I was just looking at the pricing for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition.  As it turns out, there are two pricing options:

- Full version ($299)

- Upgrade version ($199)

Alright.  You see that and you realize “Ok, self, if I have a previous version of Visual Studio, they’ll give me a discount for upgrading.”  But then you look at the “before you buy” note about Upgrade eligibility:

To qualify for upgrade pricing, you must be a licensed user of an earlier version of Microsoft Visual Studio or any other developer tool (including free developer tools, such as Visual Studio Express Editions or Eclipse).

(Emphasis mine.)  So to qualify for the “Upgrade” pricing, all I have to do is download and install free software – and one of the products that qualifies isn’t even Microsoft’s software!  (I guess they’re concerned people are migrating away from Visual Studio to Eclipse, so they want to give those users incentive to come back?)

That being the case, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to offer a “Full” version at all.  The product they ship you is virtually identical; they just change the packaging a bit.

Marketing at its finest.

I thought I’d mention a game I tried recently.  Torchlight (standalone demo here, or Steam demo here) is an excellent Diablo-style game (made by some of the same people who made Diablo and Fate).

Basically, they took Diablo II, ground it up into its essence, and then distilled that essence into pure dungeon-crawling ecstasy.  And it looks beautiful.

This is the game to play if you liked the loot-hoarding aspects of Diablo II.  The skill tree is arguably simpler, and there are only three classes (instead of seven), so you don’t have to think as hard about what you want to do with your character – you either hit stuff to death, magic stuff to death, or summon stuff to death.

It also has a few nifty features that I wish Diablo II had.  For example, it has a shared stash.  Anything in it is accessible by any of your characters.  If your fighter finds something your alchemist would find useful, you just stick it in the shared stash – it will be there when you next play your alchemist.

Another feature is that your pet (which you have in place of a hired mercenary) can be sent to town laden with loot.  It comes back with the gold from the sale of said loot.  (Penny-Arcade had a humorous take on the idea.)

Torchlight is single-player only, which is perfect for me, since that’s the only way I play Diablo-style games, and it’s pretty cheap at $19.95 on Torchlight’s official site, or $19.99 on Steam.  I highly recommend it.  (Personally I’m waiting on a Steam sale, because I have other games to play right now, but I’ll definitely buy it at some point.)

Ars Technica has an article with more information about the ACTA leak I mentioned a few days ago.  What actually leaked was merely a set of notes on a verbal meeting about a draft of the ACTA.  That doesn’t mean the notes are wrong, just that we need to keep them in perspective.

Ars’ conclusion is that the relevant portions of ACTA are merely the same as the DMCA, but on a global scale.  It could conceivably, in the future, morph into BoingBoing’s nightmare scenario, but not in the immediate future.

My interpretation?  This is based on existing law – what possible reason could there be to keep it secret?  I maintain my earlier call – write your Senators and House Representatives.  We need this treaty out in the open for the whole process.

What can I say about V?  The premise was decent – aliens arrive on Earth, proclaiming love and friendship and oh by the way we can heal all your diseases.  And all they ask in return is water and some “common minerals”.  Whatever that means.  (An Anonymous Coward on Slashdot wrote an interesting post on whether aliens would actually be interested in Earth; read it here.  Try to ignore the how-many-calories-in-a-baby speculation.  Short version?  No, they’d probably have no reason to care about Earth.)

The biggest problem with the new show is that the plot moves too fast.  Some shows need to move a little faster – Stargate Universe is one of them, I think – but V needs to slow way down.  They should not have told us about the Visitors so early – instead they should have been dropping subtle hints for two or three more episodes that Things Are Not As They Seem.

This latest episode of SGU was… interesting.  Maybe not in a good way.

What I mean is, they did have me on the edge of my seat while they were trying to dial Earth, so at least they were doing something right.

Then again, there was yet another gratuitous and entirely superfluous sex scene – only this one existed solely for the purpose of creating the most uncomfortable situation imaginable for the one guy (who was switching places with Young), and then use that to create an affair with Young’s wife.

This is becoming less and less like Stargate SG-1 and more and more like… Desperate Housewives or something.  (Not that I would know.)