Oh, and Linux is now being sold preinstalled on 3% of new computers right now, where as before Vista came along, Linux could never top 1% of market share.
Isn't that a statistic exclusive to Europe? When you're tossing general worldwide statistics around, you really shouldn't mix and match ones that appeal to your interests.
In fact, this whole exercise is about trying to say "you guys are all just prejudiced against Vista! You never gave it a fair chance!"
That's actually true for a lot of people, I can't give an scientific estimate but anecdotally a large proportion of the people that I talk to that criticise Vista admit to having never actually used it when queried (some obviously had, and their complaints were valid). It's become socially cool on tech sites and such to bag out Vista without having a shred of experience to back you up, so their test, if conducted properly, could actually yield some interesting results. Of course, it'd be far more interesting if a neutral party conducted similar tests.
You can stare at the specifications for something and make your decision based on that, or you can try using it and see how it works out in reality. A little experience may alter your perspective slighty, not enough to exonerate Vista but enough to notice that only the people with problems speak up in most cases.
I've had more "official" patches from both Ubi and EA (And a few others) break stuff than dodgy, pirate hacks.
I would argue that this is because the dodgy, pirate hacks only attempt to bypass one system whereas official patches tend to correct flawed code, fix missing/damaged resources, etc. You're comparing massive changes to minimal ones; we all know that the more changes there are in a particular patch, the more likely one is to become problematic.
I don't understand what the major aversion to implementing some sort of transparent virtual machine to run legacy applications is. The idea has been floated hundreds of times by many smart people, yet Microsoft don't seem to want to do it; even though implementing one or more virtual machines to run legacy applications would free them from backwards compatibility in their core system.
Is there some long-term business reason for not doing this that I'm not seeing? It'd benefit everyone, including Microsoft, in the long term if they did it:\
Wouldn't anyone visiting your page with AVG's Safe Search enabled cause all of the results inside the iframe to poll AVG's website? 100 results to be checked, unless grisoft.com is automatically marked as safe.
What safe actions could they have realistically taken in that situation to investigate it? If you mess around with investigating that yourself and don't immediately hand the situation over to the police don't you risk incriminating yourself by 'protecting' the person from the police?
I'm honestly curious to know; how could they have possibly investigated this more?
ID had probably the perfect setup back in the Q3Arena days. Buy our game, then take the disk and install it on all the machines in the office, everyone can play a LAN game for free. But if you want to play online, you need your own key. It was perfect, and it was a wonderful promotional tool. I know at least a dozen people in the office who got so hooked on Q3 during our LAN parties that they went out and bought Q3 to play online. All of those purchasers would never have even thought about it unless they were able to try it for free like they did. Programs like Hamachi would prevent developers from continuing that practice though; it'd be possible to "LAN over the Internet" and thus avoid having to actually purchase the game for online play between friends. Additionally, if more games added free LAN functionality you can bet on someone creating an online matchmaking program to exploit it and remove the need to purchase the game.
So, are you saying that in the future, people will prefer 3 inch screens and crappy keyboards of mobile devices to large monitors and comfortable keyboards of desktop computers? I don't think so. You're assuming that in the future mentioned we will still be using keyboards as a primary method of input; research into other methods (such as voice recognition, motion capture, etc) would seem to indicate otherwise.
Even though this is quite obviously a troll, the constant dire predictions about X company/software/OS dying is really starting to bug me. Nothing in the software world (and maybe even the real world) is dying until it's dead; recoveries are always possible. A downward trend doesn't mean something will die out, just look at RealPlayer (though whether that's a good thing or not is debatable).
Advertising, Google pays to be the default search engine for their default start page, for the search bar and for the address bar when no valid address is entered.
