I'm afraid your "Internet tough guy" facade has lost whatever humor value it once had. It's like a bad Saturday Night Live movie (make that almost any SNL movie): amusing for a few minutes, but then it grows boring and tiresome when you realize that the more you hear the same tired joke, the less amusing it becomes. You leave the theater grumbling because the writers had stretched the material too far and never knew when to quit. Give it up, "JockTroll."
Novell doesn't win. Novell loses big. They have no credibility among Linux users now.
Wouldn't it be nice if linux came in only 2 or 3 flavors...
Somewhat off-topic but yes. Yes it would. The hundreds of distributions are a huge barrier for any company that wishes to produce and distribute closed-source software on Linux.
How do you support "Linux?" Do you support Red Hat? Do you support SUSE? Do you support Debian? Ubuntu?
Do you support NVIDIA's drivers only? Or do you try to add in support for ATI's goofy drivers?
What about sound? ALSA only? Or should they add OSS as well? Maybe just an SDL wrapper instead and leave it at that?
I'm assuming it would only support the 2.6 series kernel?
You'd have to define "Linux" first. It's non-trivial and just because other companies have done it doesn't mean that it's financially viable for Blizzard. How many more coders and testers would you need to support a Linux client? Would that additional cost be offset by new Linux subscribers? If not, then why would Blizzard go down that path instead of having someone else (Transgaming, WINE developers) do the troublesome work of Linux support?
If that were the case, why wasn't it modded "off topic?"
Probably because you keep posting the same thing in threads where it doesn't apply not to be informative, but just so you could have posted a snarky reply in an attempt to tweak people. It's not a remark that advances the debate, it's just a snide comment.
How many people would switch to Linux if Blizzard provided a Linux client?
I don't know that they would really care about this. If someone was paying for WoW under Windows and then they pay for WoW under Linux... Blizzard gains nothing except an OS that is more difficult to support.
My theory is that on Fri Oct 27 Blizzard made a change serverside to their warden program. At that point every user using cedega had the game crash.. over and over until Transgaming fixed the issue. I have a feeling that during those Warden-related crashes (Blizzard reps have said that game crashes like that are often a symptom of bots and software that tries to hack the game) a number of accounts were incorrectly flagged.
Two of my coworkers were banned. Again, no pirated or hacked software, no dodgy addons. These were innocents.
A disturbing trend during this whole thing has been the attitude from those who weren't banned that if you were accused of something.. well, obviously you must be guilty of the accusation.
First, Blue Poster Drysc says that Linux shouldn't be an issue, when asked if the people were banned for playing under Linux:
An operating system would not produce a false positive, no.
As a final word to those here concerning their account being closed I can only recommend that you contact our Account Administration team by e-mailing wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com which is also included in the e-mail you should have received.
...
As I said we take enormous steps to ensure that those we remove from the game are specifically and properly confirmed as being in violation of our rules and agreements before doing so. I still urge those of you who feel you have been wrongfully banned to contact our Account Administration team.
Now, I have two co-workers who were banned who I know don't run bot clients, cheat programs, or anything of the sort. They do run cedega though.
Some people have mentioned that they weren't playing on Linux at the time of the ban but that they were actually on Windows. This doesn't really matter though as the GMs and CMs have said that they don't ban clients as they are individually discovered but rather they build up a large list and weild the ban hammer at once. So, if you were banned it may not have been for actions you were taking at the time of the banning, but instead could have been for something that happened a month ago. My instinct is to blame the period around October 29 when Blizzard made a change to their warden on the server side and it caused all cedega clients to crash upon login. Two days later Transgaming released a fix, but I wonder if a number of clients were incorrectly flagged for those warden-related crashes.
Also, if you were not banned it doesn't mean that your account hasn't been flagged, correctly or incorrectly.
Now, I don't remember what the original submission disclaimer for CDDB was, but I don't see anything legally -- or morally -- wrong with what Gracenote has done.
I see something ethically wrong with one thing Gracenote has done.
Gracenote has sued other companies (such as Roxio) that have used FreeDB, saying Gracenote owns software patents to CD-identifying technology. That so many people worked to contribute to a freely-available resource, only to have that resource closed and then have the closer use lawsuits to attempt to stifle competition came as a slap in the face. Now, this was five years ago, and maybe Gracenote has behaved themselves since then, but after that I chose to use FreeDB instead.
