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Slashback: Setup, Heck, Servitude [updated]
Getcher Woody in prime operation! You may have noticed the report Saturday that Xfree86 debs are now available, and many readers pointed out problems with setting the newest XFree up. A mysteriously unnamed correspondent writes: "i've written an article to answer some of the questions raised and give an intro into how to set [XFree86 in Debian's unstable tree] up (3dx specifically)."
"Sir, I can't sell this to you without your GPS coordinates. No -- really, store policy." einstein writes "MSN and Radio Shack have gotten together to provide high speed internet access that will cover most of the continental US, looks to be great for rural areas, but the downfalls include: $59.95 a month upfront, for a year, $299 bucks in equipment, only works with Windows 98, and you have to buy a computer from Radio Shack. ugh."
D'ja ever stop to think of it this way ... Mr. Buckaroo writes: "Verant Interactive is again trying to change the license agreement of Everquest to make it legal for them to gather whatever information/files from your machine they deem necessary. They are also changing the agreement to prevent sale of characters, items, etc. I remember when games were just games."
Mr. Buckaroo included the full text of a letter to players from John Smedley Verant Interactive's president and CEO. It's long, but worth reading.Makes you think about the voluntary nature of this and the other software you use, and what you're willing to tolerate on your own system.Dear EverQuest Players,[Updated 4:10GMT by timothy:] Reader Ted Milker set me straight on the above item, writing "That letter you posted about Everquest is months old. And it all came about from Everlore copying EQ Vaults archived news. EQ Vault restored a backup, and one of Everlore's posters decided to "scoop" that story without even reading it very carefully. Ruins of Kunark has been out for months, and April is past." Sheesh -- given game development time, I thought they meant next April! Mea culpa.
An exciting time is now at hand. Within the next 2 days the Login Servers will be coming down and we will be doing a patch that will add the EverQuest Store into the front end of the game. At that time, the first product we will be offering will be the EverQuest: Ruins of Kunark (RoK) upgrade for existing customers. This will allow existing customers of EverQuest to purchase RoK for $16.95 (Plus S&H). In addition, we will offer various shipping options depending on which country you live in. EverQuest: Ruins of Kunark will be launching on April 24th. We want to insure that this product is in everybody's hands on or before that date.In addition to this change, we will also be modifying our User Agreement and Software License to add in some additional Terms and Conditions that we will require everyone to agree to before playing EverQuest.
The first of these changes concerns the selling of EverQuest Characters and Items outside of the game (i.e. things like Ebay). Here is the text of this change:
"You may not sell or auction any EverQuest characters, items, coin or copyrighted material."
You may ask why we are doing this. There are many reasons, but first and foremost of them is the amount of trouble this is causing our Customer Service group. Simply put there area lot of people out there who defraud others and we are being put in the middle of it, and we don't have the time or the resources to assist people with these disputes when they arise. The next reason is amore philosophical one and that is that we believe people should have to earn their items and characters in the game rather than from buying them outside the game. Obviously the second point can be argued from other perspectives that we do in fact respect, but we wanted you to hear ours.
The next change to the User Agreement and Software license concerns our efforts to stop people from hacking EverQuest and from doing malicious acts that we feel can affect EverQuest as an ongoing business concern. We have developed the technology to check for these hacking tools/programs and report that fact back to us. Without getting into the specifics of this technology, I can say that we in no way will search a user's harddrive(aside from the EverQuest directory during the patching process), registry nor will we send back any information other than the fact that a user is in fact running one of these programs (specifically we are NOT sending information about everything the user is running back to our servers).
It's disturbing that the amount of recent developments in the hacking community force us to do this. Many will say "ShowEQ" isn't worth worrying about. To us, it's cheating and it's not something we can allow in a game like EverQuest where it affects other people's enjoyment of the game. In addition, although this is the first time we'll be acknowledging this, ShowEQ isn't the worst offender. Recently we had someone attempting to bring down our servers with another malicious program. We were able to quickly identify what was going on and insure this didn't happen again, but nonetheless the potential is there and we need to be able to quickly identify and stop these types of programs. Again, I want to say it clearly that we will in NO WAY send any information back to the Everquest servers other than information regarding programs that we feel interfere with the intended operation of EverQuest. We have had this technology available for some time, but recently we've found it's going to be necessary to go to greater lengths to stop this kind of thing. To those of you concerned about privacy (and rightly so) I want to say that we feel it's necessary to do this but we want you to be informed that we are going to try these measures to protect both ourselves and the game's players.
Here is the text of this change:
"You hereby grant us permission to download Game-related files to you. You also grant us permission to access, extract and upload(i) Game-related data as part of the patching process and (ii)data relating to any program that we, in our reasonable discretion,determine interferes with the proper operation of EverQuest."
Involuntary servitude is another way to spell "truancy laws" Finally, Part Two of our trek through the Hellmouth is online. Read for more reactions on the world of bullies of all ages, and how to pull through it.
"You hereby grant us permission to download Game-related files to you. You also grant us permission to access, extract and upload(i) Game-related data as part of the patching process and (ii)data relating to any program that we, in our reasonable discretion,determine interferes with the proper operation of EverQuest."
I am a former EQ player.. I no longer have an account on Verant's servers. I also do not wish do conceed to their License change - am I therefore able to receive a refund for this product that I purchased? It is 'no longer the same' product now that they have altered a 'all or nothing' license to use this product.
