How much clout do you need before you can say no? For example, I know that some of the Unreal games were patched to remove the DRM after a few months after release, and I have a copy of Heroes of Might and Magic V which is a pretty big game series that I can play on my laptop with no DVD, or serial key, or anything. But there are other games, even huger, like Bioshock for example, that have tons of intrusive DRM with them, I just don't get how it works.
Blizzard seem to be quite successful developing graphics intensive games for both Windows and Mac at the same time.
What Blizzard games have you been playing? Blizzard is consistently anywhere from 3-5 years behind the state-of-the-art when they release their games; in their case, it's a purposeful decision which results from "we want it to run on mid-range hardware on release" and "we'll release only when it's done," and I'm not saying that Blizzard games suck because of it, but I certainly wouldn't call them "graphics intensive."
WOW and Everquest 2 came out at the same time; take a look at those two side-by-side and tell me which is more graphics intensive. EQ2's engine simply blows WOW's out of the water.
EVERYTHING in Linux, from the constantly-changing ABIs (even libc!) to the repository-based distribution method, to the multitude of different distros, specifically designed, to discourage commercial software development. There are some projects to turn this around, like LSB, but they are woefully under-appreciated.
The reason there's very little (consumer-level) commercial software on Linux is because Linux makes it hard. Linux makes it hard for ATI or NVidia to develop drivers, much harder than on Microsoft platforms and Microsoft has more users to boot. Linux makes it hard to put your software on a CD and install it in a way that works for all distros, and without screwing up the user's software repository. It's even harder to market your product, considering how vocal the "must use only free software!" crowd is in the Linux community.
Unfortunately some software, even though I like, I won't pay for becuase the cost is too high (i'm looking at you photoshop)... so they get bubkis.
Photoshop is professional software intended for professionals. It's not intended for the guy in his basement cropping photos for his blog.
I'm guessing that, the features you use in Photoshop, are free in Paint.NET, or cheaply gotten in Photoshop Elements (the non-professional version of Photoshop.) If you're actually using CMYK separations, and other pro features in Photoshop, then you're an idiot for saving a few hundred bucks on the software after paying tens of thousands on the printing equipment that requires it.
You really, really care about this. Just relax and play some video games. The Xbox having only 64 MB of memory, or whatever it was, didn't make Crimson Skies any less fun.
And they were decently animated and had some good stories.
Opinions vary. I thought they were unwatchable, between the super-short episode length and that animation style. (Samurai Jack has the same style, but at least it gets enough time to tell a real story in the course of a 22-minute episode.)
The CGI version of General Grievous in Episode III is by far the best villain in the new trilogy; it's a shame he's almost totally wasted in the movie. If Lucas had any sense, Grievous would have been the recurring villain during the entire new trilogy, replacing the pointless Darth Maul and... that guy in Clone Wars who's so generic I can't even remember his name.
In Episode I, they put their main power reactor in a DOCKING BAY full of fighters. They didn't even need to blow up the trade federation ships, they could have just waited until some pilot accidentally made a bad landing.
Also, pretty much my favorite scene in that movie is where Anakin, somehow, manages to get through the trade federation mothership shields. Something which is impossible for the trained pilots in the exact same ship. The movie doesn't explain how he does this, except they do make it a point of having the other pilots ask, "how did he do that?" Thus, specifically pointing out to the audience that the script makes no damned sense.
Protip: if you're a screenwriter and you put something crazy in your script, don't have the other characters comment on it!
(Unless it's a gag, like with the motion detector scene in Alien.)
Lucas had full control over the first movie, though. He saw through every detail, at least according to the documentary included on the DVD set. He personally edited practically the entire film, if not the entire film.
Full Throttle sucked, and Dark Forces was just ok.
I agree that Lucas Arts used to make some amazing games, but you use Full Throttle to illustrate that? Not, say, Grim Fandango or the Quest for Glory series?
Yeah, you're right, the memory on the original Xbox was too low. Even without the OS overhead, that's probably not enough to run WOW. The drive space and CPU speed is sufficient, though; I ran WOW on a 800 mhz G3 iBook which is decidedly wimpier than a 800 mhz P3, had crappy-ass video hardware, and the Mac port of WOW runs really slow to boot. It had 768 MB of RAM, though.
Anyway, you don't need to go all all-caps and "what were you smoking." You could be polite when you're correcting a minor mistake.
Then let's go into why you mentioned "bums pissing on the sidewalks". To me, that was a very psychologically revealing slip.
Generally, people who piss on sidewalks are bums. I'm not interested in psycho-babble.
than stay in the city, solve its underlying problems,
I have no desire to solve someone else's problems.
