You get games DRM-less on physical media? What about Starforce and friends? Not exactly DRM as in music world, but close enough; prevents you from making backups.
I don't see where from his sentence did you extrapolate he's pirating anything? From Several people in this thread told you clearly that they're interested in copying their own CDs into their own personal digital music collection (MP3s, OGGs,...) Nowhere they said THEY would use ripping process to produce copies that are easy to share with other people. They are interested in creating copies for personal use, for sharing between their own devices.
Same thing with DRMed media. People don't want DRM because they are unable to copy music to their own devices. And all for the sake of protecting against pirates... who may be us or may not be us.
Piracy isn't good. All that I can see that was claimed above your post is that piracy is unavoidable, but nowhere that they do it or that they condone it.
Again, point me where in your post's ancestors did you find implication of piracy being good?
Personally I'm a Chrome (where available) and Opera guy myself, with occasional voyages into Firefox space, mostly for development purposes. I find the speed a priority, and IE, version 7 included, could not even closely satisfy me there. It's so sad that numerous users on websites I work on still use IE so I have to think about them too.
Based on your words, it seems taht soon I'll be able to remove "sad" part of the previous sentence. I still won't use it myself, for numerous reasons that are too small, but numerous, to be mentioned there. Still: dev purposes - thumb down, speed - thumb down (unless IE8 changes something), extensions - thumb down. And I find the UI of IE6 too featureless, IE7's is clumsy, and well, haven't tried IE8. Dunno. Mostly personal reasons.
How about getting your systems to render properly on somewhat more standards compliant browsers - Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome? Of course, that is out of question if you use ActiveX... then again, if you do, why do you use ActiveX?
How can you be sure they don't keep backups? And since they now claim to have rights to use your content (including, for example, company's trademarked logo) they can keep using it. Forever.
And I uploaded the content before these new, "revised" terms were announced.
I disagree that this is a valid reason for deleting a part of human knowledge and history. Or do you mean that having 37,142 currently connected players at the time writing is not notable?
Compare this to Tibia having 49,320 player currently connected players at time of writing. A quick Google search would also make an observer believe only its players talk about it... until you see that the founders of the company go to conferences together with representatives of Sony Online and other competition, and that there are TV reports in Poland about effect of Tibia.
But number of players isn't all that different, is it? There are times when Tibia has about 20,000 concurrent players.
Numbers tell me that OpenTibia is remarkably notable. Numbers tell me that OpenTibia has an enormous worldwide community; somewhat dispersed compared to Tibia, and not as organized (since there isn't a single company running the show), but it is quite remarkable success for an "emulator" of a server.
There is a lot of much less notable, much less used software out there which has an article, and there are many stub articles which stay stub for a long time... yet they are not deleted. Because someone talks about it?
Hundreds of comic book character articles deserve to exist, although the character appeared in one or two issues, and there is almost no fan-fic nor fan-art, nor any kind of discussion on the internet... But OpenTibia, with a vibrant and active community, deserves is not notable just because "only users talk about it"? Who better than the users?!
Understand, this is not a coherent community, and OpenTibia does not offer a complete product (doesn't offer a client, for example) so naturally there won't be reviews in any magazines, there won't be TV reports on it, there won't be... well, only its users and developers will talk about it. Should someone approach a Linux/FLOSS magazine to write an article about it in order to be Wikipediable?
Another important thing: "third party sources". How do you define third party? Aren't all those thousands of players, who actually just play the game and are not affiliated with developers, third party? Isn't host of OtServList.org, who doesn't work on OpenTibia, pretty much third party? Isn't host of OtServNews.org, who isn't working on OpenTibia code, also third party? Aren't article authors on OTSN.org, occasionally players or hosts of unaffiliated servers, also third party? Where does "third party" begin and end?
So once again: 37,000 vs 49,000? One is notable just because there is a TV report about it... the other is not? One deserves an article... the other does not? I find deletion of OpenTibia article on two separate occasions quite bad judgement on Wikipedia's administrators' part, and there is very little that can make me change my mind.
Even worse is deleting articles on some subjects. Example is OpenTibia Server which is an MMO with minimum of 1000 servers with a minimum total of 15,000 players at any particular moment. Citation here. Now the funny thing is...
article got deleted for notability reasons, among other things:)
No, it's not just for private data. Specifically, the "Facebook Pages" feature isn't; it's specifically meant for artists, companies and public figures to advertise themselves for free.
What about uploading content from a game, or content about a music artist? If I upload a song, or a screenshot from my game, or my company's logo, does that mean they can use it as they please? What if someone uploads unlicensed content, such as a, dunno, Pokemon? Can FB own that too?
