It's pretty big news depending on how you look at it. Some feel that this is Blizzard giving a big middle finger to their loyal players who have been recruiting friends for 4 years, by now giving only newbies a 3X leveling bonus.
Others have pointed out that the result of this is Blizzard making players PAY to level faster. For instance I've got friends who already play WOW, but we can't play together because they're on another server, and on the opposite faction (so can't server transfer).
If they want to reroll and play with me, Blizzard is now making them choose between:
A) Playing on the same account, with normal (slow) leveling speed.
B) Buy a second copy of the game for $30, plus another $15 a month, to be able to level 3 times as fast.
Considering the amount of time it takes to level, B is a really attractive offer, especially if you have a limited amount of time on your hands.
WOW is very addictive. It's also very fun, but the farther you get into the game, the more of the experience is targeted at wasting your time and keeping you in-game. There are quite a few things in there that are total pointless time-sinks.
So while I'm playing (quit once, but started back up) I don't really recommend people start it, especially if you know you're the type to get addicted. Last time I quit, it was because I realized I was spending every night in Raids ignoring my wife.
This time around I've had to make a conscious effort to avoid in-game 'commitments', and have done an OK job at keeping it casual. The game *helps* in this by running out of things to do at lvl 70 if you don't join a guild and do weekly Raids:)
On the second run through, you can visit some areas and do some quests you haven't done before.
On the third time, you might still find a few areas you haven't played, but you'll be doing a lot of repeat content.
By the 4th time, you've done it all, you're just trying to hit 70 to do end-game content and gearing (pvp, arenas, dungeons).
The distribution of content and leveling speed is also that of a triangle or pyramid. At low levels, there's a lot of content.
Eg. on horde there are 4 unique starting areas, and another 4 unique starting areas for alliance.
For levels 10-20 there are 3 unique areas per faction (so 6 total, down from 8 for 0-10).
For 20-30 there are maybe 3 areas, but by now many aren't unique to a single faction, so maybe 4-5 total.
From 30-40 and onwards there are only 2-3 areas you can choose from, and before the recent leveling buff, you had to do all content in several of the areas to get to the next level bracket.
So on my 2nd character I leveled, all content from lvl 40+ had already been done by my first character. The only real benefit on subsequent characters is that you know the areas better and can complete quests a little faster.
The grind to 70 is so painfully slow that a lot of people prefer to only level up to 19, 29, 39, etc. and then 'twink' that character with the best gear and enchants. Characters in any X0-X9 bracket (eg. 10-19) can play PVP with only players in that same level bracket.
I agree with the other response to your post. I've even heard it from blue posts in WOW: 'one spec to rule them all' is caused by players, not game design. They can make all the numbers work out on paper to be perfectly balanced, but if people in the forums and game keep spreading rumors that X is the only viable spec, then that becomes 'truth', because no one lets other specs into groups, etc.
Used to be that everyone said 17 arcane was 'required' for mages to get Imp. AE. The devs gave that to mages free, and then people said 17 in arcane is 'required' for Imp. Counterspell. The other 15 points in arcane are almost literally useless (at least until the next expansion, when they're getting reworked). Screw that. I leveled and played at 60 (and now 70) as an elemental mage, a spec that people won't even talk about in forums for PVE or PVP.
That said, elemental is getting HUGE buffs in the expansion. More than making numbers balance on paper, the designers have to over-buff things perceived as bad to get people to even consider them, and then nerf them back down to match the other specs. Well..except they forgot about the 'nerf back down' part. I'm looking at you, rogues and druids.
Same here. Got a 8800GT and it overheated in normal play, while keeping the fan stuck at 30% speed. I got rivatuner to turn up the fan speed, but ended up re-seating the GPU fan and reapplying thermal paste.
I took pictures and posted it too. The original Foxconn thermal paste spilled out all over the area around the GPU.
The obvious concern here is that if your openid user+pass gets stolen, you just lost everything.
Most people seem to user the same user+pass everywhere anyway, and if you had one password compromised on a keylogger or public terminal you probably had them ALL compromised.