Let's go into why you'd rather run to the suburbs at vast expense... and actually save yourself a ton of money.
By paying rent instead of owning a house, more per month to not own. By paying more for gas, groceries-- pretty much everything. Yes, I'd be saving a ton of money.
Also, I'm not "running" to anything. I've always lived "in the suburbs", as you consider my small city.
I think the assumptions you make about where I've lived in the past are very psychologically revealing!!!one!!!1!
Did I call you racist? I did not. Sensitive there, aren't you?
Oh please, don't be an ass and then play off like you're not being an ass. There's only one reason you could possibly interpret "I don't like smelling urine" to "I hate the disadvantaged," and then jump to the "most disadvantaged are black" point unless you were trying to call me a racist, all cloak-and-dagger-like. I'm not a moron, nor is anybody else on this board.
The far left (ie: socialists) are actually about increasing freedom and democracy--although the only way to achieve that is to reduce the freedoms of the capitalists (who use their wealth and "ownership" of the means of production to control society in their narrow, short-sighted and selfish interests).
Yeah, right. The way to increase freedom is to reduce freedom. Everybody is equal, but capitalists aren't as equal as everybody else. (With apologies to Orwell.) Brilliant thinking, there.
The Christian right (or any fundamentalist religious sect--be it Zionist, Islamic or whatever else there is)
Since when is Zionism a religious sect, much less a fundamentalist one? Plenty of Christians are/were Zionists, possibly more Christians than Jews at the end of WWII.
wants to reduce everyone's freedoms based on their religious dogma.
Yeah; and you want to reduce their freedoms based on their level of income, so you're MUCH better than they are.
When there are fewer restrictions on the rich and how they are allowed to push the rest of us around with their wealth, power and privilege, then it means the rest of us have less freedom.
How? You already have as much freedom as you take. If you don't want to work for a capitalist, then don't. That's not against the law, and thousands of people do it every day of their lives. (Maybe you've heard of the Amish? Nothing's stopping you from adopting their lifestyle.)
As I said, Manhattan is super expensive only because it is an island with limited land area. Where the land is not so scarce, such as Los Angeles, the cost of housing should be relatively low if the densification is done properly.
It was your example, not mine. Don't blame me if I bring up your example to refute your point.
I've been to Seattle, and yes, there are bums on the streets.
I thought that would get a rise out of you. As I suspected, your true problem with cities is that you hate to help the disadvantaged (who are mostly black).
Oh, right. I don't want to live in a city, therefore I am a racist. Your deductive logic is impeccable, sir, I salute you.
I've not even going to bother to defend myself from this bullshit you're spewing.
I don't think it's heaven, I just think it's practical and almost inevitable. And places like Manhattan must be attractive to a lot of people -- otherwise, why is housing so costly there?
Damned if I know. You'd have to pay me to move there.
Ok; let's say I paid for the train every month. (I believe it's about $120.) I still own a 1100 sq. foot house and city lot and pay HALF of what renting a 900 sq. foot apartment in NY would cost. I'd still be several hundred dollars a month ahead of somebody in New York. And this is super expensive compared to the majority of the US.
There won't be bums on the streets. The inner-city problem will be solved when a dense base of taxpayers provides the funds to solve it. Europe is proof that inner cities don't have to rot.
First of all, this city is Seattle. There's no "rot" here, it's a beautiful city. Secondly, I don't see how tax payers can possibly solve the problem of "mentally ill people who are incapable of joining society", which is, as far as I can tell, the majority of the homeless problem. I guess we can use our tax money to move them all to another city? Or what did you have in mind, exactly? Electric cars aren't going to fix it, nor is dense population; if anything dense population will make it worse.
Look, if you like living in a city, fine. Live in one. But don't just say it's "the most enviable" place to be, as if you're speaking for everybody. You're generalizing the entire world based on your belief.
Me? I like my lawn, my house, my car and everything I have that I could never have in New York or Hong Kong or whatever other super-crowded hellhole you think is heaven.
The city can always densify: the more apartments there are per square mile, the cheaper they will be. Density can be good: New York City and Hong Kong are two of the most enviable places to live.
As a resident of a town small enough that I never lock my doors, and near enough to a major urban center that I have a great tech job, I would like to say: HELL NO.
I can't imagine anybody wanting to live in NYC or Hong Kong, except people who are either so ridiculously wealthy they can emulate living somewhere else, or people who grew up there and don't know any better. Being able to look out of my window and see Orion's Belt, or being able to drive less than 15 minutes and end up in a dense forest is worth far more to me than anything a crowded, filthy city could offer.