Not all instances of people giving you free stuff are sexually motivated though, I found great enjoyment in giving gold and items to low level characters, regardless of their gender, as it improved their play experience (due to auction price inflation) and felt like I was helping them out. The overwhelming majority might be given to female characters by heterosexual males, but there are those of us that give out items indiscriminately for no real reason when bored:)
Accelerating AI wouldn't necessarily make it more difficult to beat in most games, just more random/lifelike and lower the massive skills chasm between playing against a computer and playing against a human. Wouldn't it increase the fun and replay ability of games to have more intelligent AI?
On the other side of that argument, nobody is going to make more sophisticated AI until there is more processing power available to them to do so without negatively affecting other portions of their game. An Physics core and AI core on a processor would be fairly attractive to gamers, and if they made them general enough to enhance the performance of other non-gaming specific tasks it could turn out to be fairly revolutionary couldn't it?
I don't want to throw this thread too far off topic, but that poses an interesting question:
Say you've known what your sexuality is for at least 10-15 years and have no problem with it, would you take a 'cure' to alter it if someone invented one? It's similar to that question posed in X-3 (god awful movie though) about the mutants and their 'cure' for the abnormal, would you 'cure' your abnormality and in turn remove a part who you are?
Do you have a link or reference to any DirectX 10 game running on Windows XP? So far the "Vista Only" games that have been modified to work on XP have been using DirectX 9.0l, which isn't exactly all that much different from 9.0c as I understand it? I've seen it argued a lot that DirectX 10 has no significant changes that render it unusable on XP, but they're usually using Halo2 as the reference point and that's a 9.0l game.
A web based solution seems fairly unwise at this point. Browsers can be prone to crashing with less document recovery options, data would need to be stored on a (secure) server for the most part, so if the server had hard disk failures potentially hundreds of people would lose all work since their last backup (or the last server backup). What happens when a website is inaccessible and you want your documents? What about if the company has to shut down without warning, all your documents would be lost?
In theory, with infallible servers it'd be fantastic to be able to use web-based editors, but not everybody wants to be connected to the Internet when they process documents. The hassle of having to upload documents to convert them, upload images, etc. would cause a reduction in productivity wouldn't it? People like things being snappy, I'm not seeing that occurring with web applications. Even GMail can be incredibly slow sometimes.
You sound somewhat biased towards the secondary market there, I'm curious to know if you have any (reliable) sources for the claims you are making? Specifically the "hired former Blizz execs." Anyone can make wild claims based on pure speculation and rumour, but you really need to be able to back them up when trying to dismiss an argument.
My understanding of the secondary market is that it encourages the exponential creation of game currency in order to have currency to spend. As the amount of game currency on each server increases, it's value decreases. When you lower the value of a currency, the only logical options to choose are to either replace it with something more valuable, or increase the cost of items in the various player trading areas (auctions, direct trades, etc.) The players of the game are then compelled to spend more time acquiring more gold to buy items that would otherwise have been less expensive, making the game become slightly tedious. When the game becomes tedious, people leave the game or complain excessively, damaging the reputation of the company that owns the game.
I do not and will likely never understand those who actually take the time to look into the effects of gold farming and still come out believing it's harmless. I haven't really seen an argument backed by examples of places where it hasn't negatively effected those that do not purchase gold, in terms of their progression through the game.
I'll use World of Warcraft as an example since it's the persistent entity game I am most familiar with, and point out that a lot of the best gear is actually crafted so you don't necessarily need to do 'work' yourself to acquire good items. What does said crafted gear require? Some items only you can collect, but mostly a bunch of items that anybody can collect and sell. An example of acquiring decent gear purely through buying items would be tailoring; you can acquire three of the arguably best pieces of gear available exclusively through buying items off the auction (Primal Mooncloth, Spellfire or Shadowweave), and another two if you pay another player to craft gear for you (Spellstrike/Battlecast/Whitemend). That's five out of nine slots filled with some of the better gear in the game purely through buying items off the auction, so in World of Warcraft at least your statement about having to do actual work on your character to get the best gear is somewhat flawed (if we exclude raiding, and even then only the latter dungeons provide upgrades for some items).