How the heck are Verant and the like getting away with this type of behaviour? Aren't there laws against this kind of crap? Like fraud, or theft or some such thing?
[I'm going to turn things around right now... It works both ways]
It's really because Windows is impossible to support. Redhat 7 is Redhat 7, plain and simple.
So you have Windows?
2/3.0/3.1/3.11/95 original/95A/95B/95 OSR2.5/98/98 SE/Win Me/NT 3.51/NT 4.0/Win2k?
Win16/Win32 built for 95/Win32 built for NT?
IE 3/4/5/5.5/6 beta?
x86/alpha?
Do you have xyz.dll in \windows\system?
Is it in your registry?
Do you have the latest service pack?
Don't forget the lack of proper Win 3.0 compatibility in Win 3.1 and after.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I wouldn't be suprised if it is brought back though, now that Sony owns all of Verant. Sony has lawyers that could potentially back this. And Sony has indicated they want to do similar things. So it wouldn't suprise me at all.
I'm just glad I got off evercrack long ago.
And believe me, the options around here are not great. When my family first signed up for internet access ~4 years ago, there were two choices, and we were only presented with one. The maximum speed was 33.6, and since then has only risen to 56k (for my particular ISP). The service is lowsy, although the stability is decent. A quick check shows almost 3000 accounts.
But recently things have begun to change. The larger ISP in the area was bought out by CenturyTel (national telco). Goodbye customer service, hello broadband. This summer they offered it to customers in Kalispell (larger city by Whitefish), and they recently aquired another small ISP and started offering DSL in even more "rural" areas.
And what was one of the big issues the incumbant senator was running on? Wide spread broadband. I kid you not. According to common knowledge, there is only one pipe in Montana. Its not enough. My school couldn't even get a T1 line. They had to settle for DSL (for an entire school district). There is a district wide technology committee for the schools, and almost everyone recognizes the importance. Despite the lack of broadband, the internet has become very widespread in rural areas, and I can't think of a single friend who doesn't have it.
So I don't know how much of an impact the MS/RS deal will have on the area. We already have DSL in the more urban areas (a town of 4000 has it), for reasonable prices. The only benefit I can foresee is if it prompts the local telcos to built more stations in the rural areas, because DSL does no good at my house, which is many, many miles from the nearest station/DSLAM.
Any maybe timothy would care to comment on why he chose Whitefish? Perhaps he went to the entire-town-including-adults-get-dressed-up-and-pa rty Halloween celebration?
Verant's attitude is best summed-up by this comic strip. (from 11th of Oct, so yes it's "olds".) Read that day's news for more stuff...
> I have NEVER seen a dll version be an issue in troubleshooting a system.
...
Go buy a lottery ticket NOW ! With your luck, you'' win for SURE...
I have nightmares (really) with dll incompatibilities
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Every file created by a human is copyrighted, unless the human has made the file public domain or has been dead over 70 years.
The Everquest quote is from six months ago. eqvault's archives were screwed up and they had news from April on their main page this morning
"42"
Verant backed down and does not scan people's computer for 'unauthorized' programs.
Verant are still evil, but his particular evil episode happened almost 6 months ago
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In an unusual move, Microsoft has filed suit against the online gaming company Everquest.
A Microsoft Spokesperson explained that the wording of their new License Agreement gave them the right to obtain copyrighted Microsoft Materials from their users. The offending part of the License Agreement appears below:
"...data relating to any program that we, in our reasonable discretion,determine interferes with the proper operation of EverQuest."
Microsoft has admitted that some functions of Windows can inhibit and interfere with the proper operation of Everquest, and that this new License agreement prompted them to take action.
What happened was that EQvault, an EverQuest game news site, lost their database. As they pressured their ISP to recover the most recent backup, they ran the site on an older database.. one from April.
It just so happened that the press release up above was the news posted that day.. and for most of this morning, it was the top story on EQvault. ;)
Was kind of funny watching smaller news sites leech the information; kind of gave an example of how many people steal news from other sites without ever READING it. Highly amusing to see it appear on Slashdot, though I must admit, I'm not entirely surprised. :)
Its because linux is a nightmare to support. Win98 is win98 plain and simple.
What, and you're forgetting about "What version of COMCTL32.DLL are you running? Oh I know you say 5.81 but Microsoft likes to release different versions with the same number. Do you have IE5? Yes? Okay is it 5.0 or 5.0.00.1.23? Yes I see okay that should be fine... oh wait have you played solitaire in the last 24 hours?"
Supporting Linux is as simple (?) as supporting Win32. The reason it's not is because that just doubled the amount of knowhow your support staff is going to need.
Hi.
I tried these instructions earlier today, but had to slightly modify them. Instead of:
dpkg --purge xserver-svga; apt-get update; apt-get install task-x-window-system libglide3*
I had to do:
dpkg --purge xserver-svga; apt-get update; apt-get install task-x-window-system* libglide3*
This made sure that I got task-x-window-system-core which has, among other things, dexter and xf86cfg.
Anyway, not a big deal, but that fixed it up for me.
Oh yeah, one more thing: When I patched 2.2.17 for the newest 2.2.18pre the compile failed on root.c: 643 in the proc area, any hints? I ended out just going with 2.4.0pre10, so now I get better SMP blah blah blah..
Sorry for rambling, hope the above helps...
Ben