So maybe it's still an improvement, but it should be considered as a very serious concern.
Doesn't Windows include a shrink-wrap EULA that indicates you can return the boxed copy to the store if you don't agree? I remember a laptop user (Dell?) getting a refund of the cost of Windows using this.
So hypothetically by purchasing and opening a boxed copy of WOW you've still 'signed a EULA'.
Comparing Blizzard with scientology is a tad extreme. Blizzard's intentions here are good, the problem is they may push for laws and legal precedents to achieve it that we'll be regretting for years.
Unfortunately preventing cheating on a PC is sort of like trying to prevent recording of an audio CD. If it comes down to it, you could have a literal bot plugged into your keyboard+mouse+vga ports. If a game can be played by a bot, then it's probably a game designed to waste time and cause addiction rather than be "fun".
I guess it would be pretty nice to see bots cause the death of the RPG concept of "grinding"...
While that's probably more reasonable, it's also true that the company clearly violated the EULA to create the product.
Which brings up the question of to what extent are EULA's actually enforcable? It's one thing to get kicked out of the theater for bringing in snacks, but another entirely to get sued or put in jail for breaking a private company's rules.
How is this any different than the movie theater not allowing outside food or drink? It bothers me that they can ask to see the contents of my pockets, purse, etc.
But the fact is, they're not violating any of my rights. I have every right to not go to into their movie theater if I don't want to be searched.
Likewise you have every right to not play WOW if you don't want Warden searching your computer for cheats, or don't want to follow their EULA.
As I said, Gmail and Google Maps took Ajax and web-based-apps to a new level, crushing the competition with better technology. I didn't say Google invented the internet, or even invented Ajax.
Google innovated in these areas by applying creative uses of new technology, and that's why it's Google Maps not Mapquest, and Gmail not Yahoo Mail or Hotmail that everyone uses these days. Google deserves every ounce of credit for these.
And yes, every innovation comes back to some individual or purchased company or whatever who actually sat there and wrote the code. A company (Google in this case) promoted and marketed and guided these excellent ideas and helped turn them into successes. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that process.
I've seen plenty of companies take good people and good ideas, and instead of recognizing and promoting them, they demoralize the individuals and pervert the best of ideas into an abomination. This is often done in the name of "marketing" (check out ICQ's massive failure in AOL's hands), or copying the existing market instead of doing something original (last company I worked for wouldn't even consider doing anything other than directly copying features from the market leader).
A company that recognizes and promotes innovative ideas deserves all the credit they can get.
I largely disagree with the suggestion that Google hasn't been a technology innovator. As you point out, their search engine won out because it was massively better search technology than the competition. Then you've got Gmail and Google Maps which took Ajax and web-based-apps to a new level, crushing the competition with better technology. Google also has major innovations in using MapReduce and commodity hardware infrastructure that allows them to scale their technologies extremely cheaply and reliably.
That's not to imply they haven't had business innovations as well - Google Ads and Google Apps are smart business implementations of existing technology. Or, for that matter, making their search engine *search* instead of turning it into a spam portal like other search engines at the time.
Interestingly, if you listen to the latest Penny Arcade podcast, Tycho (Jerry) says the same thing. His son started trying to grab/punch him in the balls one day. He has no idea why, just that it hurts like hell.
I'm guessing its from some retarded slapstick comedy (or commercial) on tv.
You're exaggerating more than a little bit. Magic quotes and register globals (the "worst" offenders) have always been optional, and since PHP 5 (2004) have been disabled by default. In PHP 6 they're completely unavailable.
Everyone agrees these were bad ideas, but they can't remove the features from the language overnight without massively breaking many applications. The PHP devs have been doing the "right thing", at the very least since 2004.
Give us a break. I don't know what your grudge is against PHP but statements like
"OO? Only recently."
betray your extreme bias. Php 5 has been out since 2004 with "all" OO features, while PHP4 (out since 2000) had "most" OO features. You really have no clue what you're talking about.