My point is, no matter which game you're playing you'll find the economy is negatively effected by those that add inordinate amounts of currency to it. If I printed sixteen trillion United States dollars tomorrow and used said money to purchase various goods, businesses, and property tomorrow would it negatively effect you? Do you think it might decrease the value of United States currency a little? I have not studied economics closely, but I understand that money is being printed constantly as it's required so that comparison hopefully isn't too much of a stretch.
If you can give me one scenario where having people pay money to acquire game currency that was generated via illegitimate means ("Gold Farmers" are on the fall a bit in some places, whereas using trojan viruses to steal accounts and sell the proceeds is on the rise) I'll be, well, surprised.
I don't personally oppose two people trading accounts, or one person selling theirs to another for some form of compensation. A gamer would want compensation for the time invested and if someone is prepared to pay for that then so be it. It really is the people that take simple trades to the extreme and focus solely on creating goods for said trades (high level characters via bots, gold via stealing accounts, etc.) that could potentially damage a game (and company's reputation) irreparably.
Some vocal Atheists can be judgemental in that they will call all religious individuals naive and dismiss their views out of hand, but in comparison to the rest of the people in the religious world you're barking up the wrong tree if you think Atheism somehow requires you to judge anybody more than another philosophical belief (or lack thereof.) Some religions require that you condemn entire countries of people, even if the reason is hundreds of years old and nobody (except said group) cares any more:)
Either way, I don't think it's fair to call someone judgemental based on their philosophical beliefs until you are sure you actually know what their beliefs are. Someone can call themselves a follower of a particular religious group, but that doesn't mean they believe everything about said group.
I don't suppose you want to cite evidence when making bold claims, but it usually is customary when attempting to convince people of your point of view. Blanket claims are almost never completely true or accurate, and I think blanketing Linux as better than Windows in all cases is a bit excessive. Sure, there'll always be those that think whatever they do must be the best thing around, but if you step back for a minute and really take a look the operating systems tend to compete fairly well. Sure, Linux performs some tasks better than Windows, and vice versa, but what exactly is the overall incentive to switch from one platform to another if you don't need that which the opposing operating system excels at?
Reality can suck, but I really do think you (and a lot of others) are overestimating the impact desktop Linux users have on the market. If everybody that dual boots Linux and Windows suddenly formatted their Windows partition tomorrow, do you seriously think it would do any massive damage to the Windows market share? All it would achieve is removing the option for those people to use Windows for those areas it excels at - a popular example being gaming.
I don't profess to know everything about the market share Linux has at the moment, or to what extent it possibly could impact Windows in it's current state, but I'm not claiming to hold all the answers either.
An unquestionably superior platform wouldn't have this much difficulty securing users from the competition. Until you and other zealots step back and take a look at the larger picture, I sincerely doubt the Linux movement is going to make that blanket superiority breakthrough any time soon. It takes critics to find the flaws in something.
I don't think it was ever a case of them whining about vista not requiring anti-virus or firewall software, it was them whining about vista not allowing them to implement their software in the manner they chose. As for whether caving to their pressure was a good idea or not is up for grabs though. While making your product difficult to opt-out of is a bad plan in the long run (see AOL), it does appear to be an effective way to generate more revenue. Morally objectionable, but effective.
The idea that you would dismiss an entire group of people based on the fact that they are reported to be small in one survey is fairly ridiculous. Homosexuality is supposed to affect up to 3-6% of the male population (less for females) which is as much as one in twenty people and that's just educated guesses based on those who identify themselves. It's not quite as small as you were have people believe (especially considering that survey was about couples.)
That said, the argument is moderately pointless. All three topics could be major election issues (we all know the American Republicans will ride on the outlaw gay marriage bandwagon again,) there's no reason to single any one of them out as more important than the others. Each one is equally as important.
I don't believe comparing a game that was released in a different sized market with one released today is a fair comparison at all; the gaming market has increased substantially since the days of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the original Mario Brothers. Mario 64 sold more copies than Super Mario Kart, but does that mean it was better or that the market was simply larger? There's more people going to see movies in cinemas these days than there was thirty years ago but does that mean movie quality has increased or just the number of cinema goers?
