With the lack of anything real to evaluate, this thread is bound to become repetitive, but, hey, its way too entertaining to leave alone...
I really don't understand this perspective. If you can get something for nothing, you're implying that there's something wrong with that. Why?
Admittedly, you often get what you pay for, so if its cheap, its most probably also crap, but this isn't always true. So you're doing yourself (and more importantly, the rest of us) a disservice by paying top dollar, just because that's the price you're given.
A Locost, Mallory Park, an English spring day - if iRacing could deliver this kind of quality... I should probably spend the money on building a Locost anyway.
And Lonsdale is a big brand with German (and quite a few other European ) boneheads... because the middle four letters are NSDA (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
I don't think symbols in themselves have any great power; they are merely vessels for whatever belief you want to pour into them. Their power (to offend, to move, whatever) comes from the concentration of belief invested in them.
Over here in the UK, displaying the confederate flag means your social skills are likely to dwindle the further away the topic of conversation is from some daft, Hollywood myth of "The West".
Or you are a Dukes of Hazzard fan. In which case we all know you are really thinking about Daisy Duke's arse.
Cool, it looks like a neolithic cave painting! Well, maybe I have something to thank iRental for: I'd never heard of Summit Point before this and it looks like a neat complex of tracks.
Can anyone trace the origin of this image? Saw it (unattributed) on a couple of sites, but it looks like a Blender render from a GPS trace.
I think that's an impression that has grown in this thread, but its clear from the iRacing site who they are aiming at:
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Frankly, they're covering all the bases in their marketing, so I think its a mistake to believe that the everyday or (even the casual) simulation enthusiast is not in the target market.
LOL... Yes indeed, there are people like nihil who adopt a pose, but nihil just has a voracious curiosity that is hard to satisfy or placate with pre-packaged thought.
Without a doubt, but it is rarely granted in a transparent fashion; you have to explore a bit to find ways of exercising this, unfortunately, little known right, but just start from the basis that anything is permissable.
PS. Can't add anything at the moment to Sam's eloquent treatise on this matter. Well done, sir.
Shame you deleted your work... But from the posts still in place I do not think you have stolen anything in this instance either.
Quite the opposite, your posts are like a very condensed tutorial on how to analyse a car's behaviour (and hence a setup) with the tools available.
You have nothing to apologise for, and from his posts I'm not sure scipy was directing anything at you. Indeed he says himself that anyone without an analytical eye, will not benefit from the sets anyway. My praise goes to you, Glenn67, for helping others develop that analytical eye.
You don't say anything about price, new or secondhand... But if you're looking for a very biased opinion: Yamaha TZR125. The most fun I have, ever, ever had on two wheels.
Bought secondhand for £300, it was in need of a little attention, but nothing like a rebuild or anything complicated. Given that TLC it returned the favour by being an utterly reliable, two stroke mentalist. I rode it into work, refining my traffic light clutch hand to deal with releasing 7000revs to the back wheel (otherwise it was slower than a scooter away from the lights...) and laughed every morning I was employed!
Of all the things I've ever bought, I look back at the TZR with an almost kinky fondness! You might want to remind me that it was just a machine, a tool, but it wasn't, I'll tell you, dammit it really, really wasn't!!
The either/or construction of that argument is a veil, illusion parading as common sense. But, while there is also the option of getting what you want for the right price (as well as many other options), ultimately you are right to say that people will pay whatever they believe it is worth. Because value is all about belief.
Hence, the marketing for this product has emphasised the amount of time, the amount of labour put into to it. They want you to understand it as a premium product worth a premium price. A free demo would open that intricately constructed image to the subjectivity of the user. So a free demo is not available. It stinks of control, and I know for sure that if we pay the price now, it simply sets a price for future incarnations and has the knock-on effect of reducing diversity (look at the housing market in the UK for lessons on how belief pushes prices way beyond any practical value)
Am i being cynical? Possibly. I don't know. But I do know that as a casual sim racer there is no value for me in this kind of structure. $20 for setting up my controls and doing a few laps to a) find out how well my computer copes graphically and b) find my braking points on an unfamiliar circuit. No thanks...
Sorry, my point was perhaps a little diffused - I wasn't calling the pricing disrespectful, just saying generally that anyone who wants to be in the avant-garde can expect to be questioned harshly. My comments about respect were by the by, a quick reaction to your comment about respect being due just because its a different kind of venture. This just isn't true.
Its precisely because its a new venture that paying customers should be negotiating the best deal possible. Not the best deal for Dave and his mates, but the best deal for us, the consumers.