Just wanted to catch a major fallacy here for you:
>>Evolution says that the diversity of species came about gradually over billions of years. >>That Man came to his/her current form by way of natural selection.
Natural selection and evolution are general terms for well-defined and well-proven facts of the interoperation of entities (both artifical and natural).
EG:
* If you kill off most of the non-antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria will become a larger portion of the population.
* If you put a bird on an island where food is in deep holes, birds with longer beaks will be able to get more food. Birds that get more food are able to procreate more. So birds with longer beaks will become a larger portion of the population.
That's darwinism, that's "natural selection" and evolution at work. These are repeatable, provable facts.
Evolution as a theory of creation of life is another matter altogether, which is much more contentious, and DOES (potentially) contradict the bible.
Taking darwinism and the bible at face value, there are many interpretations in which they agree. Maybe we all started as humans in basically the form we are now. But natural selection has still applied to us since then, passing around genes for hair color, disease resistance, digestion of lactose, etc.
Or, still taking both the bible and darwinism literally - how do you (or anyone) know what "God's image" is? Maybe life on earth started as bacteria, and God is an omnipotent amoeba?
Unless you are talking about life evolving from non-life, it's not in direct contradiction with the bible.
Not 100% sure about USB, but Windows XP auto-runs data cds automatically, no questions asked. I tried desperately to turn this off on my latest Windows XP install, and could find no way possible to turn off cd auto-run short of hacking the registry. Somehow every time I install XP I am dumbfounded yet again by how bad it is.
FYI, World of Warcraft HAS "stateful shared quests" which remain active until completed by any character, which then triggers a different quest. They've had several world events such as this (not sure if Sithilius was first?), and in BC they now have several other world quest events and world quest cycles that depend on the world-wide progress, as opposed to single-character progress.
Funny how you seem to know all the secrets to making a MMORPG "fun and interesting and genuinely massive", yet none of the companies that make these games can figure it out. When are you releasing your amazing new MMO so I can experience your great work?
I'm not going to argue that it's a good thing the law is on Blizzard's side in the BNETD case. But there are NUMEROUS cans of worms involved in letting 3rd-party software connect to your infrastructure. There is plenty of reason for Blizzard, as a company, to not want BNETD to exist.
Imagine of Blizzard did provide BNETD with a cd-key-auth mechanism. Now Blizzard is spending their time and money supporting a 3rd-party app that really doesn't bring any money to Blizzard except in the case that Battle.net is extremely poor or unusable. (ie: why would anyone use BNETD over battle.net unless battle.net stinks?) Blizzard would rather have a single entry point into Battle.net and no 3rd-party code to support or worry about breaking. Don't you think Blizzard would just love it to hear customers complaining on their forums about how the latest update broke some 3rd party competitor to their own battle.net?
That's if Blizzard tried to "support" BNETD. Without them supporting BNETD with a cd-key-auth mechanism, it's primary audience is people interested in pirating Blizzard games and still using them online. This is 99% of the interest in BNETD anyway, since Battle.net is in fact a perfectly good service. So it's hard for me to get all teary-eyed for them, even though I do think reverse engineering should be legal.
It's interesting to compare BNETD to Gaim. AOL used to tweak their protocol frequently, partially in an attempt to break the reverse engineers "haxing" into their system. Eventually they sued Gaim for trademark infringement. But the end result is that Gaim changed their name, continued to work on AOL's network the entire time, and now AOL opening up their network in an official capacity. This isn't something that makes sense for online games (yet).
Anyway...I guess all I was getting at is that Blizzard has plenty of good reasons to want BNETD shut down, and unfortunately the law in the U.S. is very unforgiving of reverse engineering at the moment.
I completely agree the auto-install of Safari is super sleazy. I always assumed the Quicktime/iTunes deal was legitimately necessary because iTunes relies on Quicktime for playing every media format it uses. Others in the thread have suggested that Safari may already be included with iTunes to drive their store navigation. If that's the case, then installing a shortcut to the iTunes application isn't *as* sleazy, but still bad.
