ages. This way MS can also ship a fix out immediately by patching it themselves, instead of waiting for Freescale to roll out a new binary.
And an example of where closed-source binary drivers can go horribly wrong:) But really, no one can be expected to QA every single line of code that's shipped through their device (honestly, a date function fuckup?)... what this really says is the importance of proper QA at the driver-developer level.
That's only half the problem - the other half is why people (not only the police!) are so paranoid about photography, as if everyone taking pictures is suddenly scoping the place out for a terrorist attack.
It seems like we (of the Slashdot groupthink) are the minority. When I was in the US I met many people who couldn't understand why I despised the TSA/CATSA (Canadian equivalent), and are still incredibly paranoid about hijackings on flights. Many even vehemently argued that curtailing civil liberties is absolutely essential, or the entire country will go to hell in a hand basket.
Ive is known to be the quiet, soft-spoken type. Yes, he's arguably one of the greatest industrial designers alive, but his personality doesn't quite jive with the "prance about the stage at conferences" job description.
...Because people will now use decent operating systems that don't go into kernel panic half the time?
No, just no. I haven't seen a proper Windows BSOD for ages now, and the last time it happened was due to hardware failure (bad VRAM). On the other hand, OS X Leopard has seen fit to KP on me once or twice a day for the first months or two of its existence. Serves me right for upgrading on release day:)
Red Hat isn't exactly struggling and yet all their software is pure OSS not even "freeware".
RHEL and Fedora are not consumer Linux distros. There's a world of difference between making a mainstream consumer OS vs. an enterprise workstation OS used by orders of magnitude less people.
The demise of MS will only lead to better software, more competition, lower prices, and no more annoying unpaid tech support calls from your parents/grandparents/brother/etc.
Really? I put my dad in front of my Mac and I still had to answer a bunch of questions before he went away puttering on his own thing. Linux is far from easy-to-use enough to be entirely trouble-free. I say the software industry does *fine* with MS's presence, and in fact their presence is welcome. We seem to be kicking MS's ass with Firefox just fine, despite being OSS. We don't need to get rid of that company to succeed.
Bah, I call bull. Apple's *initial* success is always based on user interface. The iPhone was (and in most ways still is) at the top of the UI heap for phones, and likewise the iPod kicked the shit out of anything else on the market at the time. The keyword here is "at the time". If you look at the iPods, there have not been any significant UI improvements to it since it was first rolled out - cover flow was not even a hotly demanded feature, and seems underused by most people.
Apple uses *really really good* UI to capture market share, after which they really just put the brakes on and try to ride off that success. The only reason the "iPod" got a spiffy new UI is courtesy of the iPhone.
Just look at OS X - no new revolutionary UI since 10.0. Everything remains the same, except now we have multiple swipe gestures. Cool, useful, but hardly industry-leading.
Apple shot itself in the foot with the SDK, giving devs no clear roadmap of how resolutions will scale in the future. I have absolutely no doubt that the vast majority of apps in the store as it is will go completely haywire at any other resolution, too much hardcoding.
Besides, the majority of the iPhone's UI components would not fit well onto a 7" screen even if properly upscaled. The cells for each contact in your contact list, for example, is MASSIVE for easy tapping. They would be *four times larger by area* on the new rumored device, which makes it simply pointless, your finger hasn't gotten any bigger.
A device that runs vanilla iPhone apps in full-screen mode is an impossibility. Maybe something that is capable of running both iPhone and Mac desktop apps at once, that would be very interesting as a hybrid. Something that is location-aware, able to tap into the massive amount of "convenience" mobile apps that have made it into the store, with the productivity of a full laptop. I would pay for that.
The removal of the keynote is a troubling sign - not for Jobs' health but rather his future with the company. The launch of the unibodies was unprecedented in how much face-time the other execs got vs. how little Jobs got, and there's no reason Jobs would do such a thing except to roll out the carpet for his own departure.
I have no doubt about it, Apple needs a personality figurehead like Jobs. Ive isn't it, God knows Schiller isn't it... who is?
I'm disappointed at both Bethesda and BioWare in particular for this. Look at LucasArts, with their procedural character animations, and Valve with their incredible facial animation tools... these guys are putting an incredible amount of story-telling technology into their twitch-shooter games (and then severely under-using it)... meanwhile RPG developers like BW and Bethesda completely ignore this technology in favor of more "oh hey our characters interact with the environment LOL" crap.
And there's also the seeming mentality that, because we're a STORY-centric game, we don't care about texture popping, load times, and a horridly complex user interface. Both devs are guilty of this to the extreme. Both Mass Effect and Fallout 3 are slow, load all too frequently, and crash-prone to boot.