This will take us a bit off topic 'cos I have views about that ... oh, whatever... Look, if you try to make a living out of anything thats infinitely reproduceable, then the only way to do it is to artificially strangle your product.
Passing the cost of that onto the consumer remains something we should all be unhappy about. No one's found a way around that conundrum yet, but that doesn't mean we have to stop trying.
Well, its the price of being a trailblazer, that you cop a lot of shit, and its a necessary part of being in a democracy that people dump a lot of shit on what you do. Its not actually 'shit', its argument.
That IS respect. It is not in the least bit respectful to say "this is how it is, like it or lump it, and stop whining about it".
For me, its not the expense, its more a structural principle that's the problem.
I think we are in an era where important changes are taking place, and while most of them are in the digtal realm, they have knock on effects in real life freedoms and real life economies.
Software designers have to wake up to a few realities.
Sorry, but my hard disk is my property, and I do not like the idea of someone parking something on it, making it illegal for me to touch it or change it in any way, and then having the cheek to charge me on a daily basis for the privilege of having it sit there.
I don't care how much Dave and his mates have spent on 'development' because frankly, getting to try out lots of race cars, hanging around race tracks, and playing games all day is what most people call 'fun'.
PS: @BBT, you do come across as a bit rabid on this subject
LOL... This is the problem at the heart of eugenics: while it might be based on a scientific hypothesis, its implementation is always political, based on contestable social assumptions.
And that is an assumption based on ground so unstable that it takes rare arrogance and common naivety to turn it into an assertion.
It assumes there is a cohesive "we" in the first place. It assumes that evolution has a goal that can be diluted. Taken in conjunction with your previous comments, it assumes that social, co-operative activity is a lower evolutionary strategy than antagonistic competition. It assumes there is a golden age of fitness that can be returned to. It attaches an unsubstantiated importance to conditions of austerity. I could go on but don't have the time....
Maybe it was enjoyable BECAUSE you were massively unprepared? Unless you are planning on camping somewhere seriously dangerous like Everest, my advice is to take a huge amount of unpredictability with you.
OK, so that might mean lots of drugs and alcohol... you got that covered, but the point of camping is to take as little as possible and seek out solutions to any dilemmas that brings. Get lost, feel hungry, crave comfort! Its the best way to discover things in places you'd never have found them otherwise.
Yeah, I post less often these days, but mainly because people talk such crap. Something like this I can't help adding to though, because I don't think there's any sarcasm here. People are talking about eugenics
It needs to be challenged.
Back OT:
Its not hard to see why the topic should go off on a tangent when so many assumptions are left open in the original question... We need to strip this down and ask what exactly is meant by being at, say, Jim Clarke's level.
Do we mean his skill as a driver and how do we measure that? Do we mean his fame as a champion, and how can we relate that to today's national and international championships? Do we mean his perceived integrity and isn't that something that's achievable by anyone, in any field, regardless of their talent however you measure it?
My own point of view? I think measuring yourself against the past is a fruitless activity. The point is to learn from the past, not ape it or equal it in some abstract system of comparison. Racing is a wasteful activity, and that's a good thing - far too much of our lives is spent in coerced forms of 'productivity'. Racing is a meditational activity: that's to say its a moment of complete awareness in the present. Your last lap is irrelevant; what matters is this braking point, this turn in point, this apex.
Are you as good as Jim Clarke? Who cares? What matters is how hard you are concentrating on now.
So when did you last go out hunting for food? Where is the land that is available for us to gather berries and shoot deer? How can you, sitting in front of your computer, define intelligence so blithely when people who actually study intelligence for a living disagree on how to define it?
I ask you again, which are you: a fascist or an idiot?
This is ignorant double talk: the inheritability of intelligence is a complex subject that only fascists and idiots attempt to encapsulate in two line sentence. Which one are you?
LOL... No, I guess it isn't really a date movie, but of my dvd collection I'm still not sure which, 'Irreversible' or 'Lap of the Gods', has been the stronger test of my relationships...
There's a free rag given away in London that has published a top twenty of British films today. Here it is, in order:
Get Carter (1971)
Quadrophenia (1979)
The Italian Job (1969)
Withnail & I (1987) The Long Good Friday (1980)
Casino Royale (2006)
Trainspotting (1996)
Blow Up (1966) The Third Man (1949)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Dracula (1958) If... (1968)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) The Wicker Man (1973) Don't Look Now (1973)
Monty Python & the Holy Grail (1975)
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
The Crying Game (1992)
Scum (1979)
This is England (2007)
Links are my personal favourites, to which I would add Performance