The first thing I notice when getting off the train in the city every morning is the stench. Cities stink.
Yes, it "shouldn't" be able to. And celebrities and sports stars "should" be paid relative to their contributions to society. And you "should" treat all women equally, no matter how attractive or unattractive they are.
You're talking about an ideal, the ideal that drivers should never be able to take down an OS doesn't work here in reality. It doesn't work in Windows, it doesn't work in Linux, it doesn't work in OS X. So while it's a fine ideal, stop talking about it as if it has some relevance in real life.
(Now, when you manage to code-up an OS that implements this ideal 100%, then you can start being snide.)
I got a decent amount on my iBook running 10.4. And that was the new one, after the first iBook with the faulty motherboard was replaced. (That thing was a total lemon; it crashed every week.)
Since I've put Vista on my desktop and laptop I've had 2 crashes on my Desktop and none on my laptop. The desktop crashes were caused by ATI's crummy-ass drivers. (I've also had multiple ATI driver reboots; fortunately this doesn't crash Vista, it just blanks out the screen for a few seconds.)
From my personal experience, I'd say the two OSes are on par. Of course, I don't buy crappy hardware (on purpose!) and I don't run weird huge Olympics projectors.
Plus, they have money. The original series talked about how valuable Dilithum crystals were, when they encountered those miners who refused to sell to them. Half of Deep Space 9's plotlines were about Quark going after "Gold-plated latinum" which was a type of coin, or something.
But in First Contact, Picard specifically says they don't have any money... wait, WTF is going on here?
He could use the Mute button on his keyboard and a normal phone. Isn't this request pretty much just, "I want to solve a trivially-easy problem in the most complex way possible?"
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Because consoles have DRM built-in?
Who gives a shit? At least consoles WORK. Take a look at how long it took me to get a copy of Dark Messiah working on my computer: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/08/02/why-pc-games-suck/
If I had bought the Xbox 360 version of the same game, I would have been done in less than a minute. You put in the disk, it works. Period.
How much clout do you need before you can say no? For example, I know that some of the Unreal games were patched to remove the DRM after a few months after release, and I have a copy of Heroes of Might and Magic V which is a pretty big game series that I can play on my laptop with no DVD, or serial key, or anything. But there are other games, even huger, like Bioshock for example, that have tons of intrusive DRM with them, I just don't get how it works.
Blizzard seem to be quite successful developing graphics intensive games for both Windows and Mac at the same time.
What Blizzard games have you been playing? Blizzard is consistently anywhere from 3-5 years behind the state-of-the-art when they release their games; in their case, it's a purposeful decision which results from "we want it to run on mid-range hardware on release" and "we'll release only when it's done," and I'm not saying that Blizzard games suck because of it, but I certainly wouldn't call them "graphics intensive."
WOW and Everquest 2 came out at the same time; take a look at those two side-by-side and tell me which is more graphics intensive. EQ2's engine simply blows WOW's out of the water.
EVERYTHING in Linux, from the constantly-changing ABIs (even libc!) to the repository-based distribution method, to the multitude of different distros, specifically designed, to discourage commercial software development. There are some projects to turn this around, like LSB, but they are woefully under-appreciated.
The reason there's very little (consumer-level) commercial software on Linux is because Linux makes it hard. Linux makes it hard for ATI or NVidia to develop drivers, much harder than on Microsoft platforms and Microsoft has more users to boot. Linux makes it hard to put your software on a CD and install it in a way that works for all distros, and without screwing up the user's software repository. It's even harder to market your product, considering how vocal the "must use only free software!" crowd is in the Linux community.
There's no mystery here, people.
Unfortunately some software, even though I like, I won't pay for becuase the cost is too high (i'm looking at you photoshop)... so they get bubkis.
Photoshop is professional software intended for professionals. It's not intended for the guy in his basement cropping photos for his blog.
I'm guessing that, the features you use in Photoshop, are free in Paint.NET, or cheaply gotten in Photoshop Elements (the non-professional version of Photoshop.) If you're actually using CMYK separations, and other pro features in Photoshop, then you're an idiot for saving a few hundred bucks on the software after paying tens of thousands on the printing equipment that requires it.
You really, really care about this. Just relax and play some video games. The Xbox having only 64 MB of memory, or whatever it was, didn't make Crimson Skies any less fun.
And they were decently animated and had some good stories.
Opinions vary. I thought they were unwatchable, between the super-short episode length and that animation style. (Samurai Jack has the same style, but at least it gets enough time to tell a real story in the course of a 22-minute episode.)