*Anything* that opts-in by default is sleazy, and adding new programs from an Update mechanism is (as repeated elsewhere in this thread) especially bad, as it will dilute people's confidence in legitimate security updates, thereby decreasing the security of the entire PC market.
Of course, you could easily argue that Microsoft already does this regularly by pushing Windows Genuine Advantage, Windows Media Player, and various other bundled software through Windows Update.
Exaggerate much? As I said, yes, the ipod is popular. But nowhere near monopoly-level popular. For instance Bloomerg measured the ipod as having 72% of the market in 2007:
In addition, the market is very active with competition. Competitors include Creative, Sandisk, Microsoft, iRiver, Samsung, Samsung, and every cell phone out there these days (which aren't counted against that 72% statistic).
A monopoly is based more on competition than on marketshare. Google 'define:monopoly': "a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller".
Calling the iPod a monopoly is simply absurd.
Compare this to Microsoft in the OS, office document, or PC gaming markets. They've intentionally pushed proprietary formats to prevent anyone from even *attempting* to compete in those markets. Even though Apple may have had a near-monopoly in the portable music market in the year or two after it first came out, they've pushed open formats like AAC and pushed for DRM-free formats so that even their Apple Store songs would be cross-platform and cross-device.
If Apple had gone the route of Microsoft and pushed a tightly controlled proprietary format like WMV, Apple could have extinguished the entire music market and kept it to themselves. Instead they're competing based on merit alone, and still doing quite well.
Which is just one reason that it's surprising to see Apple taking this sleazy "auto-install Safari" route.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty big news depending on how you look at it. Some feel that this is Blizzard giving a big middle finger to their loyal players who have been recruiting friends for 4 years, by now giving only newbies a 3X leveling bonus.
Others have pointed out that the result of this is Blizzard making players PAY to level faster. For instance I've got friends who already play WOW, but we can't play together because they're on another server, and on the opposite faction (so can't server transfer).
If they want to reroll and play with me, Blizzard is now making them choose between:
A) Playing on the same account, with normal (slow) leveling speed.
B) Buy a second copy of the game for $30, plus another $15 a month, to be able to level 3 times as fast.
Considering the amount of time it takes to level, B is a really attractive offer, especially if you have a limited amount of time on your hands.
WOW is very addictive. It's also very fun, but the farther you get into the game, the more of the experience is targeted at wasting your time and keeping you in-game. There are quite a few things in there that are total pointless time-sinks.
So while I'm playing (quit once, but started back up) I don't really recommend people start it, especially if you know you're the type to get addicted. Last time I quit, it was because I realized I was spending every night in Raids ignoring my wife.
This time around I've had to make a conscious effort to avoid in-game 'commitments', and have done an OK job at keeping it casual. The game *helps* in this by running out of things to do at lvl 70 if you don't join a guild and do weekly Raids :)
Just FYI, they ARE boosting leveling speed from 60-70 when the expansion comes out.
Experiencing the content from 1-70 once is nice.
On the second run through, you can visit some areas and do some quests you haven't done before.
On the third time, you might still find a few areas you haven't played, but you'll be doing a lot of repeat content.
By the 4th time, you've done it all, you're just trying to hit 70 to do end-game content and gearing (pvp, arenas, dungeons).
The distribution of content and leveling speed is also that of a triangle or pyramid. At low levels, there's a lot of content.
Eg. on horde there are 4 unique starting areas, and another 4 unique starting areas for alliance.
For levels 10-20 there are 3 unique areas per faction (so 6 total, down from 8 for 0-10).
For 20-30 there are maybe 3 areas, but by now many aren't unique to a single faction, so maybe 4-5 total.
From 30-40 and onwards there are only 2-3 areas you can choose from, and before the recent leveling buff, you had to do all content in several of the areas to get to the next level bracket.
So on my 2nd character I leveled, all content from lvl 40+ had already been done by my first character. The only real benefit on subsequent characters is that you know the areas better and can complete quests a little faster.
