A middle-aged woman I know bought her first laptop a month ago. She's a former biochemist and mathematician. The laptop has Windows 7 Pro installed along with a bunch of scamware and nannyware. Now since this is her first ever computer, she's a complete virgin-innocent when it comes to the most basic operating system tasks. (For example, she had to be shown how to save a file, where that file went to and how to move it somewhere else afterwards!)
What she isn't such a noob at though, is the bullshit factor. Like when programs constantly interrupt her movie viewing to nag about 'upgrading' or when she has to give her consent to do something that might cause damage, in some nebulous and undefined way, to her laptop, mental state, social status and possibly, physical health.
"What the fuck is this shit??", she said when Windows wouldn't let her rename a photo without her explicit permission, for the gajillionth time. This woman knows idiocy and sell when she sees it. I'm currently installing openSUSE and teaching her how to use that.
So are you proposing that what everyone really needs is an international Pirate Party to flaunt the rules and show people that there is an alternative to suffering under an economy of invented scarcity and priviliged access?
Make no mistake. Corporate media is not competitive. (Why else would Hollywood spontaneously decide to produce two movies in a year about mall cops??)
Look at their track record. They don't want you to do ANYTHING that doesn't involve you paying them.
Bizarre, byzantine useage licences?
Check.
Attempting to monopolising software markets?
Oh yeah.
Changing the legal rules as they go and retroactively enforcing those changed laws?
Hell yeah!
Before you so ardently defend copyright laws, ask yourself: In the 21st century does it matter a fuck if a copyright law is broken or that in the 21st century, there are more people going hungry and without the education to end their hunger, than in any other time in human history?
As long as they didn't do what they used to do back in the Commodore 64/48K Spectrum days when they'd just slap on a photo of the game as played on another better machine, I had no problem with the game box 'art' (I use the term cautiously here).
In fact, I feel quite nostalgic now for the glory days of airbrushed mullet warriors saving helpless bikini chicks from ninjas riding motorbikes, and the like.
What really pissed me off though was when they'd ship a game with a 5Kg printed manual, foldout maps and even cheatsheets inside sealed envelopes, to cover up the fact that the game was pretty much all in your head. It was like the great confidence trick of early computer games. Flight sims were always doing it.
You'd be amazed to know that none of the above has anything to do with teachers but everything to do with clueless school administrators, idiotic legislation and lawyer-happy parents.
So I assume you never went to an Irish catholic school then.
As hard as it is to use the term 'Paradigm Engineering' with a straight face, isn't it way past the time when somebody started working on a system that ISN'T just about mapping, tracking, categorising, labelling and snooping on people for the benefit of the first bunch of market researchers to reach your door waving a billion-dollar cheque?
What's next? 'The Dollhouse' by 2015?
I swear, I'm going to have to start investing in tinfoil hats soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_crucible/If you don't learn from the mistakes of the past, you risk repeating them.
Although I think that Norman Mailer alone can't change millennia of basic human cognitive dissonance. If you're not a witch, you must be a communist. If you're not a communist, you must be gay, or a paedophile. You must be those things because the mob demands something to beat down so it can reinforce its model of 'normal' and 'right'.
What if they had a closed-source proprietary product of comparatively inferior quality fiercely guarded by the capricious and draconian rules of a corporation which transparently wants to conquer and control the I.T. media world, and nobody could be arsed to develop anything for it?
What if media developers weren't so damn greedy and shortsighted and none of them rushed to stake a claim in Apple's walled garden?
There're plenty of reasons (for example:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html/) why noone should be bothered with Apple but in all the whining and sounds of dismay everytime Apple does something anti-consumer and anti-developer, I don't hear a lot of people saying they're going to give away their iPhone or go to Android or whatever.
It's just a gadget, people. Your life was fine before you got it and it'll be a lot finer after you've forgotten about it. Assuming Jobs doesn't rule the world by then....
Also in a similar self-important whiny voice of proprietary authoritarianism....
Think Of The Children!
Your Country Needs You!
