1. It's not trolling when I'm genuinely trying to figure out what the hell you meant. I thought "The State" might be slang for California or something. I apologize that my telepathic abilities don't seem to work over Slashdot... what you type is all I read.
2. The article has numbers covering *retail* sales from *brick and mortar* stores. Do you understand? Do you think it might be just a LITTLE possible that just MAYBE some people bought the game over Amazon.com or some other online site? Just because you don't do anything but buy off-the-shelf doesn't mean you represent everyone.
In the real (non-Slashdot) world, a program isn't working when you can't click any buttons or type into any fields. i.e. when the hourglass icon is up. That's what the poster is asking about, not CPU usage.
1) Where is "the State" exactly? Is that a state within the US?
2) It does say it's an *estimation.* I believe it also doesn't count online sales. I'd bet the number is close to accurate.
3) Frankly, the researchers of the article did a hell of a lot more work than you did, so until you have another number to counter them with (talking about over-the-counter PC game sales), maybe you should just trust them.
Did you read the article? First of all, it has three Blizzard games: Diablo II, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft. It has Halo. If those aren't "must have" games, then I'd like some of what you're smoking. Secondly, it *does* have "genre-busters", for instance, Black and White, trucking sims, train sims, or THE Sims.
I think you had this gripe about how gaming was so much better "in the olden days" all thought up and probably half-written before you even glanced at the article in question. Sure the list contains a lot of Deer Hunter/Atari Arcade Classics-type titles in it, but all-in-all, it's not a bad list at all and to me it signals that good games, generally, really DO get noticed.
You uninstalled every Google product because of something The Register said might happen? Has The Register EVER had an accurate prediction in their entire history? Man, talk about a knee-jerk reaction.
Unfortunately, not until VLC or some other open source player figures out the format and how to play it.
What bothers me is that the "screencap" protection has actually gotten worse. In MacOS 9, you could take a screencap with a DVD playing and the DVD image would just be blanked out. In OS X, you can't take a screencap at all without quitting DVD Player. Which is a royal PITA when I want to take a screencap of something in World of Warcraft and I happen to have a DVD playing on the other monitor. Thanks, Apple!
They've also worked with the Creative Commons community to add easy licensing tools to Microsoft Office products, where you can set your CC-compatible license by selecting a menu item and filling in a few fields, and Word/Excel will respect that license (at least as well as software can) when you pass the file on.
I don't think Microsoft has anything in particular against open source, personally.
In the Slashdot tradition of posting based on the summary and not reading the article, I see they DO do a write-up of Marathon. But it's not listed as an "honorable mention," and, in any case, it certainly belongs in the top 5 more than System Shock 2 does.
I enjoyed the last paragraph... Marathon might not have been the most popular game, and might have come out on perhaps the least popular gaming platform in history, but it's damned good. For people who have played it, we know.
System Shock 2 doesn't really bring anything new, it's just really well-done.
But where's Bungie's Marathon? Robbed!
If Half-Life is on the list for having a compelling story, then Marathon deserves to be on the list for having a more compelling story than Half-Life years before HL came out. It's not a PC-only list, since Goldeneye is on it, but did they even consider Macintosh-exclusive games?
Yeah, but the problem here is that archive.org kept the material accessible even though their own policy is to delete material if robots.txt says to. It has nothing to do with the right of archive.org to ignore the robots.txt file, it's all about whether archive.org must follow their own published policies.
Ok, I understand that Golf isn't exactly, say, marathon running. But you get more exercise COOKING? What do you, cook on a treadmill? Buy 50-lb bags of sugar and flour and lift them repeatedly? Chase after the pigs and cows you're going to eat personally?
1) Badges at corporations. Let you unlock doors, pay for your cafeteria lunch without cash, etc.
2) Replacement for bar codes in businesses. Greatly speeds up the inventory count.
Which of those uses is "evil" again? Oh wait, neither of them. It's just a handy new technology that's useful for a lot of things.
Anybody who is opposed to RFID as a technology is a wacko. Can it be abused? Yeah, potentially... so can serial numbers and bar codes. To remove all the valid uses because there's one bad use is moronic... that's like saying that VCRs should be illegal because they can be used for copyright infringement.
