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Comment Re:This is not good news (Score 1) 248

Heck, when you think about it, WebKit has almost become the de-facto web renderer on the Internet, taking over from IE by being everywhere. How and when did Apple take over from Microsoft in that regard?

Webkit lost a lot of user share last year as Chrome switched over from Webkit to Blink and Android 4.4+ followed suit.

If anything, Blink is the current de facto web renderer with somewhere around 40-50% of the market.

Comment Re:Unfair pricing (Score 1) 160

I will never buy anything in the EU until they stop their 1 USD equals 1 EUR scam.

It's not a scam.

OK, lets take a specific example.

In the US, a new AAA game is generally $60 pre-tax... which is 48.6€ using current exchange rates.

With me so far? OK, so the US price is ready to list on Steam because US price listings don't include taxes. However, the EU version isn't, because EU requires that VAT be included in the price.

So... lets take Italy for example. VAT in Italy* is 22%. So... the same price that lists for $60 USD would list for... 59.292€. Suddenly the 1:1 ratio makes sense.

Now, here's the thing: VAT varies wildly across Europe... anywhere from 15% (Luxembourg) to 27% (Hungary). From what I've heard, there are only two mainland Europe pricing regions on Steam. Which means the prices are going to be affected by the VAT rates of the other countries in said pricing region.

* Italy was chosen for two reasons: 1. Most countries are in the 20-25% range... 22% is about in the middle; and 2. I know someone who lives in Italy.

Comment Re:Nope. That's not what happened here... (Score 1) 160

Right now, Steam has promotion where you get "tokens" (for lack of a better term) from game achievements and can use those to buy games. Those tokens have the same value in all regions, so if you buy a game with tokens, you can gift it to anyone else, regardless of any gifting restrictions on purchased games.

Steam gems are gotten from the turning various cards you get from playing various games on Steam (it's based on the game and the amount of time played as opposed to achievements.

Those tokens are actually an auction, so unless you're the highest bidder, you get nothing.

Incidentally, said auction ends later today, to be immediately followed with the Steam Winter/Summer sale.

(I'm too lazy to see if /. support upside down text for Summer)

Comment Re:Why Steam? Why? (Score 0) 160

Let's say the game costs 10 times less in Russia.

So if a game is $50 in the US, and it costs "10 times less" in Russia, does it mean that it's 10x$50=$500 less than the US price and that Valve will pay me $450 to take it off their hands?

Or did you mean "one tenth"?

"times less" moves the x10 to the other side of the equation.

Such as $50=10x$5

Which is the same as $50/10=$5

Comment Re:Naming (Score 5, Funny) 161

Well, I heard* that the name Go was decided upon when an executive at Google needed to think up a name and was looking around his office.

On his computer at the time was a Chrome browser with the Google homepage open, but a Solitaire window was open in front of it obscuring the right half the page.

Now, if the Solitaire window was on the other side, we might have the ogle programming language instead!

* and by "heard" I mean "just made up"

Comment Re:I guess it shows that Valve as a company .... (Score 2) 92

I am glad that Steam look at Twitch as a competitor, but making it so that their streaming is only accessible through the Steam client is well -- a terrible decision.

If you mean viewing a stream, apparently you only need Safari or Chrome to do it. I haven't actually tested that, though.

Comment Re:Use the singular (Score 3, Informative) 274

The Foundation "is", not are. It is one entity. You're not referring to all the people within the Foundation, you're referring to the Foundation itself. You even use the word "it", not them, to refer to the Wikimedia Foundation.

You use is when referring to a singular entity.
You use are when referring to more than one entity or a group, such as they.

From my observations, this is one of those points where UK and US English disagree.

Organizations are referred to as plural in UK English and singular in US English.

Comment Re:Python (Score 2) 291

Of course, Java hasn't stood still, nor have the people that write libraries for it.

Hell, I want to say the Java + Spring + Hibernate stack even existed before RoR did.

Thanks to advances over the years, you can now write Spring applications using no XML. Short example (the longer example guide seems to have gone MIA on the Spring Guides site).

Although I'd hope you'd be using your web server/servlet container's database setup stuff (including connection pooling) rather than hard-coding it into the app.

Comment Re:NDS != NDS (Score 1) 61

Both of my original DS's have a cracked hinge (rough handling from the kids), but both of them still work,

Cracked hinges were a common problem with the original DS and DS Lite. A design defect, if you will.

I kept using my DS Lite with cracked hinge until the R button stopped working and replaced it with a DSi XL... and replaced that with a 3DS XL once decent games started arriving for it.

I still have my DSi around here somewhere...

Comment Re:Funny Timing (Score 1) 61

Though I appreciated my time in the first game for some reason. Guess it's because it was the first Zelda game I actually experienced & played through (I had played Zelda on NES but wasn't good enough on it to have any clue where I was going, also tried Link but had even less of a clue there.)

By "Link", I'm assuming you mean The Adventure of Link for NES?

Honestly, if I had to introduce people to the Zelda series, I'd introduce them to the SNES/GBA A Link to the Past.

A Link to the Past may be 20+ years old now, but it's the first 2D Zelda game that gives you hints as to what you're supposed to be doing.

It's not truly open world (unlike its 2013 direct sequel A Link Between Worlds for 3DS), but unlike most games in the series, you have some idea of where you're supposed to be going at any given time. This is because key characters in the game helpfully mark locations on the world map for you. That isn't to say it's completely straightforward as sometimes you have to figure out how to get into the dungeons...

Incidentally, Nintendo chose to make A Link Between Worlds, a new sequel to A Link to the Past, instead of doing a remake like they did for Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.

Comment Re:That's because (Score 2) 227

First the PC will have better specs on paper, but when it comes to running the actual game, the performance may be worse simply because having a console allows for more highly tuned and specialized code.

Yeeeah, not in this generation. That's because Sony and Microsoft went for 1.6GHz AMD Jaguar Fusion family of x86-64/GPU processors instead of custom processors this time around.

Second, that $600 PC purchased now will definitely be a lot better, but if it were purchased at the time of release, even the raw numbers wouldn't be all that much better, never mind the actual performance.

The consoles use faster RAM (actually, only the framebuffer does for the XbOne), but the PC's clock speed advantage is likely enough to close those gaps... and is pretty much guaranteed if they use a dedicated graphics card (as the RAM speed advantage largely goes away in that case).

Also if you don't already have a good monitor, that's even more of an investment, unless you want to hook up the PC to your TV as well.

If you were doing a Gaming PC, this is exactly what you'd do.

That's one nice thing about everything using HDMI cables these days.

Third, you forget the a console gamer can buy used games at a store, whereas PC gamers typically can't resell their digital downloads. Given that the online digital games on sale will probably be in the same price range as a used disc in a store for a similarly aged game and it's not that big of a difference. If you want to play the newest games as they're released the full-price cost is going to be about the same whether or not it's on PC or console.

Yeah... that's not usually the case. Steam sales tend to be cheaper than used copies of console games. And sooner in a game's lifetime as well.

However, there are some people for whom a console is a much better value proposition. If the PC was hands down better in every case, no one would buy one. However, given their popularity, it seems to suggest that there are a large number of people for who consider a console to be a better value.

Consoles are largely easier to set up and use.

This is the kind of thing that the SteamBox standard was created to fight. However, then Valve started mucking around with the "standard" before the first one was even released. Heck, I still don't think the controller has been standardized and SteamBoxes were announced like a year ago!

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