The War On [Insert Topical Cultural Demon Here] Must Go On
Burn The [Insert Topical Cultural Demon Here]!!
There are of course loads more. Anyway, it all sounds as if no-one has moved on since the 11th century so let's remind those that order soldiers around that you can't always get what you want and usually, you regret what you wish for.
REAL power???
If someone - anyone - came into my home and told me how,y children should live, how I should live, and what I'm allowed to say, I'd assume they were mentally ill. If it turned out that they weren't, I'd kill them.
If I did anything less I'd be a slave. How difficult is that for anyone to understand?
Amazing - because so was I! In fact, apart from trying to understand why these human-being-things (of which I was supposed to be one of) were actually the most stupid fuckers I had ever seen outside of the zoo, I was looking forward to my ninth birthday party.
Customs Officer: "Anything to declare, mate?"
Educated liberal-minded international traveller: "Why, as Oscar Wilde once said: 'I have nothing to declare except my genius!'"
Customs Officer: "OSCAR WILDE?? He's a slim-hipped pillow of a pommie quincie bastard! Get 'im!"
Traveller is beaten, tasered and dragged off to a sideroom by six large men.
Customs Officer: (Glaring at a line of nervous children) "Awright, who's next? Any of you little ankle biters carrying computer games, eh?"
I think it was about 15 years ago that I downloaded 'the cookbook' from a warez site.
It was a TOTAL disappointment. Most of it was outdated (how to phreak public payphones and hack Yahoo! email circa 1998) or overrated. Lots of stuff about how to make pipebombs or pick locks but nothing really interesting, like how to set up and manage a pirate radio station, or how to grow marijuana or how to build an engine and generator or a list of your legal rights.
Fuck it - there wasn't even anything on rifling the barrel of a firearm. And I bet there wasn't much like that in these guy's downloads either.
But do you know where you could learn these secrets of self-empowerment??
Sadly I don't think you can apply the term 'moron' to the real people behind this mess - the programmers who built this codec. As someone who met more than a few middle and senior managers, take it from me that they tend not to be technically skilled.
I'd like to know the names of the team who were handed this idea and instead of refusing pointblank to have anything to do with it, ran with it. Because now we're all sorry for the indifference or just plain collusion of those fucking Jobsworths.
Anyone who's old enough to remember playing tabletop roleplaying games in the 80's and early 90's is likely already aware of Games Workshop's track record. They set boardgaming back by twenty years.
After establishing themselves as the dominant games publisher in the U.K. and having formed a network of like-minds in the 'White Dwarf' magazine and Citadel Miniatures staff, GW merged with Citadel c1989 and White Dwarf became the house publication. Actually, I'll re-word that: It became a monthly advertisement for all things GW.
White Dwarf was almost the only source of games news in those pre-internet days and it had the kind of persuasion and disinformation powers Rupert Murdoch could only envy. The letters page (what they had in place of forum posts in those days, kids) was first neutered (only GW fanboys got printed) then dropped altogether. Presumably because GW wanted to remove all traces of thinking from their fans. Only Games Workshop published games were reviewed - and always only every favourably - and only Games Workshop events were publicised. By 1992 it wasn't even covering anything outside of GW's current catalogue.
Citadel Miniatures had also been co-opted. Their range of miniatures became so much a part of the GW product line that older miniatures were often renamed to suit GW's revised history. (E.g, a range of 1986 Elric of Melnibone characters became generic GW Elves and an early line of Lord Of The Rings characters were all dispersed to generic 'warrior' or 'wizard'. Even the White Dwarf himself was later redesignated 'Imperial Dwarf'.) As well as this, the style of the miniatures became ever more 'cartoon' and a lot of the earlier sexuality and violence was purged. Citadel used to have miniatures of slave-girls being roasted over open fires, nude Goblins and Ogres carrying sacks of bloody body parts. Now, every miniature is relentlessly (Christian) family-friendly.