I'd like to see a comparison between the games based on the time in which they were released, not just raw numbers.
Morality is a point of view, the measure of one's power is (arguably) more solid. The Weasel Rule will apply to many more things than a mere "evil company" so using that example was likely more beneficial.
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Oh, and Linux is now being sold preinstalled on 3% of new computers right now, where as before Vista came along, Linux could never top 1% of market share.
Isn't that a statistic exclusive to Europe? When you're tossing general worldwide statistics around, you really shouldn't mix and match ones that appeal to your interests.
In fact, this whole exercise is about trying to say "you guys are all just prejudiced against Vista! You never gave it a fair chance!"
That's actually true for a lot of people, I can't give an scientific estimate but anecdotally a large proportion of the people that I talk to that criticise Vista admit to having never actually used it when queried (some obviously had, and their complaints were valid). It's become socially cool on tech sites and such to bag out Vista without having a shred of experience to back you up, so their test, if conducted properly, could actually yield some interesting results. Of course, it'd be far more interesting if a neutral party conducted similar tests.
You can stare at the specifications for something and make your decision based on that, or you can try using it and see how it works out in reality. A little experience may alter your perspective slighty, not enough to exonerate Vista but enough to notice that only the people with problems speak up in most cases.
I've had more "official" patches from both Ubi and EA (And a few others) break stuff than dodgy, pirate hacks.
I would argue that this is because the dodgy, pirate hacks only attempt to bypass one system whereas official patches tend to correct flawed code, fix missing/damaged resources, etc. You're comparing massive changes to minimal ones; we all know that the more changes there are in a particular patch, the more likely one is to become problematic.
I don't understand what the major aversion to implementing some sort of transparent virtual machine to run legacy applications is. The idea has been floated hundreds of times by many smart people, yet Microsoft don't seem to want to do it; even though implementing one or more virtual machines to run legacy applications would free them from backwards compatibility in their core system.
Is there some long-term business reason for not doing this that I'm not seeing? It'd benefit everyone, including Microsoft, in the long term if they did it :\
Wouldn't anyone visiting your page with AVG's Safe Search enabled cause all of the results inside the iframe to poll AVG's website? 100 results to be checked, unless grisoft.com is automatically marked as safe.
What safe actions could they have realistically taken in that situation to investigate it? If you mess around with investigating that yourself and don't immediately hand the situation over to the police don't you risk incriminating yourself by 'protecting' the person from the police?
I'm honestly curious to know; how could they have possibly investigated this more?
You're no better than him, you know. You pulled out an ad hominem argument instead of providing the facts that he apparently forgot to state.
Don't attempt to take the moral high ground when you're not prepared to put more research into your post than the parent.
Even though this is quite obviously a troll, the constant dire predictions about X company/software/OS dying is really starting to bug me. Nothing in the software world (and maybe even the real world) is dying until it's dead; recoveries are always possible. A downward trend doesn't mean something will die out, just look at RealPlayer (though whether that's a good thing or not is debatable).
Advertising, Google pays to be the default search engine for their default start page, for the search bar and for the address bar when no valid address is entered.
Not all instances of people giving you free stuff are sexually motivated though, I found great enjoyment in giving gold and items to low level characters, regardless of their gender, as it improved their play experience (due to auction price inflation) and felt like I was helping them out. The overwhelming majority might be given to female characters by heterosexual males, but there are those of us that give out items indiscriminately for no real reason when bored :)
Nobody has a problem with double standards until those standards apply negatively to themselves =/
Accelerating AI wouldn't necessarily make it more difficult to beat in most games, just more random/lifelike and lower the massive skills chasm between playing against a computer and playing against a human. Wouldn't it increase the fun and replay ability of games to have more intelligent AI?
