CobraA1

Reply to GCII 2.0 - Let's Take 2.0 for a Spin in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]+1 for updating all non-widescreen content. And might as well do up everything in 16:9 while you're at it, from what I hear the monitor and hdtv manufacturers are doing away with the silliness of having 2 different widescreen aspect ratios and 16:10 will be dead soon.[/quote] Well, the vast majority of aspect-ratio dependent is largely movies from what I can tell, and that means several versions of the same movie, which would take a lot of disk space. I would recommend

Reply to Game Cheats Are Illegal? in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

Interestingly enough . . . I'm reading some of the legalese, and one thing popped into my mind: Blizzard is not necesarilly discussing what you buy at the store. In filing 88 (especially page 8), there is much acknowlegement that the vast majority of the content is stored on Blizzard's servers and copied to the user's computer during gameplay. I don't think the court case is going

Reply to Game Cheats Are Illegal? in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Take a candy bar into a theater that doesn't allow outside food and drink and wave it around, then take a gun into a bank and wave it around. After that, you should be able to grasp the fundamental difference between violating house rules, and violating law.[/quote] In this case, MDY got hauled off to court. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc? [quote]1) The Consumer has the right to use the software when he picks it up at the register.[/quote] If the customer agrees wit

Reply to What would be viable copy protection? in PC Gaming GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]They depend on a remote DRM activation server, when that is gone (as it will be at some point) you have nothing.[/quote] You have all of your games at the state you last left them. Neither Impulse nor Steam have an absolute requirement tht you be connected to their servers for you to play the games. Last I checked, both of them also have backup/restore capabilities as well. Impulse probably does quite a bit better than Steam considering Stardock's stance against DRM. &n

Reply to What would be viable copy protection? in PC Gaming GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Gamers Bill or Rights[/quote] I think you mean Gamers Bill of Rights. I've seen some weird stuff done in the name of "copy protection." Requiring occasional internet access for single player games. I fail to see how that prevents copying. Playing around with hardware bugs, which inevitably leads to trouble. Being tempermental about running other software. I'm a developer, so I naturally have some development tool

Reply to Have you ever downloaded a game? in PC Gaming GalCiv2 Forums

I use Steam and Impulse, and have purchased and downloaded games through them. I have downloaded a game called "Enemy Nations" that the authors decided to release for free. I'm proud to be a PC gamer. Console games are profitable, I'm sure, but my PC is plenty capable and a great platform for gaming. [quote]Why don't they introduce a system which is full proof?[/quote] I think you mean foolproof. Two o's, one word. [quote]A common mistake that people ma

Reply to 65 mpg car I can't buy? in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

Econoboxes suck. The Tesla Roadster rocks. http://www.teslamotors.com/ It's priced like a Ferrari, goes from 0 to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds, and it's available in the USA. And oh, yeah, did I mention it gets the equivalent of 100 or more mpg? Take that, stupid econoboxes!! I'm personally driving a Honda Civic. I average about 33 mpg, but I've hit 40+ on occasion. I don't own it, though. When I do finally buy my own vehicle, it's likely to be a Ford Focus (that 35 m

Reply to When PC terms start becoming regular terms of daily speech. in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

What's amusing is that my Geography teacher uses "BC/AD" in her speech and "BCE/ACE" in her slide presentations. Oh, wrong PC [e digicons]XD[/e] . I've often heard the word "google" used as a generic replacement for "search." UNIX people seem to be obsessed with the word "grok." "noob" is popular among the gamers. [quote]I have no clue as to what possible connection she thought Sea Moss had to my work but clearly she had no idea of what CMOS is.[/quote

Reply to What would happen if two people ran GalCiv2 from the same purchase on different computers? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

If possible, buy a second copy. I'm not exactly liking how people are making assumptions about the personalities of your parents. I try not to judge people I've never met. If you have an allowance, perhaps it's time to start saving?

Reply to What's the 3D engine for? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

It's a bit of a matter of personal taste. Sure it's a bit pointless to some people, but so what? Other people like it, and adding it makes it appeal to more people. If it were just a bunch of 2D icons, yeah, it would appeal to some people, but to be honest there are a lot of people who it wouldn't appeal to. Agree with it or not, having 3D these days means the difference between a niche game and a popular game. Unfortunately a lot of people will turn down a game just because i

Reply to Will America always be a superpower? in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Hmm, you are not implying only communist societies can come up with an efford such as this because capitalistic sociesties simply lack the potential to do so, are you?[/quote] I'm sorry, how in the world did I imply anything about comminusm, capitalism or any other economic system? This has nothing to do with economic systems and everything to do with how fast we can move resources into space. We simply can't do it very fast at the moment, period. [quote]I perso

Reply to Dead horse buffet in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]One has to keep in mind that those prices are insanely inflated by prices on the coasts and major cities, which have always been ridiculous.[/quote] I'm sure those houses are part of the credit problem as well. I don't think this problem is limited to the midwest. [quote]BTW: In fairness to Republicans, all those that voted against the bill earned some respect from me. Now I must go and hide my head knowing that the majority of Democrats voted for this crap. We need ano

Reply to Dead horse buffet in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Its about $2,500 from every man, woman and child. [/quote] Gotta remember, this is a housing issue. Your average house costs nearly $300,000. Even a cheap house is gonna be $100,000. It's an enormous purchase compared to pretty much everything else an individual buys. Or to put it this way: It takes 120 people (men, women, and children) paying $2,500 to pay for a single average house. [quote]You have five bucks, you buy something with it, and sell it to some suc