However Games Workshop's corporate policies are hardly 'friendly' in any sense of the word. Endlessly re-releasing the same core games as 'new' releases with (barely) altered rules, unreasonably overpricing miniatures (currently, a 5-man Space Marine squad costs £20. Twenty Pounds Sterling! for five plastic toy soldiers you're meant to paint yourself.), delaying deliveries and payments to competitors, endless recycling of illustrations and ideas, it goes on.
A lot of gamers will point and say that GW has some great games and awesome miniatures but in fact, nothing GW does is original, their best work was pre-1993 and they don't make a single item that isn't designed specifically to shift large amounts of overpriced, crap, miniatures paint. Even the pulp fiction they churn out. There are good, cheaper miniatures made by their competitors. There are also far superior boardgames available (see http://www.boardgamegeek.com//).
It's pretty obvious at this stage that Games Workshop have no respect for their customers or fans. Most of their fans are teenagers and although teenagers with a Games Workshop habit need pretty well off parents to pay for their fix, GW clearly expects them to 'grow out of it' at some stage and piss off. Just as long as there's another generation of saps in line, GW doesn't care.
And that, ladies and gentlegeeks, is why Games Workshop are bastards and why should anyone be surprised at anything they do?
I agree with you there. Stalker also had some annoying crap where if you ignored the wide open road ahead of you and decided to turn 90 and head off towards the faraway hills, you immediately ran into intense radiation zones suspiciously placed between unclimbable hills and large bandit camps.
I think the main problem I have with this is that it belies the promise the game made when you bought it. 'Action! Adventure! Advanced AI! A Free Open World Where YOU Are The Hero!' Free and open my arse.
Everyday, politicians in the real world lie to people and tell them that they're free and they live in a free world where everyone has the same opportunities. Bullshit. They're prisoners of an economy, free only to compete ever more ruthlessly amongst themselves while small groups of power elites sell the planet from under them. So when I buy a game promising freedom and heroics - I WANT THAT!.
I don't want to be treated like a fucking errand boy ('Clear the rats out of that cellar, newbie.'). I don't want handholding help messages, I don't want the developer's assuming that I'm an idiot adolescent, I don't want North American culture influencing my heroics, I don't want to be forced to conform and I don't want to be punished for noncompliance.
Why the fucking hell can't game developers understand that?
...as an angry mob of rightwing Christian/'Think Of The Children'/Reactionary Old Priests/Shills For Any Of The Above Actually Working For A Rival Media Corporation pressure groups attacks this game for its graphic depiction of secret illegal military operations inside the sovereign territory of a fellow member of the United Nations with which the United States is not legally or officially at war with.
Nah... that's too long and complicated. They'll just say its violent and ban it in Australia.
If this was about aliens on another planet, would we be blithering on and on about 'first contact' rules?
I mean I feel like asking because from a lot of the posts here, they might as well be aliens on another planet - and not human beings with all the understood rights given to them by the United Nations, amongst other institutions.
If Ubisoft were truly so honest about preserving the environment, why would they insist on keeping 200+ watt servers running 24 hours a day to support their latest DRM scam?
(http://www.petitiononline.com/ew15dl94/petition.html)
TV is passive entertainment. Site forums aren't, so your comparison isn't exactly accurate.
Besides having rules on directing continuity people to keep viewers in place for the ads though, TV companies use localisation, CGI to alter advert content, higher sound volume during the adbreaks, adverts during the programmes themselves (not counting the product placement) and they crop the programmes' lengths to suit rigid advertisement times.
And none of that even mentions the lengths they'll go to censor writers, commission programmes for the braindead and shuffle their schedules around in direct competition with each other - just to pander to the advertisers.
Oh yeah, and in Ireland and the U.K. you're required by law to pay for a TV licence to watch that crap.
If they acted like that on your favourite website, would you still use it?
I wonder if we'll ever get to see Lord British pimping himself in a low cut dress?
And by that I don't mean Richard Garriott. I just mean the character. Seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
A middle-aged woman I know bought her first laptop a month ago. She's a former biochemist and mathematician. The laptop has Windows 7 Pro installed along with a bunch of scamware and nannyware. Now since this is her first ever computer, she's a complete virgin-innocent when it comes to the most basic operating system tasks. (For example, she had to be shown how to save a file, where that file went to and how to move it somewhere else afterwards!)