What exactly did you expect Bush to do? Grab a shovel and fly over post-haste? Don't you think it might be more important to keep the head of state in a less-dangerous area?
Let's say that the federal funding for the levies wasn't slashed to pay for the War in Iraq. The war started, what, 2002? The levies broke in 2005? Do you seriously think that the entire levy system could be rebuilt in 3 years? Sure, it could have been as an emergency effort *if* we knew, three years in advance, that the storm was coming. But as a normal course of action, no.
Blaming Bush for this is ridiculous. The levies had been underfunded for years before his administration even came into power, otherwise construction to fix them would have been well-underway by 2005.
My local highway has had terrible traffic for the last ten years and only recently has the highway department even begun construction for another lane.
Re:Who are they hiding the features from?
on
Marketing Mozilla
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· Score: 1
BTW, for Mac users: The integrated spell-checking doesn't integrate with the OS X dictionary. It still uses its own. That means that custom words you add to the OS X dictionary will show up as misspellings in Firefox.
Bad, Firefox, bad! If you're going to have a Mac port, port it right, damnit.
Re:It should NOT evolve into more that just a brow
on
Marketing Mozilla
·
· Score: 1
And my favorite part of the story: instead of admitting their mistakes, Netscape decided to sue over un-competitive practices (I guess Microsoft should have made IE *worse* so that it was competitive with Netscape 4.x.) Thanks for wasting all that time and money on a pointless lawsuit.
But look at what happened on the Macintosh platform where there was no such un-competitive practice: IE still won out. At the time, it was a plain better browser.
Average users don't install plug-ins. Average users don't even know that plug-ins exist. Average users never visit the Preferences/Settings dialog to look over the options there.
If Firefox is adding something like this, it needs to ADD it. Otherwise, only geeks will ever see it and you're back to square one.
Of course they do. They want to stay in business. If Apple suddenly stripped the DRM from all the purchased songs, they'd lose every RIAA record label instantly and probably more than a few indepentants. Then they'd lose all the television producers with content up there as well. They'd go from a selection of millions to only thousands, and people would move on to DRM-using services like Rhapsody in droves.
It'll also star a man who looks and acts remarkably like Heinlein himself, yet is surrounded by millions of dollars and beautiful women at all times. Strange how that works in almost all his novels...
When I livedin the northwest, I heard lots of talk about people wanting to get rid of the hydro dams because they believe it would be beneficial to salmon. (This seems NUTS to me.)
You want to hear real crazy in the northwest?
Tacoma, Washington recently decided to add another span to their overloaded Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge. (You might remember the original one was Galloping Gurdy... yeah, it's that bridge.) The designer who created the new bridge came up with a great idea... the Tacoma Narrows is known for having insanely-fast currents while the tide is coming in and going out. His idea was to put turbines in the base of the bridge tower to generate power during the tide shifts. Selling the generated power would, over the course of a few dozen years, pay for the construction of the bridge while at the same time providing clean energy to everyone nearby. Win-win!
But of course, this is Washington Wacko-Environmentalist State. Instead, his plan was cancelled because the Wacko-Environmentalist movement decided that turbines, even covered with safety grilles, would kill fish-- and God knows that the lives of 3 fish a year is more important than tons of clean power! So now the bridge has a conventional base with no turbines and, as an added bonus, all of us non-wackos have to pay TOLLS to cross it!
I have nothing against practical environmentalists, but that movement needs to filter a little more against the wackos who seem more against the advancement of humanity than the protection of the environment. Washington and Oregon seem to be the foundation of this wacko movement, unfortunately.
About 3 years ago, I started replacing my normal bulbs with CFL bulbs to save energy. The 1927 wiring in my house has a tendency to burn the CFLs out a lot quicker in a few sockets in the basement, so I still have normal bulbs in those ones, at least until I get an electrician out to look at it.
I figure it kind of makes up for me heating the house with an electric boiler and radiators during the winter.
Slashdot Mirror
1. It's not trolling when I'm genuinely trying to figure out what the hell you meant. I thought "The State" might be slang for California or something. I apologize that my telepathic abilities don't seem to work over Slashdot... what you type is all I read.