The grind to 70 is so painfully slow that a lot of people prefer to only level up to 19, 29, 39, etc. and then 'twink' that character with the best gear and enchants. Characters in any X0-X9 bracket (eg. 10-19) can play PVP with only players in that same level bracket.
I agree with the other response to your post. I've even heard it from blue posts in WOW: 'one spec to rule them all' is caused by players, not game design. They can make all the numbers work out on paper to be perfectly balanced, but if people in the forums and game keep spreading rumors that X is the only viable spec, then that becomes 'truth', because no one lets other specs into groups, etc.
Used to be that everyone said 17 arcane was 'required' for mages to get Imp. AE. The devs gave that to mages free, and then people said 17 in arcane is 'required' for Imp. Counterspell. The other 15 points in arcane are almost literally useless (at least until the next expansion, when they're getting reworked). Screw that. I leveled and played at 60 (and now 70) as an elemental mage, a spec that people won't even talk about in forums for PVE or PVP.
That said, elemental is getting HUGE buffs in the expansion. More than making numbers balance on paper, the designers have to over-buff things perceived as bad to get people to even consider them, and then nerf them back down to match the other specs. Well..except they forgot about the 'nerf back down' part. I'm looking at you, rogues and druids.
Same here. Got a 8800GT and it overheated in normal play, while keeping the fan stuck at 30% speed. I got rivatuner to turn up the fan speed, but ended up re-seating the GPU fan and reapplying thermal paste.
I took pictures and posted it too. The original Foxconn thermal paste spilled out all over the area around the GPU.
http://metacog.net/blog/index.php/2008/04/06/nvidia-8800gt-overheating/
That's nice, he got to pick whether he was punished or not? I don't think that's how punishment works...
The obvious concern here is that if your openid user+pass gets stolen, you just lost everything.
Most people seem to user the same user+pass everywhere anyway, and if you had one password compromised on a keylogger or public terminal you probably had them ALL compromised.
So maybe it's still an improvement, but it should be considered as a very serious concern.
Doesn't Windows include a shrink-wrap EULA that indicates you can return the boxed copy to the store if you don't agree? I remember a laptop user (Dell?) getting a refund of the cost of Windows using this.
So hypothetically by purchasing and opening a boxed copy of WOW you've still 'signed a EULA'.
Comparing Blizzard with scientology is a tad extreme. Blizzard's intentions here are good, the problem is they may push for laws and legal precedents to achieve it that we'll be regretting for years.
Unfortunately preventing cheating on a PC is sort of like trying to prevent recording of an audio CD. If it comes down to it, you could have a literal bot plugged into your keyboard+mouse+vga ports. If a game can be played by a bot, then it's probably a game designed to waste time and cause addiction rather than be "fun".
I guess it would be pretty nice to see bots cause the death of the RPG concept of "grinding"...
While that's probably more reasonable, it's also true that the company clearly violated the EULA to create the product.
Which brings up the question of to what extent are EULA's actually enforcable? It's one thing to get kicked out of the theater for bringing in snacks, but another entirely to get sued or put in jail for breaking a private company's rules.
How is this any different than the movie theater not allowing outside food or drink? It bothers me that they can ask to see the contents of my pockets, purse, etc.
But the fact is, they're not violating any of my rights. I have every right to not go to into their movie theater if I don't want to be searched.
Likewise you have every right to not play WOW if you don't want Warden searching your computer for cheats, or don't want to follow their EULA.
As I said, Gmail and Google Maps took Ajax and web-based-apps to a new level, crushing the competition with better technology. I didn't say Google invented the internet, or even invented Ajax.
Google innovated in these areas by applying creative uses of new technology, and that's why it's Google Maps not Mapquest, and Gmail not Yahoo Mail or Hotmail that everyone uses these days. Google deserves every ounce of credit for these.
And yes, every innovation comes back to some individual or purchased company or whatever who actually sat there and wrote the code. A company (Google in this case) promoted and marketed and guided these excellent ideas and helped turn them into successes. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that process.