What she isn't such a noob at though, is the bullshit factor. Like when programs constantly interrupt her movie viewing to nag about 'upgrading' or when she has to give her consent to do something that might cause damage, in some nebulous and undefined way, to her laptop, mental state, social status and possibly, physical health.
"What the fuck is this shit??", she said when Windows wouldn't let her rename a photo without her explicit permission, for the gajillionth time. This woman knows idiocy and sell when she sees it. I'm currently installing openSUSE and teaching her how to use that.
So are you proposing that what everyone really needs is an international Pirate Party to flaunt the rules and show people that there is an alternative to suffering under an economy of invented scarcity and priviliged access?
Make no mistake. Corporate media is not competitive. (Why else would Hollywood spontaneously decide to produce two movies in a year about mall cops??)
Look at their track record. They don't want you to do ANYTHING that doesn't involve you paying them.
Bizarre, byzantine useage licences?
Check.
Attempting to monopolising software markets?
Oh yeah.
Changing the legal rules as they go and retroactively enforcing those changed laws?
Hell yeah!
Before you so ardently defend copyright laws, ask yourself: In the 21st century does it matter a fuck if a copyright law is broken or that in the 21st century, there are more people going hungry and without the education to end their hunger, than in any other time in human history?
...but what you can do for your country TO GET RID OF GLENN BECK. I'm pretty sure that's how it goes.
YYYYYEEEEAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!
As long as they didn't do what they used to do back in the Commodore 64/48K Spectrum days when they'd just slap on a photo of the game as played on another better machine, I had no problem with the game box 'art' (I use the term cautiously here).
In fact, I feel quite nostalgic now for the glory days of airbrushed mullet warriors saving helpless bikini chicks from ninjas riding motorbikes, and the like.
What really pissed me off though was when they'd ship a game with a 5Kg printed manual, foldout maps and even cheatsheets inside sealed envelopes, to cover up the fact that the game was pretty much all in your head. It was like the great confidence trick of early computer games. Flight sims were always doing it.
You'd be amazed to know that none of the above has anything to do with teachers but everything to do with clueless school administrators, idiotic legislation and lawyer-happy parents.
So I assume you never went to an Irish catholic school then.
As hard as it is to use the term 'Paradigm Engineering' with a straight face, isn't it way past the time when somebody started working on a system that ISN'T just about mapping, tracking, categorising, labelling and snooping on people for the benefit of the first bunch of market researchers to reach your door waving a billion-dollar cheque?
What's next? 'The Dollhouse' by 2015?
I swear, I'm going to have to start investing in tinfoil hats soon.
...it's a Sudden Outbreak Of Common Sense. How come no-one else tagged it thus?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_crucible/If you don't learn from the mistakes of the past, you risk repeating them. Although I think that Norman Mailer alone can't change millennia of basic human cognitive dissonance. If you're not a witch, you must be a communist. If you're not a communist, you must be gay, or a paedophile. You must be those things because the mob demands something to beat down so it can reinforce its model of 'normal' and 'right'.
...before we have to remind our worthless government of our revolutionary (distant) past.
What if they had a closed-source proprietary product of comparatively inferior quality fiercely guarded by the capricious and draconian rules of a corporation which transparently wants to conquer and control the I.T. media world, and nobody could be arsed to develop anything for it?
What if media developers weren't so damn greedy and shortsighted and none of them rushed to stake a claim in Apple's walled garden?
There're plenty of reasons (for example: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html/) why noone should be bothered with Apple but in all the whining and sounds of dismay everytime Apple does something anti-consumer and anti-developer, I don't hear a lot of people saying they're going to give away their iPhone or go to Android or whatever.
It's just a gadget, people. Your life was fine before you got it and it'll be a lot finer after you've forgotten about it. Assuming Jobs doesn't rule the world by then....