You mean Fallout 3 with a reboot, on a Mac? I'm a Mac user too, but there's no sense pretending that gaming is "as good as" the PC here, it simply isn't. What I wouldn't give for some native OS X games, rebooting every time I want to play a game is a bit stupid.
Not to mention I bought a Mac so I can run OS X, not use that craptastic piece of crap known as Windows.
I enjoyed F3, but have to agree on most of your points. I do believe that Bethesda was the wrong choice of developer to hand the franchise to - they made only a few token gestures to their source material and then transformed the game into Oblivion-with-guns.
Characters are still uninspired, animations still stiff (despite Bethesda's claims otherwise) and lifeless. The main quest (as usual Bethesda style) is far too short, and level design is almost non-existent indoors, where you spend most of your time spelunking identical tunnels and hallways that are clearly built out of prefab parts. Honestly, I expected the interior of the fricking Capitol to look a bit different than some random DC office building!
The game is directionless and aimless, and requires the player to "find their own fun", which fortunately I did, after I brute-leveled my character to level 20 and started popping Super Mutants in single shots. Repairing items was a pain, as weapons wore down far too quickly, and you spend all your time scavenging and inventory-managing instead of *playing the game*. Bethesda needs to take cues from Rockstar - the masters of creating open worlds that still feel purposeful (not to mention having a much longer main quest).
I hated Oblivion, and I enjoyed Fallout 3, despite its many (and there are MANY) flaws. I just wish F4 will be given to a more competent developer that will make more of an effort to develop a real post-apocalyptic game instead of Oblivion with pew-pew lasers.
3. MS may obsolesce something that worked for the whole organization in favor of something that seems to work less well, another risk issue for corp mgrs.
The way I see it it's the *opposite* of this that keeps MS stagnant. They have so much legacy technology in their platform that it's all just cruft that contributes to compatibility and stability problems. Peek into the Win32 API and notice how much has been deprecated but never removed, for fear of breaking some major legacy app or another. The consequence of this is that developers now *know* that MS has no teeth behind the word "deprecated", and will gladly keep using API that has been obsolete for near a decade. This is a vicious cycle, forcing MS to keep back-compat a higher priority than it ought to be, since removal of long-disused API will break even new software.
I got the first issue, and IMHO it's something funky with their power management. The power-off never happens on AC power, and I've noticed it happening at *any* battery charge level. This indicates to me that the system is kicking in an emergency shutdown when the motherboard starts drawing more power than the battery can handle. The wall wart is rated up to 130W or so on the MBP, so the motherboard won't be busting this limit, but the MBP runs only on 75W or so on batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
When the alternative is someone with no ideas and plenty of experience at failing... I'll take the idealist with no experience, thank you very much.
Agreed. A few friends and I got together and got the Left 4 Dead 4-pack and having been playing the hell out of it - while an entirely separate group have pirated the game and seem incredulous that we chose to *buy* the game.
Piracy will continue to proper until we as a society start looking down on it with the same disdain we treat freeloaders.
And look at Mirror's Edge. A successful game by most measures, though not quite as successful as EA had hoped. But look at the review scores: those explain your problem.
Neither of those demos fit the bill: both Mirror's Edge and LittleBigPlanet did not give out so much content in the demos as to make the full game irrelevant.
Rather, we should look at Mirror's Edge specifically (it's the only one of the 3 named that I have played):
- Demo had incredible smooth-flowing motion, and awesome sense of immersion, is easy to pick up (but had hidden depth), and combat that added some spice without becoming overbearing.
- Full version had the same smooth-flowing motion and immersion, but now has levels where puzzles are difficult and sometimes downright obtuse. Combat becomes a huge part of the game, and honestly is simply not that well done. Level design broke up the "flow" of levels, which is what players were wanting to begin with. Add poor technical features such as clipping issues and you've got yourself a frustrating game to play.
Don't blame the demo. ME was a fine game, but the other 90% of the game that *wasn't* the demo was a sore disappointment compared to the polish demonstrated by the first level (i.e. the demo).
Laws *dont* exist to serve corperate interest... okay, okay laws *should* not exist to serve corperate interest.
No, we absolutely should cater to corporate interests on the caveat that those interests benefit the people. Creating employment is a net benefit to the people (depending on what you're giving up in exchange), and IMHO there shouldn't be opposition to lawmaking for the sake of companies simply because they are corporations. Let each proposal be judged on its own merit.