I for one extremely dislike virtual keyboards. It's quite clumsy to type on them, unless you have a stylus, and even then I'd prefer Graffiti. I don't mean Graffiti-like method, I mean Graffiti; both Graffiti2 from Palm and Letter Recognizer from MS are bad. Transcriber may be interesting... if I only wanted to enter English text. In full. All the time.
I use acronyms, I use Croatian language, I use programming language keywords and variable names. I don't enter plain English text.
Graffiti is the best entry method to date, seconded by physical keyboards of any format.
Excuse me, taking out Evolution? Although most users use webmail, many still use POP and IMAP mail because they don't know better. What about games -- many users want at least basic entertainment while waiting for download of extra content to finish. (We can argue that xbill would be sufficient instead of whole load of Gnome games, but meh.)
You could also install XFCE (as part of Xubuntu) instead and get lite/r Ubuntu automagically. How about going for Debian + well-configured IceWM? It could work, it could function. Same as WindowMaker; quite usable, but not well maintained in Debian (as far as other packages come, at least).
Now imagine stuff like that happening in country like Croatia, of which many people didn't even hear. I can name several examples:
* cards replacing paper booklets in medical care cca 10 years ago... and for several years most doctors didn't have the equipment for reading the data required for treating patients
* introduction of "e-index" three years ago, for grades of university students, unifying old "X-card" (used for tracking food subventions in student cantines) , and old paper booklet "index"... of course, it is immeasurably more difficult to read the grades from e-index, requires a.Net 3.0 application, and besides, there's an online system we can log into to show grades to prospective employers
Also, we can count in introduction of "OIB", person identification number, also known as tax number. Basic difference to JMBG (unique citizen's identification number)?
* OIB is shorter (13->11 digits)
* OIB doesn't contain any data about person (random numbers + 1 checksum digit)
And why? To satisfy European union.
I find it quite absurd that a shorter number is considered more secure. And we're spending hundreds millions on the project which includes delivering of OIBs in paper form to every single citizen in the country.
I only played FreeCol. I didn't play original Colonization, but I presume it by comparison only includes game mechanics and help for mechanics, instead of expanded history articles. In any case, even as a complete foreigner with regards to US (south-east Europe), I didn't learn so much; I guess I knew enough about US history from other sources:)
I agree with most points you made in this last posting, and I'd like to point out where my experiences of "losing being bad" come from: StarCraft, CounterStrike and Age of Empires players. Well, mostly SC and AoE. It's kind-of hard to believe that when you get online, you look and feel like a person who never touched the game. And with StarCraft, I had an unpleasant experience of kind-of introducing a person to the game, and in a few months becoming someone who could not even start building an army before being overwhelmed by an army of Zealots.
And there's also one "unnamed MMORPG" ruled by twelve-year-old brats with a daily 8-hour routine of playing this game, and without any respect for anyone, not to mention most don't speak English properly. And the game even isn't that fun. It's quite slow, and becomes even more frustrating when you get killed while going about on your own business... because getting killed can easily take away results of several hours of gameplay. Which isn't a problem for the brats, but for a casual player, it's not just a problem, it's a frustrating anti-experience. Did I just invent that expression? Probably, but in my mind it fits the description perfectly.
I mostly play games to learn how things are done -- in past few years it became obvious that gaming industry is "my thing" and lately, if I play a game, it's mostly to see "how to do things (right)".
Obviously, being able to recognize context is important here. Losing in computer games from bunch of spoiled brats when you're just looking for entertainment when you come back from tiresome work -- that's not my idea of fun.
Besides, contrary to many other people (including entire nations in some cases) I do not consider gaming a sport, nor a business. Bikers also are not having fun when they're racing; they're actually working, or at least working out.
I'm trying to have fun. I'll gladly lose to someone of my own skill level. I will however not compete with kids whose entire lives are online and who spend over eight hours a day playing their favorite game. Because, that's what many online players do. If I were racing with a biker, I'd be of his own level, or else I would not play. Same thing here. Losing catastrophically isn't fun. And that's it.
The only person I have to beat is myself. Yes. True. Sadly, that's the only thing that pushes me through life and, excuse me, but I didn't need you to tell me this.
Now tell me losing is fun when you didn't intend to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
You get games DRM-less on physical media? What about Starforce and friends? Not exactly DRM as in music world, but close enough; prevents you from making backups.
I don't see where from his sentence did you extrapolate he's pirating anything? From Several people in this thread told you clearly that they're interested in copying their own CDs into their own personal digital music collection (MP3s, OGGs,...) Nowhere they said THEY would use ripping process to produce copies that are easy to share with other people. They are interested in creating copies for personal use, for sharing between their own devices.