Which means it will only last as long as the console machines it runs on, will last.
Even Hollywood didnt get away with that one.
Think Of The Children!
Your Country Needs You!
The War On [Insert Topical Cultural Demon Here] Must Go On
Burn The [Insert Topical Cultural Demon Here]!!
There are of course loads more. Anyway, it all sounds as if no-one has moved on since the 11th century so let's remind those that order soldiers around that you can't always get what you want and usually, you regret what you wish for.
REAL power??? ,y children should live, how I should live, and what I'm allowed to say, I'd assume they were mentally ill. If it turned out that they weren't, I'd kill them.
If someone - anyone - came into my home and told me how
If I did anything less I'd be a slave.
How difficult is that for anyone to understand?
Amazing - because so was I! In fact, apart from trying to understand why these human-being-things (of which I was supposed to be one of) were actually the most stupid fuckers I had ever seen outside of the zoo, I was looking forward to my ninth birthday party.
Customs Officer: "Anything to declare, mate?"
Educated liberal-minded international traveller: "Why, as Oscar Wilde once said: 'I have nothing to declare except my genius!'"
Customs Officer: "OSCAR WILDE?? He's a slim-hipped pillow of a pommie quincie bastard! Get 'im!"
Traveller is beaten, tasered and dragged off to a sideroom by six large men.
Customs Officer: (Glaring at a line of nervous children) "Awright, who's next? Any of you little ankle biters carrying computer games, eh?"
I think it was about 15 years ago that I downloaded 'the cookbook' from a warez site.
It was a TOTAL disappointment. Most of it was outdated (how to phreak public payphones and hack Yahoo! email circa 1998) or overrated. Lots of stuff about how to make pipebombs or pick locks but nothing really interesting, like how to set up and manage a pirate radio station, or how to grow marijuana or how to build an engine and generator or a list of your legal rights.
Fuck it - there wasn't even anything on rifling the barrel of a firearm. And I bet there wasn't much like that in these guy's downloads either.
But do you know where you could learn these secrets of self-empowerment??
In the science section of your local library.
Sadly I don't think you can apply the term 'moron' to the real people behind this mess - the programmers who built this codec. As someone who met more than a few middle and senior managers, take it from me that they tend not to be technically skilled.
I'd like to know the names of the team who were handed this idea and instead of refusing pointblank to have anything to do with it, ran with it. Because now we're all sorry for the indifference or just plain collusion of those fucking Jobsworths.
Anyone who's old enough to remember playing tabletop roleplaying games in the 80's and early 90's is likely already aware of Games Workshop's track record. They set boardgaming back by twenty years.
After establishing themselves as the dominant games publisher in the U.K. and having formed a network of like-minds in the 'White Dwarf' magazine and Citadel Miniatures staff, GW merged with Citadel c1989 and White Dwarf became the house publication. Actually, I'll re-word that: It became a monthly advertisement for all things GW.
White Dwarf was almost the only source of games news in those pre-internet days and it had the kind of persuasion and disinformation powers Rupert Murdoch could only envy. The letters page (what they had in place of forum posts in those days, kids) was first neutered (only GW fanboys got printed) then dropped altogether. Presumably because GW wanted to remove all traces of thinking from their fans. Only Games Workshop published games were reviewed - and always only every favourably - and only Games Workshop events were publicised. By 1992 it wasn't even covering anything outside of GW's current catalogue.
Citadel Miniatures had also been co-opted. Their range of miniatures became so much a part of the GW product line that older miniatures were often renamed to suit GW's revised history.
(E.g, a range of 1986 Elric of Melnibone characters became generic GW Elves and an early line of Lord Of The Rings characters were all dispersed to generic 'warrior' or 'wizard'. Even the White Dwarf himself was later redesignated 'Imperial Dwarf'.)
As well as this, the style of the miniatures became ever more 'cartoon' and a lot of the earlier sexuality and violence was purged. Citadel used to have miniatures of slave-girls being roasted over open fires, nude Goblins and Ogres carrying sacks of bloody body parts. Now, every miniature is relentlessly (Christian) family-friendly.