On the other side of that argument, nobody is going to make more sophisticated AI until there is more processing power available to them to do so without negatively affecting other portions of their game. An Physics core and AI core on a processor would be fairly attractive to gamers, and if they made them general enough to enhance the performance of other non-gaming specific tasks it could turn out to be fairly revolutionary couldn't it?
I don't want to throw this thread too far off topic, but that poses an interesting question:
Say you've known what your sexuality is for at least 10-15 years and have no problem with it, would you take a 'cure' to alter it if someone invented one? It's similar to that question posed in X-3 (god awful movie though) about the mutants and their 'cure' for the abnormal, would you 'cure' your abnormality and in turn remove a part who you are?
Do you have a link or reference to any DirectX 10 game running on Windows XP? So far the "Vista Only" games that have been modified to work on XP have been using DirectX 9.0l, which isn't exactly all that much different from 9.0c as I understand it? I've seen it argued a lot that DirectX 10 has no significant changes that render it unusable on XP, but they're usually using Halo2 as the reference point and that's a 9.0l game.
A web based solution seems fairly unwise at this point. Browsers can be prone to crashing with less document recovery options, data would need to be stored on a (secure) server for the most part, so if the server had hard disk failures potentially hundreds of people would lose all work since their last backup (or the last server backup). What happens when a website is inaccessible and you want your documents? What about if the company has to shut down without warning, all your documents would be lost?
In theory, with infallible servers it'd be fantastic to be able to use web-based editors, but not everybody wants to be connected to the Internet when they process documents. The hassle of having to upload documents to convert them, upload images, etc. would cause a reduction in productivity wouldn't it? People like things being snappy, I'm not seeing that occurring with web applications. Even GMail can be incredibly slow sometimes.
You sound somewhat biased towards the secondary market there, I'm curious to know if you have any (reliable) sources for the claims you are making? Specifically the "hired former Blizz execs." Anyone can make wild claims based on pure speculation and rumour, but you really need to be able to back them up when trying to dismiss an argument.
My understanding of the secondary market is that it encourages the exponential creation of game currency in order to have currency to spend. As the amount of game currency on each server increases, it's value decreases. When you lower the value of a currency, the only logical options to choose are to either replace it with something more valuable, or increase the cost of items in the various player trading areas (auctions, direct trades, etc.) The players of the game are then compelled to spend more time acquiring more gold to buy items that would otherwise have been less expensive, making the game become slightly tedious. When the game becomes tedious, people leave the game or complain excessively, damaging the reputation of the company that owns the game.
I do not and will likely never understand those who actually take the time to look into the effects of gold farming and still come out believing it's harmless. I haven't really seen an argument backed by examples of places where it hasn't negatively effected those that do not purchase gold, in terms of their progression through the game.
I'll use World of Warcraft as an example since it's the persistent entity game I am most familiar with, and point out that a lot of the best gear is actually crafted so you don't necessarily need to do 'work' yourself to acquire good items. What does said crafted gear require? Some items only you can collect, but mostly a bunch of items that anybody can collect and sell. An example of acquiring decent gear purely through buying items would be tailoring; you can acquire three of the arguably best pieces of gear available exclusively through buying items off the auction (Primal Mooncloth, Spellfire or Shadowweave), and another two if you pay another player to craft gear for you (Spellstrike/Battlecast/Whitemend). That's five out of nine slots filled with some of the better gear in the game purely through buying items off the auction, so in World of Warcraft at least your statement about having to do actual work on your character to get the best gear is somewhat flawed (if we exclude raiding, and even then only the latter dungeons provide upgrades for some items).
My point is, no matter which game you're playing you'll find the economy is negatively effected by those that add inordinate amounts of currency to it. If I printed sixteen trillion United States dollars tomorrow and used said money to purchase various goods, businesses, and property tomorrow would it negatively effect you? Do you think it might decrease the value of United States currency a little? I have not studied economics closely, but I understand that money is being printed constantly as it's required so that comparison hopefully isn't too much of a stretch.
