dmantione

[quote]Now I don't really mind cd-checks (they are annoying though)[/quote] They are more than annoying if you travel. IMO the best moments to play games is while waiting on a delayed airplane or if you have to spend the evenings in a hotel, best in a country where you don't understand the foreign language on the television. Games are even more valuable entertainment if the hotel has no internet (luckily that is increasingly less common). Carrying CD's in your laptop bag simply doesn'

I would like to make a distinction between: Conservative measures, measures that will prevent gaming only when it is sure that there is a case of piracy. Optimistic measures, measures that will prevent gaming if a situation is encountered that may be related with piracy Checking wether 2 copies are being used at the same time is a form of (1), checking how many times a serial is installed is a form of (2). I consider (1) as perfectly okay to protect yo

Hello, I suspect some people have heard Infogrames is going to sell Atari Europe to Namco Bandai. Well actually Namco Bandai gets all of the publishing business PAL territory+Japan while the remnants of Atari will be active in the rest of the NTSC territory. (Odd split in this digital television age). This leaves some of questions. I don't think you would sell such a major share of your business if you are run

[quote]I don't have "emulation software" or any other sort of that strain of software on my machines. [/quote] I did not have emulators in mind. But now you bring up the topic, well, there are 3 possibilities: You have a stack of optical media on your desk to insert when games ask for it You use emulators and put the optical media in their box You download cracks and put the optical media in their box In all 3 cases, you s

[quote who="ManSh00ter" reply="1" id="2318345"]Glad I'm not in US, you guys need to sort out your laws a bit. As for the "positive action", this can be easily disputed and in fact may be just a scare tactic - the "I agree" button you click when installing is ambiguous enough to be useless in court if you really decide to fight. You can say that it wasn't you who clicked the button - it was your cat. If they want to arrest your cat, they can go ahead! Point is, there is no way

[quote who="the_Monk" reply="25" id="2318350"]Hasn't ever bother me.......[/quote] Time will come when your software will refuse to obey you. Let's talk again after that.

[quote] if there weren't any pirates[/quote] There have always been pirates and there will always be pirates. The reason why we have DRM is that products with the promise to eliminate piracy did appear on the market, nothing else. Piracy is not free, you have to spend a lot of time into finding and downloading the warez, which can be of dubious quality. People are even prepared to pay for piracy given the popularity of providers warez binary newsgroups. When the balan

Music in games can be become boring quickly, and this spoils the fun. My biggest wish would be runtime synthesized rather than pre-rendered music. I.e. like Age of Wonders. In practise this gives a better listering experience and makes it easier make music more varying (or even dynamically adapt it to game events).

Building research facilities will always increase the research output. If you build them on planets with research bonusses and on tiles with extra research bonusses they will be very effective. If build them on planets with research penalties and on normal tiles their output will be poor. Upgrading to more advanced research facilities helps a lot. You need a prospering economy to research well. If you run into excessive deficit your research facilities w

USD 21,30 = EUR 14,99. 1 dollar = 1 euro. Apparently Australia has joined the euro zone.

BestBuy would be nice to pay the price in dollars, which seems to be cheaper, but I can't find any shipment option to the Netherlands. I don't think buying translatlantic makes sense here anyway, shipment costs can easily double the price of the game. Then locally the lowest price I can find is EUR 39,99, a bit too much to my taste so buying international makes sense. I placed an order at Amazon UK for GBP 2

Good, and as voting with the wallet also means rewarding positive steps, that will be rewarded with a sale. Unfortunately, not through Impulse, as it doesn't let me buy it.

People who know me may be a bit surprised, but I actually am Stardocks's side here. I think it is hard to avoid regional pricing at all, publishers operate in different markets, and obviously costs in different markets will be different. Obviously this is not true for a webshop, but publishers have to make a price policy for a certain market and that means an on-line distributor like Stardock has to comply with that policy. And let's not say the EU is an easy market with 23 official languages

While these numbers are excellent, I think you are confusing power factor with efficiency. A good power factor means a low blind current. Efficiency is a different thing and in current state of the art PSU's the peak efficiency is about 95% while at 30-40% it still drops below 80%.

Well, I think the AI is doing threat calculations. As long as you are not a threat, they will leave you alone. This is rather well executed, I have had the AI declare war on me for example when I became close to an influence victory. I.e. "if is_winning_game(player) then declare_war;". The AI also immedeately reacts if it detects you are planning a war (or might be planning a war, because the algorithms can have false positives). And if you become rather large, it starts to form alliances aga

Depends... If a company from .us starts to sell in .nl, it has to respect the law in .nl even if it has no office in .nl. Internet complicates this, and I believe a .nl resident buying in a .us webshop falls under the law of .us. This is again complicated by the issue of regional pricing, it means the company is actively targetting its products at foreign countries, which can be interpreted as being active in that market, and often is interpreted that way. Anyway, we are talking here

I assume the regional pricing is for countries with EUR and GBP currencies. I advice sellers to be very carefull with this. It is not forbidden to have different pricing between euro and forint territories, but it is forbidden to take steps that for example prevent people that live in euro territory to buy in forint territory. Nintendo for example got a heavy EUR 149 million fine for this a few years ago. This was because they we

[quote who="Nesrie" reply="10" id="2308086"] This whole digital license thing is still being worked out. [/quote] digital license digital sale Sorry, but I believe it is important to keep the terminology correct.

Well, there is theory and there is practise. I have activated my GC2 already at least 10 times, while I have only 2 installations: On my laptop and on my desktop. None of these re-activations was because of a re-installed operating system. If I would have had to contact support for that I would have been crazy already. I think 3 activations can be reasonable in some circumstances, but one prerequisite would be that the customer himself can delete his earlier activations so they become availab

GC2 has been very well maintained since its release, so there is quite a difference between the original and the most recent version. But, I believe GC2 Ultimate is quite up to date, but there might be a more recent patchlevel. Patching should not be essential to your gameplay. For strategy, try this thread , I learned about some clever tactics while reading it.

Brad, the patch is not the must urgent thing. I have the feeling that the lack of a functioning mod library is currently killing the community. There is little fun in developing mods if nobody uses them. While I am aware that there are third party sites that have mods available, the exposure of mods through the GC2 Library is extreme helpfull (essential?) to make mods visible to GC2 player.

That would be the bigger=better mentality, which in my experience is not true; when a PSU runs at only a small fraction of its capacity both its efficiency as its cos(phi) drop to bad levels. When designing HPC clusters (part of my job), I tend to use a 1000W PSU only for GPU clusters that have a dual cpu board, i.e. if you have a dual Opteron 2380 and 2 Nvidia 295's or even Tesla's, then it becomes interresting. If the customer wants just single CPU I always use much smaller ones, good power

Your video cards are rated at about 180W a piece. Your CPU needs about 90W. Taking into account the other components and spare capacity, I'd go for a PSU in the 600-700W range.

Any purchase is a vote for Ubisoft to continue their malicious practices. As far as I am concerned these consumer hostile companies shall go bankrupt.

Hi, Anyone remember Giana Sisters on the Commodore 64? I had weeks and weeks and weeks of fun on it when I was a child. Good gameplay, good music, and good graphics. [e digicons]:inlove:[/e] Some people have written a sequel, Giana's return , which looks very promising. It has just been released for Wiz. As I don't own this advanced piece of technology, I am anxiously awaiting the GP2X release that seems to be released in a