I've seen plenty of companies take good people and good ideas, and instead of recognizing and promoting them, they demoralize the individuals and pervert the best of ideas into an abomination. This is often done in the name of "marketing" (check out ICQ's massive failure in AOL's hands), or copying the existing market instead of doing something original (last company I worked for wouldn't even consider doing anything other than directly copying features from the market leader).
A company that recognizes and promotes innovative ideas deserves all the credit they can get.
I largely disagree with the suggestion that Google hasn't been a technology innovator. As you point out, their search engine won out because it was massively better search technology than the competition. Then you've got Gmail and Google Maps which took Ajax and web-based-apps to a new level, crushing the competition with better technology. Google also has major innovations in using MapReduce and commodity hardware infrastructure that allows them to scale their technologies extremely cheaply and reliably.
That's not to imply they haven't had business innovations as well - Google Ads and Google Apps are smart business implementations of existing technology. Or, for that matter, making their search engine *search* instead of turning it into a spam portal like other search engines at the time.
IANAL but isn't bundling their anti-virus with Office a pretty blatant use of their monopoly to take over other markets?
Or has the government not officially ruled/admitted MS has an Office monopoly, only an OS monopoly?
Interestingly, if you listen to the latest Penny Arcade podcast, Tycho (Jerry) says the same thing. His son started trying to grab/punch him in the balls one day. He has no idea why, just that it hurts like hell.
I'm guessing its from some retarded slapstick comedy (or commercial) on tv.
You're exaggerating more than a little bit. Magic quotes and register globals (the "worst" offenders) have always been optional, and since PHP 5 (2004) have been disabled by default. In PHP 6 they're completely unavailable.
Everyone agrees these were bad ideas, but they can't remove the features from the language overnight without massively breaking many applications. The PHP devs have been doing the "right thing", at the very least since 2004.
Give us a break. I don't know what your grudge is against PHP but statements like
"OO? Only recently."
betray your extreme bias. Php 5 has been out since 2004 with "all" OO features, while PHP4 (out since 2000) had "most" OO features. You really have no clue what you're talking about.
Just wanted to catch a major fallacy here for you:
>>Evolution says that the diversity of species came about gradually over billions of years.
>>That Man came to his/her current form by way of natural selection.
Natural selection and evolution are general terms for well-defined and well-proven facts of the interoperation of entities (both artifical and natural).
EG:
* If you kill off most of the non-antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria will become a larger portion of the population.
* If you put a bird on an island where food is in deep holes, birds with longer beaks will be able to get more food. Birds that get more food are able to procreate more. So birds with longer beaks will become a larger portion of the population.
That's darwinism, that's "natural selection" and evolution at work. These are repeatable, provable facts.
Evolution as a theory of creation of life is another matter altogether, which is much more contentious, and DOES (potentially) contradict the bible.
Taking darwinism and the bible at face value, there are many interpretations in which they agree. Maybe we all started as humans in basically the form we are now. But natural selection has still applied to us since then, passing around genes for hair color, disease resistance, digestion of lactose, etc.
Or, still taking both the bible and darwinism literally - how do you (or anyone) know what "God's image" is? Maybe life on earth started as bacteria, and God is an omnipotent amoeba?
Unless you are talking about life evolving from non-life, it's not in direct contradiction with the bible.
Not 100% sure about USB, but Windows XP auto-runs data cds automatically, no questions asked. I tried desperately to turn this off on my latest Windows XP install, and could find no way possible to turn off cd auto-run short of hacking the registry. Somehow every time I install XP I am dumbfounded yet again by how bad it is.
FYI, World of Warcraft HAS "stateful shared quests" which remain active until completed by any character, which then triggers a different quest. They've had several world events such as this (not sure if Sithilius was first?), and in BC they now have several other world quest events and world quest cycles that depend on the world-wide progress, as opposed to single-character progress.
Funny how you seem to know all the secrets to making a MMORPG "fun and interesting and genuinely massive", yet none of the companies that make these games can figure it out. When are you releasing your amazing new MMO so I can experience your great work?