That's not "planned obsolescence" - that's just progress. Planned obsolescence is where my new TVs will refuse to play old DVDs, forcing me to buy all my content again in hi-def. Or, in a more precise example, forcing me to buy new memory cards if I want to use new cameras. Neither are true - my SD cards will work just as well in new cameras as they did in the old. The fact that storage is getting bigger has nothing to do with "planned obsolescence".
A "good company" is not the determinant for survival. Sun may be "good", but they have dwindling revenue, and their primary software products are free.
Last I checked all my SD cards still work in SDHC slots... how is this planned obsolescence again?
I'm glad you confirmed my theory about how the GE culture would work. The way I see it, employees would not have any idea of what type of performance they would need to give in order to remain "safe" from being axed, and this simply encourages a culture of one-upsmanship where employees scramble over each other and kiss their boss' ass relentlessly. Overtime will kick in and escalate as employees try to out-do the guy in the next cube over, until all you've got left are empty, burned-out, unhappy messes of employees.
The problem with laying off people based on reviews is that it obscures the true value of these people. Is your bottom 20 percent really that bad? Laying off the bottom 20 of a team of elite hackers seems ill-advised, and laying off the bottom 20 of a team of slackers seems to not go far enough.
If you're going to "clean house", target people with an absolute bar, and get rid of those who fail to make the cut. Using a proportional layoff like "bottom 20 percent" doesn't do much good, and only serves to overwork people and decrease morale dramatically as people scramble to out-do each other and cover their asses. Risk will become a dirty word as people stick to tried-and-true and easily-defensible actions instead of trying new innovative things.
This seems more likely. AFAIK Freescale's the guys who do low-power x86 chips, which is an idea that never really panned out. Most devices still use ARM chips, and MS probably joined the club with the 2nd and 3rd generations.
Right, which is why the exact cause of the problem was discovered within hours of the first reports. Imagine if MS was swarmed with angry Zune customers, and had to talk to Freescale to see if they could look in their code and solve it... For a lesser bug or lesser customer (smaller than MS) this could have taken ages. This way MS can also ship a fix out immediately by patching it themselves, instead of waiting for Freescale to roll out a new binary.
And an example of where closed-source binary drivers can go horribly wrong :) But really, no one can be expected to QA every single line of code that's shipped through their device (honestly, a date function fuckup?)... what this really says is the importance of proper QA at the driver-developer level.
This was written by the Freescale guys, not MS, where it would make sense for the device manufacturer to ship their own date/time code.
That's only half the problem - the other half is why people (not only the police!) are so paranoid about photography, as if everyone taking pictures is suddenly scoping the place out for a terrorist attack.
It seems like we (of the Slashdot groupthink) are the minority. When I was in the US I met many people who couldn't understand why I despised the TSA/CATSA (Canadian equivalent), and are still incredibly paranoid about hijackings on flights. Many even vehemently argued that curtailing civil liberties is absolutely essential, or the entire country will go to hell in a hand basket.
Ive is known to be the quiet, soft-spoken type. Yes, he's arguably one of the greatest industrial designers alive, but his personality doesn't quite jive with the "prance about the stage at conferences" job description.
There's no need for hyperbole here:
...Because people will now use decent operating systems that don't go into kernel panic half the time?
No, just no. I haven't seen a proper Windows BSOD for ages now, and the last time it happened was due to hardware failure (bad VRAM). On the other hand, OS X Leopard has seen fit to KP on me once or twice a day for the first months or two of its existence. Serves me right for upgrading on release day :)
Red Hat isn't exactly struggling and yet all their software is pure OSS not even "freeware".
RHEL and Fedora are not consumer Linux distros. There's a world of difference between making a mainstream consumer OS vs. an enterprise workstation OS used by orders of magnitude less people.
The demise of MS will only lead to better software, more competition, lower prices, and no more annoying unpaid tech support calls from your parents/grandparents/brother/etc.
Really? I put my dad in front of my Mac and I still had to answer a bunch of questions before he went away puttering on his own thing. Linux is far from easy-to-use enough to be entirely trouble-free. I say the software industry does *fine* with MS's presence, and in fact their presence is welcome. We seem to be kicking MS's ass with Firefox just fine, despite being OSS. We don't need to get rid of that company to succeed.
Bah, I call bull. Apple's *initial* success is always based on user interface. The iPhone was (and in most ways still is) at the top of the UI heap for phones, and likewise the iPod kicked the shit out of anything else on the market at the time. The keyword here is "at the time". If you look at the iPods, there have not been any significant UI improvements to it since it was first rolled out - cover flow was not even a hotly demanded feature, and seems underused by most people.
Apple uses *really really good* UI to capture market share, after which they really just put the brakes on and try to ride off that success. The only reason the "iPod" got a spiffy new UI is courtesy of the iPhone.