Same thing with DRMed media. People don't want DRM because they are unable to copy music to their own devices. And all for the sake of protecting against pirates... who may be us or may not be us.
Piracy isn't good. All that I can see that was claimed above your post is that piracy is unavoidable, but nowhere that they do it or that they condone it.
Again, point me where in your post's ancestors did you find implication of piracy being good?
General Ackbar says: "It's a trap!"
Rule 34?
Personally I'm a Chrome (where available) and Opera guy myself, with occasional voyages into Firefox space, mostly for development purposes. I find the speed a priority, and IE, version 7 included, could not even closely satisfy me there. It's so sad that numerous users on websites I work on still use IE so I have to think about them too.
Based on your words, it seems taht soon I'll be able to remove "sad" part of the previous sentence. I still won't use it myself, for numerous reasons that are too small, but numerous, to be mentioned there. Still: dev purposes - thumb down, speed - thumb down (unless IE8 changes something), extensions - thumb down. And I find the UI of IE6 too featureless, IE7's is clumsy, and well, haven't tried IE8. Dunno. Mostly personal reasons.
In the name of all web programmers world-wide, may the Lords of Kobol make your words true :)
How can they know if I have permission to upload or not?
How about getting your systems to render properly on somewhat more standards compliant browsers - Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome? Of course, that is out of question if you use ActiveX... then again, if you do, why do you use ActiveX?
How can you be sure they don't keep backups? And since they now claim to have rights to use your content (including, for example, company's trademarked logo) they can keep using it. Forever.
And I uploaded the content before these new, "revised" terms were announced.
Did I spam it?
I disagree that this is a valid reason for deleting a part of human knowledge and history. Or do you mean that having 37,142 currently connected players at the time writing is not notable?
Compare this to Tibia having 49,320 player currently connected players at time of writing. A quick Google search would also make an observer believe only its players talk about it... until you see that the founders of the company go to conferences together with representatives of Sony Online and other competition, and that there are TV reports in Poland about effect of Tibia.
But number of players isn't all that different, is it? There are times when Tibia has about 20,000 concurrent players.
Numbers tell me that OpenTibia is remarkably notable. Numbers tell me that OpenTibia has an enormous worldwide community; somewhat dispersed compared to Tibia, and not as organized (since there isn't a single company running the show), but it is quite remarkable success for an "emulator" of a server.
There is a lot of much less notable, much less used software out there which has an article, and there are many stub articles which stay stub for a long time ... yet they are not deleted. Because someone talks about it?
Hundreds of comic book character articles deserve to exist, although the character appeared in one or two issues, and there is almost no fan-fic nor fan-art, nor any kind of discussion on the internet... But OpenTibia, with a vibrant and active community, deserves is not notable just because "only users talk about it"? Who better than the users?!
Understand, this is not a coherent community, and OpenTibia does not offer a complete product (doesn't offer a client, for example) so naturally there won't be reviews in any magazines, there won't be TV reports on it, there won't be ... well, only its users and developers will talk about it. Should someone approach a Linux/FLOSS magazine to write an article about it in order to be Wikipediable?
Another important thing: "third party sources". How do you define third party? Aren't all those thousands of players, who actually just play the game and are not affiliated with developers, third party? Isn't host of OtServList.org, who doesn't work on OpenTibia, pretty much third party? Isn't host of OtServNews.org, who isn't working on OpenTibia code, also third party? Aren't article authors on OTSN.org, occasionally players or hosts of unaffiliated servers, also third party? Where does "third party" begin and end?
So once again: 37,000 vs 49,000? One is notable just because there is a TV report about it ... the other is not? One deserves an article ... the other does not? I find deletion of OpenTibia article on two separate occasions quite bad judgement on Wikipedia's administrators' part, and there is very little that can make me change my mind.
Even worse is deleting articles on some subjects. Example is OpenTibia Server which is an MMO with minimum of 1000 servers with a minimum total of 15,000 players at any particular moment. Citation here. Now the funny thing is...
article got deleted for notability reasons, among other things :)
No, it's not just for private data. Specifically, the "Facebook Pages" feature isn't; it's specifically meant for artists, companies and public figures to advertise themselves for free.
What about uploading content from a game, or content about a music artist? If I upload a song, or a screenshot from my game, or my company's logo, does that mean they can use it as they please? What if someone uploads unlicensed content, such as a, dunno, Pokemon? Can FB own that too?
I for one extremely dislike virtual keyboards. It's quite clumsy to type on them, unless you have a stylus, and even then I'd prefer Graffiti. I don't mean Graffiti-like method, I mean Graffiti; both Graffiti2 from Palm and Letter Recognizer from MS are bad. Transcriber may be interesting ... if I only wanted to enter English text. In full. All the time.