2. The article has numbers covering *retail* sales from *brick and mortar* stores. Do you understand? Do you think it might be just a LITTLE possible that just MAYBE some people bought the game over Amazon.com or some other online site? Just because you don't do anything but buy off-the-shelf doesn't mean you represent everyone.
In the real (non-Slashdot) world, a program isn't working when you can't click any buttons or type into any fields. i.e. when the hourglass icon is up. That's what the poster is asking about, not CPU usage.
1) Where is "the State" exactly? Is that a state within the US?
2) It does say it's an *estimation.* I believe it also doesn't count online sales. I'd bet the number is close to accurate.
3) Frankly, the researchers of the article did a hell of a lot more work than you did, so until you have another number to counter them with (talking about over-the-counter PC game sales), maybe you should just trust them.
Did you read the article? First of all, it has three Blizzard games: Diablo II, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft. It has Halo. If those aren't "must have" games, then I'd like some of what you're smoking. Secondly, it *does* have "genre-busters", for instance, Black and White, trucking sims, train sims, or THE Sims.
I think you had this gripe about how gaming was so much better "in the olden days" all thought up and probably half-written before you even glanced at the article in question. Sure the list contains a lot of Deer Hunter/Atari Arcade Classics-type titles in it, but all-in-all, it's not a bad list at all and to me it signals that good games, generally, really DO get noticed.
Let me get this straight...
You uninstalled every Google product because of something The Register said might happen? Has The Register EVER had an accurate prediction in their entire history? Man, talk about a knee-jerk reaction.
Blshea
Ok, so the bad guys know my buying habits...
Now what? Why the hell do I give a crap whether they know my buying habits or not? How could they possibly use this knowledge to harm me?
Unfortunately, not until VLC or some other open source player figures out the format and how to play it.
What bothers me is that the "screencap" protection has actually gotten worse. In MacOS 9, you could take a screencap with a DVD playing and the DVD image would just be blanked out. In OS X, you can't take a screencap at all without quitting DVD Player. Which is a royal PITA when I want to take a screencap of something in World of Warcraft and I happen to have a DVD playing on the other monitor. Thanks, Apple!
They've also worked with the Creative Commons community to add easy licensing tools to Microsoft Office products, where you can set your CC-compatible license by selecting a menu item and filling in a few fields, and Word/Excel will respect that license (at least as well as software can) when you pass the file on.
I don't think Microsoft has anything in particular against open source, personally.
In the Slashdot tradition of posting based on the summary and not reading the article, I see they DO do a write-up of Marathon. But it's not listed as an "honorable mention," and, in any case, it certainly belongs in the top 5 more than System Shock 2 does.
I enjoyed the last paragraph... Marathon might not have been the most popular game, and might have come out on perhaps the least popular gaming platform in history, but it's damned good. For people who have played it, we know.
System Shock 2 doesn't really bring anything new, it's just really well-done.
But where's Bungie's Marathon? Robbed!
If Half-Life is on the list for having a compelling story, then Marathon deserves to be on the list for having a more compelling story than Half-Life years before HL came out. It's not a PC-only list, since Goldeneye is on it, but did they even consider Macintosh-exclusive games?
Yeah, but the problem here is that archive.org kept the material accessible even though their own policy is to delete material if robots.txt says to. It has nothing to do with the right of archive.org to ignore the robots.txt file, it's all about whether archive.org must follow their own published policies.
Be honest: How long have you been saving that one up?
Ok, I understand that Golf isn't exactly, say, marathon running. But you get more exercise COOKING? What do you, cook on a treadmill? Buy 50-lb bags of sugar and flour and lift them repeatedly? Chase after the pigs and cows you're going to eat personally?
Oh please. Let's take a look at what RFID is:
1) Badges at corporations. Let you unlock doors, pay for your cafeteria lunch without cash, etc.
2) Replacement for bar codes in businesses. Greatly speeds up the inventory count.
Which of those uses is "evil" again? Oh wait, neither of them. It's just a handy new technology that's useful for a lot of things.