The CGI version of General Grievous in Episode III is by far the best villain in the new trilogy; it's a shame he's almost totally wasted in the movie. If Lucas had any sense, Grievous would have been the recurring villain during the entire new trilogy, replacing the pointless Darth Maul and ... that guy in Clone Wars who's so generic I can't even remember his name.
In Episode I, they put their main power reactor in a DOCKING BAY full of fighters. They didn't even need to blow up the trade federation ships, they could have just waited until some pilot accidentally made a bad landing.
Also, pretty much my favorite scene in that movie is where Anakin, somehow, manages to get through the trade federation mothership shields. Something which is impossible for the trained pilots in the exact same ship. The movie doesn't explain how he does this, except they do make it a point of having the other pilots ask, "how did he do that?" Thus, specifically pointing out to the audience that the script makes no damned sense.
Protip: if you're a screenwriter and you put something crazy in your script, don't have the other characters comment on it!
(Unless it's a gag, like with the motion detector scene in Alien.)
Lucas had full control over the first movie, though. He saw through every detail, at least according to the documentary included on the DVD set. He personally edited practically the entire film, if not the entire film.
In short, I don't buy it.
Full Throttle sucked, and Dark Forces was just ok.
I agree that Lucas Arts used to make some amazing games, but you use Full Throttle to illustrate that? Not, say, Grim Fandango or the Quest for Glory series?
Yeah, you're right, the memory on the original Xbox was too low. Even without the OS overhead, that's probably not enough to run WOW. The drive space and CPU speed is sufficient, though; I ran WOW on a 800 mhz G3 iBook which is decidedly wimpier than a 800 mhz P3, had crappy-ass video hardware, and the Mac port of WOW runs really slow to boot. It had 768 MB of RAM, though.
Anyway, you don't need to go all all-caps and "what were you smoking." You could be polite when you're correcting a minor mistake.
Then let's go into why you mentioned "bums pissing on the sidewalks". To me, that was a very psychologically revealing slip.
Generally, people who piss on sidewalks are bums. I'm not interested in psycho-babble.
than stay in the city, solve its underlying problems,
I have no desire to solve someone else's problems.
Let's go into why you'd rather run to the suburbs at vast expense ... and actually save yourself a ton of money.
By paying rent instead of owning a house, more per month to not own. By paying more for gas, groceries-- pretty much everything. Yes, I'd be saving a ton of money.
Also, I'm not "running" to anything. I've always lived "in the suburbs", as you consider my small city.
I think the assumptions you make about where I've lived in the past are very psychologically revealing!!!one!!!1!
Did I call you racist? I did not. Sensitive there, aren't you?
Oh please, don't be an ass and then play off like you're not being an ass. There's only one reason you could possibly interpret "I don't like smelling urine" to "I hate the disadvantaged," and then jump to the "most disadvantaged are black" point unless you were trying to call me a racist, all cloak-and-dagger-like. I'm not a moron, nor is anybody else on this board.
The far left (ie: socialists) are actually about increasing freedom and democracy--although the only way to achieve that is to reduce the freedoms of the capitalists (who use their wealth and "ownership" of the means of production to control society in their narrow, short-sighted and selfish interests).
Yeah, right. The way to increase freedom is to reduce freedom. Everybody is equal, but capitalists aren't as equal as everybody else. (With apologies to Orwell.) Brilliant thinking, there.
The Christian right (or any fundamentalist religious sect--be it Zionist, Islamic or whatever else there is)
Since when is Zionism a religious sect, much less a fundamentalist one? Plenty of Christians are/were Zionists, possibly more Christians than Jews at the end of WWII.
wants to reduce everyone's freedoms based on their religious dogma.
Yeah; and you want to reduce their freedoms based on their level of income, so you're MUCH better than they are.
When there are fewer restrictions on the rich and how they are allowed to push the rest of us around with their wealth, power and privilege, then it means the rest of us have less freedom.
How? You already have as much freedom as you take. If you don't want to work for a capitalist, then don't. That's not against the law, and thousands of people do it every day of their lives. (Maybe you've heard of the Amish? Nothing's stopping you from adopting their lifestyle.)
As I said, Manhattan is super expensive only because it is an island with limited land area. Where the land is not so scarce, such as Los Angeles, the cost of housing should be relatively low if the densification is done properly.
It was your example, not mine. Don't blame me if I bring up your example to refute your point.
I've been to Seattle, and yes, there are bums on the streets.