Just look at OS X - no new revolutionary UI since 10.0. Everything remains the same, except now we have multiple swipe gestures. Cool, useful, but hardly industry-leading.
Apple shot itself in the foot with the SDK, giving devs no clear roadmap of how resolutions will scale in the future. I have absolutely no doubt that the vast majority of apps in the store as it is will go completely haywire at any other resolution, too much hardcoding.
Besides, the majority of the iPhone's UI components would not fit well onto a 7" screen even if properly upscaled. The cells for each contact in your contact list, for example, is MASSIVE for easy tapping. They would be *four times larger by area* on the new rumored device, which makes it simply pointless, your finger hasn't gotten any bigger.
A device that runs vanilla iPhone apps in full-screen mode is an impossibility. Maybe something that is capable of running both iPhone and Mac desktop apps at once, that would be very interesting as a hybrid. Something that is location-aware, able to tap into the massive amount of "convenience" mobile apps that have made it into the store, with the productivity of a full laptop. I would pay for that.
The removal of the keynote is a troubling sign - not for Jobs' health but rather his future with the company. The launch of the unibodies was unprecedented in how much face-time the other execs got vs. how little Jobs got, and there's no reason Jobs would do such a thing except to roll out the carpet for his own departure.
I have no doubt about it, Apple needs a personality figurehead like Jobs. Ive isn't it, God knows Schiller isn't it... who is?
I'm disappointed at both Bethesda and BioWare in particular for this. Look at LucasArts, with their procedural character animations, and Valve with their incredible facial animation tools... these guys are putting an incredible amount of story-telling technology into their twitch-shooter games (and then severely under-using it)... meanwhile RPG developers like BW and Bethesda completely ignore this technology in favor of more "oh hey our characters interact with the environment LOL" crap.
And there's also the seeming mentality that, because we're a STORY-centric game, we don't care about texture popping, load times, and a horridly complex user interface. Both devs are guilty of this to the extreme. Both Mass Effect and Fallout 3 are slow, load all too frequently, and crash-prone to boot.
You mean Fallout 3 with a reboot, on a Mac? I'm a Mac user too, but there's no sense pretending that gaming is "as good as" the PC here, it simply isn't. What I wouldn't give for some native OS X games, rebooting every time I want to play a game is a bit stupid.
Not to mention I bought a Mac so I can run OS X, not use that craptastic piece of crap known as Windows.
I enjoyed F3, but have to agree on most of your points. I do believe that Bethesda was the wrong choice of developer to hand the franchise to - they made only a few token gestures to their source material and then transformed the game into Oblivion-with-guns.
Characters are still uninspired, animations still stiff (despite Bethesda's claims otherwise) and lifeless. The main quest (as usual Bethesda style) is far too short, and level design is almost non-existent indoors, where you spend most of your time spelunking identical tunnels and hallways that are clearly built out of prefab parts. Honestly, I expected the interior of the fricking Capitol to look a bit different than some random DC office building!
The game is directionless and aimless, and requires the player to "find their own fun", which fortunately I did, after I brute-leveled my character to level 20 and started popping Super Mutants in single shots. Repairing items was a pain, as weapons wore down far too quickly, and you spend all your time scavenging and inventory-managing instead of *playing the game*. Bethesda needs to take cues from Rockstar - the masters of creating open worlds that still feel purposeful (not to mention having a much longer main quest).
I hated Oblivion, and I enjoyed Fallout 3, despite its many (and there are MANY) flaws. I just wish F4 will be given to a more competent developer that will make more of an effort to develop a real post-apocalyptic game instead of Oblivion with pew-pew lasers.
3. MS may obsolesce something that worked for the whole organization in favor of something that seems to work less well, another risk issue for corp mgrs.
The way I see it it's the *opposite* of this that keeps MS stagnant. They have so much legacy technology in their platform that it's all just cruft that contributes to compatibility and stability problems. Peek into the Win32 API and notice how much has been deprecated but never removed, for fear of breaking some major legacy app or another. The consequence of this is that developers now *know* that MS has no teeth behind the word "deprecated", and will gladly keep using API that has been obsolete for near a decade. This is a vicious cycle, forcing MS to keep back-compat a higher priority than it ought to be, since removal of long-disused API will break even new software.
I got the first issue, and IMHO it's something funky with their power management. The power-off never happens on AC power, and I've noticed it happening at *any* battery charge level. This indicates to me that the system is kicking in an emergency shutdown when the motherboard starts drawing more power than the battery can handle. The wall wart is rated up to 130W or so on the MBP, so the motherboard won't be busting this limit, but the MBP runs only on 75W or so on batteries.