Anybody who is opposed to RFID as a technology is a wacko. Can it be abused? Yeah, potentially... so can serial numbers and bar codes. To remove all the valid uses because there's one bad use is moronic... that's like saying that VCRs should be illegal because they can be used for copyright infringement.
What exactly did you expect Bush to do? Grab a shovel and fly over post-haste? Don't you think it might be more important to keep the head of state in a less-dangerous area?
Let's say that the federal funding for the levies wasn't slashed to pay for the War in Iraq. The war started, what, 2002? The levies broke in 2005? Do you seriously think that the entire levy system could be rebuilt in 3 years? Sure, it could have been as an emergency effort *if* we knew, three years in advance, that the storm was coming. But as a normal course of action, no.
Blaming Bush for this is ridiculous. The levies had been underfunded for years before his administration even came into power, otherwise construction to fix them would have been well-underway by 2005.
My local highway has had terrible traffic for the last ten years and only recently has the highway department even begun construction for another lane.
BTW, for Mac users: The integrated spell-checking doesn't integrate with the OS X dictionary. It still uses its own. That means that custom words you add to the OS X dictionary will show up as misspellings in Firefox.
Bad, Firefox, bad! If you're going to have a Mac port, port it right, damnit.
And my favorite part of the story: instead of admitting their mistakes, Netscape decided to sue over un-competitive practices (I guess Microsoft should have made IE *worse* so that it was competitive with Netscape 4.x.) Thanks for wasting all that time and money on a pointless lawsuit.
But look at what happened on the Macintosh platform where there was no such un-competitive practice: IE still won out. At the time, it was a plain better browser.
Average users don't install plug-ins. Average users don't even know that plug-ins exist. Average users never visit the Preferences/Settings dialog to look over the options there.
If Firefox is adding something like this, it needs to ADD it. Otherwise, only geeks will ever see it and you're back to square one.
Of course they do. They want to stay in business. If Apple suddenly stripped the DRM from all the purchased songs, they'd lose every RIAA record label instantly and probably more than a few indepentants. Then they'd lose all the television producers with content up there as well. They'd go from a selection of millions to only thousands, and people would move on to DRM-using services like Rhapsody in droves.
If you're almost entirely ignorant of modern MUDs and MMOs, why are you even posting here? Seriously.
:P
I can sum up that post in two sentences:
"I love Nethack. I don't know anything about any game other than Nethack."
Besides, Mission: Thunderbolt is better.
It'll also star a man who looks and acts remarkably like Heinlein himself, yet is surrounded by millions of dollars and beautiful women at all times. Strange how that works in almost all his novels...
When I livedin the northwest, I heard lots of talk about people wanting to get rid of the hydro dams because they believe it would be beneficial to salmon. (This seems NUTS to me.)
You want to hear real crazy in the northwest?
Tacoma, Washington recently decided to add another span to their overloaded Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge. (You might remember the original one was Galloping Gurdy... yeah, it's that bridge.) The designer who created the new bridge came up with a great idea... the Tacoma Narrows is known for having insanely-fast currents while the tide is coming in and going out. His idea was to put turbines in the base of the bridge tower to generate power during the tide shifts. Selling the generated power would, over the course of a few dozen years, pay for the construction of the bridge while at the same time providing clean energy to everyone nearby. Win-win!
But of course, this is Washington Wacko-Environmentalist State. Instead, his plan was cancelled because the Wacko-Environmentalist movement decided that turbines, even covered with safety grilles, would kill fish-- and God knows that the lives of 3 fish a year is more important than tons of clean power! So now the bridge has a conventional base with no turbines and, as an added bonus, all of us non-wackos have to pay TOLLS to cross it!
I have nothing against practical environmentalists, but that movement needs to filter a little more against the wackos who seem more against the advancement of humanity than the protection of the environment. Washington and Oregon seem to be the foundation of this wacko movement, unfortunately.
About 3 years ago, I started replacing my normal bulbs with CFL bulbs to save energy. The 1927 wiring in my house has a tendency to burn the CFLs out a lot quicker in a few sockets in the basement, so I still have normal bulbs in those ones, at least until I get an electrician out to look at it.
I figure it kind of makes up for me heating the house with an electric boiler and radiators during the winter.