Reply to Will America always be a superpower? in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I think in the next 150 years a sizeable ammount of research will be concerned about preserving habitable enviroments, wich is in turn exactly what you need for a generation vojage colonization efford.[/quote] The challenges of a planet with of gravity and vast size are far different from the challenges of a ship in space, even one large enough for a generational crew. We barely have any technology capable of fabrication of any structure in space, much less one of the size need

Reply to Name some OS other than Windows, Mac and Linux in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]It's called Mac OS X.[/quote] The real Mac OS X, or did they just decide to keep the name? [quote]Let's set a criteria for looking for OSs: If they can't be skinned, they're not worth it[/quote] Palm OS can be skinned ^_^. Linux can be skinned as well. Unfortunately, neither one uses Stardock products :(. You can sorta customize DOS a bit. The prompt can be changed, and if you knew some ANSI escape sequences you could change colors around.

Reply to Will America always be a superpower? in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Congratulations, you just killed the entire human race.[/quote] Well, if us religious people are wrong and God never comes again, then that's gonna happen one way or another. Eventually, the universe will succumb to thermodynamics and there will be no useful energy left. But that stuff is so far into the future that frankly it doesn't matter. We have to focus on what's going on right now rather than what's so far ahead in the future.

Reply to Will America always be a superpower? in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Second of all, the US is a military superpower because of its superior Air Force and Navy.[/quote] Don't forget the Army, which is every bit as important. One thing we learned in some of the wars after WWII was that you can't hold a city with only an air force. We've bombed cities to the stone age, only to find out later the people regrouped and took the city back. You need a presence in the city itself to prevent this. You need an army. Saddam's army was largely wiped

Reply to GCII 2.0 - Let's Take 2.0 for a Spin in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

I think that some sort if tech/miniturization adjustment should be available in the ship editor. The page numbers look a bit off in the manual. Other than that, no complaints. You're probably the only company to release a "version 2.0" of an existing game. I like that :). I like how the game continues to be worked on long after its release. It's become very stable - many of my other games still crash, sometimes predictably. But they will never be be fixed, because unli

Reply to Name some OS other than Windows, Mac and Linux in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

Garnet OS: Palm OS's supposed replacement. Windows Mobile: What really replaced Palm OS. Palm's newest devices use Windows Mobile. Android: Supposed to be the next-generation OS for handhelds. Brush up on your Java if you want to create apps for it. iPhone's OS: Dunno if there's a real name for it, but lots of third party apps are starting to be made for it. FreeDOS: Open source alternative to DOS.

Reply to Should people have the right to resell games as grey or secondary market material? in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Any or all of you feel free to open a Google search for "define: greed"[/quote] I would never, ever, use Google as a dictionary. I usually use dictionary.com because it always includes definitions from real, respected dictionaries such as Webster's, Random House, or the American Heritage dictionary. [quote]Can you _have_ greed without profit?[/quote] Sure you can. Greed is a desire for more than you deserve. It's a desire, an emotion. You can be poor and

Reply to Object Desktop 2009 Preview in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]anyone else have problems with registation count exceeded after only couple of unsuccessfull installs that impulse itself caused?[/quote] Not really, but then again I haven't had to reinstall it yet. It'll probably be a year or so when I upgrade to Windows 7 someday. I am, however, getting lockup issues when it starts. Right now I'm looking at an eternal "logging in" and will probably need to restart it. Feature wise, I can't complain. The defaults could need so

Reply to Google Chrome in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

After all this time of giving Chrome some benefit of a doubt, I am now recommending against it, and do not believe that anybody should use it without being fully aware of how insecure and invasive it really is. For details, listen to episodes #161 and #162 of the Security Now! podcast. http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm I may not completely agree with starkers' exact line of reasoning, but I now agree with his conclusion. I am now looking to see if I can find s

Reply to EA and SecuROM in PC Gaming GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Seriously, I have nothing against activations, but I have something against forced online-connection and limited activations. it was already bad on steam and it will be bad on anything else.[/quote] Even Steam is better than SecuROM in that sense, if I remember correctly. Steam doesn't require constant checking: Once you activate and install the game, you can place it in offline mode and it'll be happy as long as you want it to be. But with SecuROM and other DRMs, they'll start

Reply to Stardock Announces "The Gamer's Bill of Rights" in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Not all games need (or even should have) updates. Adventure games, like The Longest Journey for example, don't need updates. Even shooters, just your standard fare like half-life, or crysis, or whate have you. Expansions yes, updates - not if the game was complete when it was released, which is of course another item on the list.[/quote] There are always at least bug fixes to be made. In addition, look at what Valve is doing to Team Fortress 2: They are adding new stuff like mo

Reply to Forbes: Spore’s Piracy Problem in Gaming GalCiv2 Forums

A quote from the article GW Swichord linked to: [quote]The publisher defends its antipiracy scheme as "just like online music services that limit the number of machines you can play a song on."[/quote] Great comparison EA - let's see, what happened to DRM on music? Oh yeah, that's right. It totally flopped. Sony had their rootkit fiasco, Steve Jobs wrote a letter denouncing DRM, EMI went DRM free on iTunes, and later all of the major publishers released DRM free music on Amazo