However Games Workshop's corporate policies are hardly 'friendly' in any sense of the word. Endlessly re-releasing the same core games as 'new' releases with (barely) altered rules, unreasonably overpricing miniatures (currently, a 5-man Space Marine squad costs £20. Twenty Pounds Sterling! for five plastic toy soldiers you're meant to paint yourself.), delaying deliveries and payments to competitors, endless recycling of illustrations and ideas, it goes on.
A lot of gamers will point and say that GW has some great games and awesome miniatures but in fact, nothing GW does is original, their best work was pre-1993 and they don't make a single item that isn't designed specifically to shift large amounts of overpriced, crap, miniatures paint. Even the pulp fiction they churn out. There are good, cheaper miniatures made by their competitors. There are also far superior boardgames available (see http://www.boardgamegeek.com//).
It's pretty obvious at this stage that Games Workshop have no respect for their customers or fans. Most of their fans are teenagers and although teenagers with a Games Workshop habit need pretty well off parents to pay for their fix, GW clearly expects them to 'grow out of it' at some stage and piss off. Just as long as there's another generation of saps in line, GW doesn't care.
And that, ladies and gentlegeeks, is why Games Workshop are bastards and why should anyone be surprised at anything they do?
I agree with you there. Stalker also had some annoying crap where if you ignored the wide open road ahead of you and decided to turn 90 and head off towards the faraway hills, you immediately ran into intense radiation zones suspiciously placed between unclimbable hills and large bandit camps.
I think the main problem I have with this is that it belies the promise the game made when you bought it. 'Action! Adventure! Advanced AI! A Free Open World Where YOU Are The Hero!'
Free and open my arse.
Everyday, politicians in the real world lie to people and tell them that they're free and they live in a free world where everyone has the same opportunities. Bullshit. They're prisoners of an economy, free only to compete ever more ruthlessly amongst themselves while small groups of power elites sell the planet from under them. So when I buy a game promising freedom and heroics - I WANT THAT!.
I don't want to be treated like a fucking errand boy ('Clear the rats out of that cellar, newbie.'). I don't want handholding help messages, I don't want the developer's assuming that I'm an idiot adolescent, I don't want North American culture influencing my heroics, I don't want to be forced to conform and I don't want to be punished for noncompliance.
Why the fucking hell can't game developers understand that?
...as an angry mob of rightwing Christian/'Think Of The Children'/Reactionary Old Priests/Shills For Any Of The Above Actually Working For A Rival Media Corporation pressure groups attacks this game for its graphic depiction of secret illegal military operations inside the sovereign territory of a fellow member of the United Nations with which the United States is not legally or officially at war with.
Nah... that's too long and complicated. They'll just say its violent and ban it in Australia.
If this was about aliens on another planet, would we be blithering on and on about 'first contact' rules? I mean I feel like asking because from a lot of the posts here, they might as well be aliens on another planet - and not human beings with all the understood rights given to them by the United Nations, amongst other institutions.
If Ubisoft were truly so honest about preserving the environment, why would they insist on keeping 200+ watt servers running 24 hours a day to support their latest DRM scam?
(http://www.petitiononline.com/ew15dl94/petition.html)
TV is passive entertainment. Site forums aren't, so your comparison isn't exactly accurate.
Besides having rules on directing continuity people to keep viewers in place for the ads though, TV companies use localisation, CGI to alter advert content, higher sound volume during the adbreaks, adverts during the programmes themselves (not counting the product placement) and they crop the programmes' lengths to suit rigid advertisement times.
And none of that even mentions the lengths they'll go to censor writers, commission programmes for the braindead and shuffle their schedules around in direct competition with each other - just to pander to the advertisers.
Oh yeah, and in Ireland and the U.K. you're required by law to pay for a TV licence to watch that crap.
If they acted like that on your favourite website, would you still use it?
I wonder if we'll ever get to see Lord British pimping himself in a low cut dress? And by that I don't mean Richard Garriott. I just mean the character. Seriously.