I use acronyms, I use Croatian language, I use programming language keywords and variable names. I don't enter plain English text.
Graffiti is the best entry method to date, seconded by physical keyboards of any format.
Gmail, sir. Gmail.
xbill, plx
Excuse me, taking out Evolution? Although most users use webmail, many still use POP and IMAP mail because they don't know better. What about games -- many users want at least basic entertainment while waiting for download of extra content to finish. (We can argue that xbill would be sufficient instead of whole load of Gnome games, but meh.)
You could also install XFCE (as part of Xubuntu) instead and get lite/r Ubuntu automagically. How about going for Debian + well-configured IceWM? It could work, it could function. Same as WindowMaker; quite usable, but not well maintained in Debian (as far as other packages come, at least).
Both much liter than either Gnome or KDE.
3. Send in the LPTs (Linux Proselytization Teams) to spread the Word amongst all those who didn't get the message the first time around.
They probably already have Word, or else they wouldn't need reeducation :)
Now imagine stuff like that happening in country like Croatia, of which many people didn't even hear. I can name several examples:
* cards replacing paper booklets in medical care cca 10 years ago ... and for several years most doctors didn't have the equipment for reading the data required for treating patients
* introduction of "e-index" three years ago, for grades of university students, unifying old "X-card" (used for tracking food subventions in student cantines) , and old paper booklet "index"... of course, it is immeasurably more difficult to read the grades from e-index, requires a .Net 3.0 application, and besides, there's an online system we can log into to show grades to prospective employers
Also, we can count in introduction of "OIB", person identification number, also known as tax number. Basic difference to JMBG (unique citizen's identification number)?
* OIB is shorter (13->11 digits)
* OIB doesn't contain any data about person
(random numbers + 1 checksum digit)
And why? To satisfy European union.
I find it quite absurd that a shorter number is considered more secure. And we're spending hundreds millions on the project which includes delivering of OIBs in paper form to every single citizen in the country.
Why?!
Summary is also incorrect in another slight detail:
"So if there are only 200 advanced civilizations in our galaxy, the chances are that theyâ(TM)ll never notice each other."
That's a quote from TFA. (Link provided for those who are lazy to scroll up :) )
Not geek?! Hey! I take pride in being a geek :D
I only played FreeCol. I didn't play original Colonization, but I presume it by comparison only includes game mechanics and help for mechanics, instead of expanded history articles. In any case, even as a complete foreigner with regards to US (south-east Europe), I didn't learn so much; I guess I knew enough about US history from other sources :)
Father mode? Nice :)
I agree with most points you made in this last posting, and I'd like to point out where my experiences of "losing being bad" come from: StarCraft, CounterStrike and Age of Empires players. Well, mostly SC and AoE. It's kind-of hard to believe that when you get online, you look and feel like a person who never touched the game. And with StarCraft, I had an unpleasant experience of kind-of introducing a person to the game, and in a few months becoming someone who could not even start building an army before being overwhelmed by an army of Zealots.
And there's also one "unnamed MMORPG" ruled by twelve-year-old brats with a daily 8-hour routine of playing this game, and without any respect for anyone, not to mention most don't speak English properly. And the game even isn't that fun. It's quite slow, and becomes even more frustrating when you get killed while going about on your own business... because getting killed can easily take away results of several hours of gameplay. Which isn't a problem for the brats, but for a casual player, it's not just a problem, it's a frustrating anti-experience. Did I just invent that expression? Probably, but in my mind it fits the description perfectly.
I mostly play games to learn how things are done -- in past few years it became obvious that gaming industry is "my thing" and lately, if I play a game, it's mostly to see "how to do things (right)".
Thanks for a nice discussion :)
Obviously, being able to recognize context is important here. Losing in computer games from bunch of spoiled brats when you're just looking for entertainment when you come back from tiresome work -- that's not my idea of fun.
Besides, contrary to many other people (including entire nations in some cases) I do not consider gaming a sport, nor a business. Bikers also are not having fun when they're racing; they're actually working, or at least working out.
I'm trying to have fun. I'll gladly lose to someone of my own skill level. I will however not compete with kids whose entire lives are online and who spend over eight hours a day playing their favorite game. Because, that's what many online players do. If I were racing with a biker, I'd be of his own level, or else I would not play. Same thing here. Losing catastrophically isn't fun. And that's it.
The only person I have to beat is myself. Yes. True. Sadly, that's the only thing that pushes me through life and, excuse me, but I didn't need you to tell me this.
Now tell me losing is fun when you didn't intend to lose.
Losing isn't fun.
Perhaps. Remaining three quarters probably include full songs, rest probably include no music at all.
[citation needed]