And no, Gracenote did not "release the database to the FreeDB," FreeDB copied a two-year-old mirror that had been made before Gracenote was formed, before it closed the database. Gracenote's position has been that the data was owned by them. In fact, they used the arguement that XMCD added copyright tags to each submission setting the copyright to the CDDB maintainer, copyrights which then passed to Gracenote when they were formed and said maintainer was an employee.
I tend to have a strong dislike for Senator Stevens. He's made quite a name for himself, but not in a good way. He's possibly the senator I would most like to see leave office, and that even includes the two senators from my state (Boxer and Feinstein). Yet the tubes analogy is what people pick to jump on? Steven's analogy was not terrible and it seems that the strongest criticism of it comes from people (like the Daily Show writers) who don't really understand how the Internet works. ISPs and network admins have been calling Internet connections "pipes" for many years more than Senator Stevens has, and the notion that P2P traffic can fill the connection and bog it down for anyone else should be obvious to anyone who's had a home network with a roommate that uses BitTorrent.
What an amount of invective (especially for a general position I tend to agree with), particularly in that reprehensible signature of yours. My God, you even proved the grandparent's post for him. If you want anyone to take you seriously instead of seeming as loony as the extremists you criticize, please tone the rhetoric down. It doesn't help any sort of debate.
I believe that freedom of the "press" is referring to freedom of THE PRESS, not the government.
"THE PRESS" is not limited to people with little cards reading Reporter or The Press. It refers to the notion that anyone, everyone, regardless of who they are or who they work for, have the freedom to report.
with DX, any idiot can sit down and get something working pretty quick using included example programs etc. less BS to wade through. you tell your user 'get DX version abc, windows XP'
Uhh.. except they don't. Most vendors still have to support Windows 98/Me. XP-only stuff is becoming more common, but there's still a lot of legacy support. At least DirectX is easy to upgrade on every system.
The reason so many people used decursive however was thanks to the large number of idiotic whack-a-mole mass-debuff fights that made playing any class that could debuff a huge pain. Ie, not a fun game to play. Unfortunately, some of Naxx's encounters were built assuming everyone was using decursive (because they were), meaning they'll be far more difficult than intended when decursive is disabled.
In the United States, a very sad situation exists where politics and religion are extremely closely intertwined. The Republican Party has now become the party of the religious conservative, of which our country has an alarming number. So you get a lot of people who either think that religious fundamentalism is the way to go, or folks who think that sort of mentality is crazy.
Unfortunately the folks who are in between are completely marginalized by both parties.
I've heard Republican pundits on TV mention the popularity of 24 as a mandate of support from the American public for any sorts of "anti-terrorism" legislation/action.
Exactly. Terror is a philosophy. How do you declare war on a philosophy, on a tactic? A war on Al Quaeda? Ok, that I can get behind. But we have to sacrifice while the "war on terror" continues? Just when will that war end? When "terror" surrenders?
If DeBeers eventually figures out they can make more money selling artificial diamonds, thereby causing them to greatly scale back on their child-labor/war diamonds, I figure it'll be a win for everyone. Sadly, it'll also be a win for DeBeers.
Slashdot Mirror
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Wow. I haven't seen anyone troll this well here in years. Bravo, my hat is off to you.
I'm afraid your "Internet tough guy" facade has lost whatever humor value it once had. It's like a bad Saturday Night Live movie (make that almost any SNL movie): amusing for a few minutes, but then it grows boring and tiresome when you realize that the more you hear the same tired joke, the less amusing it becomes. You leave the theater grumbling because the writers had stretched the material too far and never knew when to quit. Give it up, "JockTroll."
Wouldn't it be nice if linux came in only 2 or 3 flavors...
Somewhat off-topic but yes. Yes it would. The hundreds of distributions are a huge barrier for any company that wishes to produce and distribute closed-source software on Linux.
How do you support "Linux?" Do you support Red Hat? Do you support SUSE? Do you support Debian? Ubuntu?
Do you support NVIDIA's drivers only? Or do you try to add in support for ATI's goofy drivers?
What about sound? ALSA only? Or should they add OSS as well? Maybe just an SDL wrapper instead and leave it at that?
I'm assuming it would only support the 2.6 series kernel?
You'd have to define "Linux" first. It's non-trivial and just because other companies have done it doesn't mean that it's financially viable for Blizzard. How many more coders and testers would you need to support a Linux client? Would that additional cost be offset by new Linux subscribers? If not, then why would Blizzard go down that path instead of having someone else (Transgaming, WINE developers) do the troublesome work of Linux support?