I thought that would get a rise out of you. As I suspected, your true problem with cities is that you hate to help the disadvantaged (who are mostly black).
Oh, right. I don't want to live in a city, therefore I am a racist. Your deductive logic is impeccable, sir, I salute you.
I've not even going to bother to defend myself from this bullshit you're spewing.
I don't think it's heaven, I just think it's practical and almost inevitable. And places like Manhattan must be attractive to a lot of people -- otherwise, why is housing so costly there?
Damned if I know. You'd have to pay me to move there.
Not everyone is as lucky as you.
Ok; let's say I paid for the train every month. (I believe it's about $120.) I still own a 1100 sq. foot house and city lot and pay HALF of what renting a 900 sq. foot apartment in NY would cost. I'd still be several hundred dollars a month ahead of somebody in New York. And this is super expensive compared to the majority of the US.
There won't be bums on the streets. The inner-city problem will be solved when a dense base of taxpayers provides the funds to solve it. Europe is proof that inner cities don't have to rot.
First of all, this city is Seattle. There's no "rot" here, it's a beautiful city. Secondly, I don't see how tax payers can possibly solve the problem of "mentally ill people who are incapable of joining society", which is, as far as I can tell, the majority of the homeless problem. I guess we can use our tax money to move them all to another city? Or what did you have in mind, exactly? Electric cars aren't going to fix it, nor is dense population; if anything dense population will make it worse.
Look, if you like living in a city, fine. Live in one. But don't just say it's "the most enviable" place to be, as if you're speaking for everybody. You're generalizing the entire world based on your belief.
Me? I like my lawn, my house, my car and everything I have that I could never have in New York or Hong Kong or whatever other super-crowded hellhole you think is heaven.
Feel free to stay right where you are then -- you'll spend a large chunk of your monthly salary on auto fuel.
No, I take the train to work and my employer pays for that.
They won't stink after the petroleum era ends.
So when we switch to electric cars, bums will stop pissing on the sidewalks? I doubt it.
The city can always densify: the more apartments there are per square mile, the cheaper they will be. Density can be good: New York City and Hong Kong are two of the most enviable places to live.
As a resident of a town small enough that I never lock my doors, and near enough to a major urban center that I have a great tech job, I would like to say: HELL NO.
I can't imagine anybody wanting to live in NYC or Hong Kong, except people who are either so ridiculously wealthy they can emulate living somewhere else, or people who grew up there and don't know any better. Being able to look out of my window and see Orion's Belt, or being able to drive less than 15 minutes and end up in a dense forest is worth far more to me than anything a crowded, filthy city could offer.
The first thing I notice when getting off the train in the city every morning is the stench. Cities stink.
Yes, it "shouldn't" be able to. And celebrities and sports stars "should" be paid relative to their contributions to society. And you "should" treat all women equally, no matter how attractive or unattractive they are.
You're talking about an ideal, the ideal that drivers should never be able to take down an OS doesn't work here in reality. It doesn't work in Windows, it doesn't work in Linux, it doesn't work in OS X. So while it's a fine ideal, stop talking about it as if it has some relevance in real life.
(Now, when you manage to code-up an OS that implements this ideal 100%, then you can start being snide.)
I got a decent amount on my iBook running 10.4. And that was the new one, after the first iBook with the faulty motherboard was replaced. (That thing was a total lemon; it crashed every week.)
Since I've put Vista on my desktop and laptop I've had 2 crashes on my Desktop and none on my laptop. The desktop crashes were caused by ATI's crummy-ass drivers. (I've also had multiple ATI driver reboots; fortunately this doesn't crash Vista, it just blanks out the screen for a few seconds.)
From my personal experience, I'd say the two OSes are on par. Of course, I don't buy crappy hardware (on purpose!) and I don't run weird huge Olympics projectors.
It would have, but someone sabotaged the hyperdrive motivator. Bastards.
I see that boldface is featured in the new API.
If you look at other games like WoW or Lotro or Everquest etc etc with each update the potential memory requirements just goes up and up.
When WOW came out, it ran on a machine much wimpier than my Xbox 360 is now. And on-par with my original Xbox-- remember it had 8GB of drive space.
Plus, they have money. The original series talked about how valuable Dilithum crystals were, when they encountered those miners who refused to sell to them. Half of Deep Space 9's plotlines were about Quark going after "Gold-plated latinum" which was a type of coin, or something.
But in First Contact, Picard specifically says they don't have any money... wait, WTF is going on here?
He could use the Mute button on his keyboard and a normal phone. Isn't this request pretty much just, "I want to solve a trivially-easy problem in the most complex way possible?"