If you can give me one scenario where having people pay money to acquire game currency that was generated via illegitimate means ("Gold Farmers" are on the fall a bit in some places, whereas using trojan viruses to steal accounts and sell the proceeds is on the rise) I'll be, well, surprised.
I don't personally oppose two people trading accounts, or one person selling theirs to another for some form of compensation. A gamer would want compensation for the time invested and if someone is prepared to pay for that then so be it. It really is the people that take simple trades to the extreme and focus solely on creating goods for said trades (high level characters via bots, gold via stealing accounts, etc.) that could potentially damage a game (and company's reputation) irreparably.
Some vocal Atheists can be judgemental in that they will call all religious individuals naive and dismiss their views out of hand, but in comparison to the rest of the people in the religious world you're barking up the wrong tree if you think Atheism somehow requires you to judge anybody more than another philosophical belief (or lack thereof.) Some religions require that you condemn entire countries of people, even if the reason is hundreds of years old and nobody (except said group) cares any more :)
Either way, I don't think it's fair to call someone judgemental based on their philosophical beliefs until you are sure you actually know what their beliefs are. Someone can call themselves a follower of a particular religious group, but that doesn't mean they believe everything about said group.
I don't suppose you want to cite evidence when making bold claims, but it usually is customary when attempting to convince people of your point of view. Blanket claims are almost never completely true or accurate, and I think blanketing Linux as better than Windows in all cases is a bit excessive. Sure, there'll always be those that think whatever they do must be the best thing around, but if you step back for a minute and really take a look the operating systems tend to compete fairly well. Sure, Linux performs some tasks better than Windows, and vice versa, but what exactly is the overall incentive to switch from one platform to another if you don't need that which the opposing operating system excels at?
Reality can suck, but I really do think you (and a lot of others) are overestimating the impact desktop Linux users have on the market. If everybody that dual boots Linux and Windows suddenly formatted their Windows partition tomorrow, do you seriously think it would do any massive damage to the Windows market share? All it would achieve is removing the option for those people to use Windows for those areas it excels at - a popular example being gaming.
I don't profess to know everything about the market share Linux has at the moment, or to what extent it possibly could impact Windows in it's current state, but I'm not claiming to hold all the answers either.
An unquestionably superior platform wouldn't have this much difficulty securing users from the competition. Until you and other zealots step back and take a look at the larger picture, I sincerely doubt the Linux movement is going to make that blanket superiority breakthrough any time soon. It takes critics to find the flaws in something.
I don't think it was ever a case of them whining about vista not requiring anti-virus or firewall software, it was them whining about vista not allowing them to implement their software in the manner they chose. As for whether caving to their pressure was a good idea or not is up for grabs though. While making your product difficult to opt-out of is a bad plan in the long run (see AOL), it does appear to be an effective way to generate more revenue. Morally objectionable, but effective.
The idea that you would dismiss an entire group of people based on the fact that they are reported to be small in one survey is fairly ridiculous. Homosexuality is supposed to affect up to 3-6% of the male population (less for females) which is as much as one in twenty people and that's just educated guesses based on those who identify themselves. It's not quite as small as you were have people believe (especially considering that survey was about couples.)
That said, the argument is moderately pointless. All three topics could be major election issues (we all know the American Republicans will ride on the outlaw gay marriage bandwagon again,) there's no reason to single any one of them out as more important than the others. Each one is equally as important.
I don't believe comparing a game that was released in a different sized market with one released today is a fair comparison at all; the gaming market has increased substantially since the days of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the original Mario Brothers. Mario 64 sold more copies than Super Mario Kart, but does that mean it was better or that the market was simply larger? There's more people going to see movies in cinemas these days than there was thirty years ago but does that mean movie quality has increased or just the number of cinema goers?
I'd like to see a comparison between the games based on the time in which they were released, not just raw numbers.
Morality is a point of view, the measure of one's power is (arguably) more solid. The Weasel Rule will apply to many more things than a mere "evil company" so using that example was likely more beneficial.