Humodour

Securom disk check. No limited activations. Supposedly copies made before the release date will have an online activation in that it phones home to check the date in order to prevent pre-release copies being playable. Any discs made after the release date will not have this limitation. Steam version just has Steam itself. Nothing extra. Information from here. Also supposed to have single disc LAN capability. No activation limit but we DO still have to activate it? **** it, no more Securom activation bull****, I'll just buy it on Steam. Given the exchange rate it'll probably be half the price anyway.

Maybe it's just me in my own little world then, but I thought all these games were coming out mid 2010. If that's the case, what else that's interesting or big is coming out this year?

They should've put a minimum price of $1 on it. Still, I'm betting that even considering that 30% of people, they're still making lots of money (and sales they otherwise never would have gotten) of this promotion. I imagine people would be a lot more free with positive word of mouth praise if they paid for it this way, too.

There are a lot of smart people on here who've invested money before. I on the other hand have never invested before, and as I said, I do plan to see a financial adviser eventually. Oh, wait I didn't say that, I deleted that part of the post for some reason. Have you done it yet? It hasn't arrived. Maybe you didn't hit 'send'. I am very interested in this plan. Please respond.

The following games will be unlocked on Steam (and I'm guessing other stores, digital or otherwise) in the next 1 to 4 weeks: Borderlands (5 days) Torchlight (6 days) Dragon Age (1 week, 6 days) Left 4 Dead 2 (3 weeks, 6 days) I only post this because I was personally surprised that all these guys were about to be released and figured others might like to know.

The problem is that it's hard to tell how much you want to pay for the game until you've played it, so people will err on the side of caution and pay a low price. Of course, it has a demo, so that's a good solution to the problem.

Be generous! If you don't pay at least $5 I will beat you with a stick. http://2dboy.com/games.php It ends on the 25th of this month (4 days). I bought the Linux version for $30 because it's a good game and I'm glad to see them supporting Linux. Edit: Here's some data on how this sale has worked for them so far. http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/

If you had $50,000 dollars at the start of 2011 and the basic interest rate on a long-term deposit account was about 7% (and likely to be so for a long time to come) while inflation was about 3%, what would you do with the money? Assume you have no debts or financial obligations and won't touch this money for 5 to 10 years. I'm guessing high-growth options on the stockmarket?

reliability, actually. theslug specifically mentioned credit rating being correlated with education, though. That's a solid reason for employment purposes, though I don't really get how it would help insurance companies; they're not creditors.

So credit rating is a measure of education and ability to hold down a job?

Yep. Most people don't realise this. It's not just pipelining, either. Bit-level parallelism, instruction parallelism (where pipelines come in), superscalar processing - and all these happen before you even get to multiple cores or CPUs. We've had parallel computing for decades. Data-level parallelism and task parallelism are the new ones.

And thats with Apple making people pay for service packs. Impressive. Upgrading from MacOS 10.5 to 10.6 is like €30, which is completely insane. Imagine the global ****storm that would hit the fan if Microsoft started charging for windows upgrades. OS X upgrades are not really service packs. This one had fewer new standout features than is typical for an OS X updgrade because they focused on performance and optimisation this time around. Among general service pack optimisations they introduced 3 significant new changes: OpenCL, Grand Central, and 64-bit support. Moreover Mac OS X upgrades never cost $200 or $300 dollars like Microsoft's do; they're a tenth of the price. It's a different business model. As for you ranting about Macs being 'useless', the fact that they're certified Unix is anything but useless to me. Certainly more useful (and powerful) than Windows (though admittedly not Linux). Macs also rival PCs in terms of power and performance on a hardware level. It's no secret they're more expensive though and I'd be lying if I tried to argue otherwise. My next PC will be a custom-built box which I'll put Ubuntu 10.04 on and a dual-boot to Windows for the games that don't run on my current Mac. After that it'll be another Mac Mini (one of the most awesome devices ever). I would like a Mac Pro but I think I'll just spend the money on a trip to Europe instead.

I'm 21 and I finally got a credit card. The catch? It's attached to my savings account so it's actually just a debit card with the MasterCard brand on it that works for any credit transaction. Basically so I can do online shopping. I'm like you: I can't really conceive of buying something I don't have the money for. Luckily credit scores aren't as important in this country (transactions only last on your record for 5 to 7 years too) and seem to be based on other factors besides credit cards. This caught my eye though: Insurance and employment being based on credit rating seems disturbing.

Just like my ex-girlfriend. Hahahahahaha. Sheer elegance in its simplicity!

Apple's market share has been increasing for years now (since long before Vista) while Microsoft's has been decreasing. I don't know where you got that from. It's certainly not true for the Vista release (Apple gained when Vista was released and kept those gains) and the data from before 2000 when Apple became resurgent is non-existent. It's true that analysts expect Windows 7 to boost Apple marketshare but I have a feeling Apple would be just fine even without Microsoft donating customers.

The N900 is one sweat-arse phone and if I don't have a new one once it comes out (unlikely) I'll be buying it the first chance I get. It's Nokia, it's Linux, it's a smartphone. What's not to love? Also of interest, Microsoft quarterly earnings come out Friday.

Can't you order non-locked iPhones in Europe?

Aye, that's quite a worry that is.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the reason isn't.

I feel that at if least half of this thread's posts aren't blind Apple bashing this thread will have been worth it.

Although I do find it ridiculous that Apple still has the prices for the products in Australia set at the 1 AUD = 0.60 USD exchange rate considering that it only went that low for like a month and is now back to the 0.90 cent plus range. I'm totally going to order overseas. Except it looks like the iPhone is only sold with an AT&T plan in America. WTF? Tempted to buy this beast in America once the Aussie dollar goes above parity: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop...mco=MTAyNTQwMTk I'd save about $4000 compared to if I bought it via the Australia Apple store portal.

Apple made comments about releasing a new product before Christmas as well as working on lower-end products (admitting the margins will be smaller but saying they're dedicated to providing cheaper alternatives - read: stealing market share from companies like Microsoft and HP). Mac sales increased 19%. They also sold twice as many copies of their latest operating system (Snow Leopard) as they expected and they couldn't build enough iPhones to meet demand. All this in the middle of America's worst recession in decades (America accounts for 50% of Apple's revenue). http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...To_xhAD9BEJCA80

"You will need an Ubi.com account and you must live in the U.S. to play the game Update: The promotion is now closed and it is no longer possible to play the game for free. If you are interested in further information on this title, visit the Ubi official website at http://www.ubi.com/" Not anymore. And apparently never outside the US. Meh, just buy it for $10 on Good Old Games.

If anybody is wondering, here's Apple's latest quarterly earnings: Apple smashes forecasts, stock hits record. Mac sales grew 17%, iPhone sales only met expectations because they couldn't make enough to meet demand. Jesus.