I'm not going to argue that it's a good thing the law is on Blizzard's side in the BNETD case. But there are NUMEROUS cans of worms involved in letting 3rd-party software connect to your infrastructure. There is plenty of reason for Blizzard, as a company, to not want BNETD to exist.
Imagine of Blizzard did provide BNETD with a cd-key-auth mechanism. Now Blizzard is spending their time and money supporting a 3rd-party app that really doesn't bring any money to Blizzard except in the case that Battle.net is extremely poor or unusable. (ie: why would anyone use BNETD over battle.net unless battle.net stinks?) Blizzard would rather have a single entry point into Battle.net and no 3rd-party code to support or worry about breaking. Don't you think Blizzard would just love it to hear customers complaining on their forums about how the latest update broke some 3rd party competitor to their own battle.net?
That's if Blizzard tried to "support" BNETD. Without them supporting BNETD with a cd-key-auth mechanism, it's primary audience is people interested in pirating Blizzard games and still using them online. This is 99% of the interest in BNETD anyway, since Battle.net is in fact a perfectly good service. So it's hard for me to get all teary-eyed for them, even though I do think reverse engineering should be legal.
It's interesting to compare BNETD to Gaim. AOL used to tweak their protocol frequently, partially in an attempt to break the reverse engineers "haxing" into their system. Eventually they sued Gaim for trademark infringement. But the end result is that Gaim changed their name, continued to work on AOL's network the entire time, and now AOL opening up their network in an official capacity. This isn't something that makes sense for online games (yet).
Anyway...I guess all I was getting at is that Blizzard has plenty of good reasons to want BNETD shut down, and unfortunately the law in the U.S. is very unforgiving of reverse engineering at the moment.
As another poster suggests, it seems the author would have to have broken the WoW terms and conditions to create the bot.
But I guess that's not a strong legal case if they're pushing this copyright stuff? The copyright stuff doesn't seem like a very strong case either...
Lol...that's awesome. I've always used quicktime alternative on windows machines, but had no idea that iTunes would use it in place of quicktime.
I completely agree the auto-install of Safari is super sleazy. I always assumed the Quicktime/iTunes deal was legitimately necessary because iTunes relies on Quicktime for playing every media format it uses. Others in the thread have suggested that Safari may already be included with iTunes to drive their store navigation. If that's the case, then installing a shortcut to the iTunes application isn't *as* sleazy, but still bad.
*Anything* that opts-in by default is sleazy, and adding new programs from an Update mechanism is (as repeated elsewhere in this thread) especially bad, as it will dilute people's confidence in legitimate security updates, thereby decreasing the security of the entire PC market.
Of course, you could easily argue that Microsoft already does this regularly by pushing Windows Genuine Advantage, Windows Media Player, and various other bundled software through Windows Update.
Exaggerate much? As I said, yes, the ipod is popular. But nowhere near monopoly-level popular. For instance Bloomerg measured the ipod as having 72% of the market in 2007:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aM6PvSxM.wq8&refer=us
In addition, the market is very active with competition. Competitors include Creative, Sandisk, Microsoft, iRiver, Samsung, Samsung, and every cell phone out there these days (which aren't counted against that 72% statistic).
A monopoly is based more on competition than on marketshare. Google 'define:monopoly': "a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller".
Calling the iPod a monopoly is simply absurd.
Compare this to Microsoft in the OS, office document, or PC gaming markets. They've intentionally pushed proprietary formats to prevent anyone from even *attempting* to compete in those markets. Even though Apple may have had a near-monopoly in the portable music market in the year or two after it first came out, they've pushed open formats like AAC and pushed for DRM-free formats so that even their Apple Store songs would be cross-platform and cross-device.
If Apple had gone the route of Microsoft and pushed a tightly controlled proprietary format like WMV, Apple could have extinguished the entire music market and kept it to themselves. Instead they're competing based on merit alone, and still doing quite well.
Which is just one reason that it's surprising to see Apple taking this sleazy "auto-install Safari" route.