Probably because you keep posting the same thing in threads where it doesn't apply not to be informative, but just so you could have posted a snarky reply in an attempt to tweak people. It's not a remark that advances the debate, it's just a snide comment.
I don't know that they would really care about this. If someone was paying for WoW under Windows and then they pay for WoW under Linux... Blizzard gains nothing except an OS that is more difficult to support.
Two of my coworkers were banned. Again, no pirated or hacked software, no dodgy addons. These were innocents.
A disturbing trend during this whole thing has been the attitude from those who weren't banned that if you were accused of something.. well, obviously you must be guilty of the accusation.
An operating system would not produce a false positive, no.
As a final word to those here concerning their account being closed I can only recommend that you contact our Account Administration team by e-mailing wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com which is also included in the e-mail you should have received.
As I said we take enormous steps to ensure that those we remove from the game are specifically and properly confirmed as being in violation of our rules and agreements before doing so. I still urge those of you who feel you have been wrongfully banned to contact our Account Administration team.
Now, I have two co-workers who were banned who I know don't run bot clients, cheat programs, or anything of the sort. They do run cedega though.
Some people have mentioned that they weren't playing on Linux at the time of the ban but that they were actually on Windows. This doesn't really matter though as the GMs and CMs have said that they don't ban clients as they are individually discovered but rather they build up a large list and weild the ban hammer at once. So, if you were banned it may not have been for actions you were taking at the time of the banning, but instead could have been for something that happened a month ago. My instinct is to blame the period around October 29 when Blizzard made a change to their warden on the server side and it caused all cedega clients to crash upon login. Two days later Transgaming released a fix, but I wonder if a number of clients were incorrectly flagged for those warden-related crashes.
Also, if you were not banned it doesn't mean that your account hasn't been flagged, correctly or incorrectly.
I see something ethically wrong with one thing Gracenote has done.
Gracenote has sued other companies (such as Roxio) that have used FreeDB, saying Gracenote owns software patents to CD-identifying technology. That so many people worked to contribute to a freely-available resource, only to have that resource closed and then have the closer use lawsuits to attempt to stifle competition came as a slap in the face. Now, this was five years ago, and maybe Gracenote has behaved themselves since then, but after that I chose to use FreeDB instead.
And no, Gracenote did not "release the database to the FreeDB," FreeDB copied a two-year-old mirror that had been made before Gracenote was formed, before it closed the database. Gracenote's position has been that the data was owned by them. In fact, they used the arguement that XMCD added copyright tags to each submission setting the copyright to the CDDB maintainer, copyrights which then passed to Gracenote when they were formed and said maintainer was an employee.
Oh, how I wish I had mod points right now..
Donald is Disney, Daffy is a Warner property. Then again, WB's Internet rights history isn't glowing either.
I tend to have a strong dislike for Senator Stevens. He's made quite a name for himself, but not in a good way. He's possibly the senator I would most like to see leave office, and that even includes the two senators from my state (Boxer and Feinstein). Yet the tubes analogy is what people pick to jump on? Steven's analogy was not terrible and it seems that the strongest criticism of it comes from people (like the Daily Show writers) who don't really understand how the Internet works. ISPs and network admins have been calling Internet connections "pipes" for many years more than Senator Stevens has, and the notion that P2P traffic can fill the connection and bog it down for anyone else should be obvious to anyone who's had a home network with a roommate that uses BitTorrent.
What an amount of invective (especially for a general position I tend to agree with), particularly in that reprehensible signature of yours. My God, you even proved the grandparent's post for him. If you want anyone to take you seriously instead of seeming as loony as the extremists you criticize, please tone the rhetoric down. It doesn't help any sort of debate.
Sony reps already make a great number of rediculous verbal gaffs, we don't really need any more fodder.
What a joke of a list.
"THE PRESS" is not limited to people with little cards reading Reporter or The Press. It refers to the notion that anyone, everyone, regardless of who they are or who they work for, have the freedom to report.
Uhh.. except they don't. Most vendors still have to support Windows 98/Me. XP-only stuff is becoming more common, but there's still a lot of legacy support. At least DirectX is easy to upgrade on every system.
The reason so many people used decursive however was thanks to the large number of idiotic whack-a-mole mass-debuff fights that made playing any class that could debuff a huge pain. Ie, not a fun game to play. Unfortunately, some of Naxx's encounters were built assuming everyone was using decursive (because they were), meaning they'll be far more difficult than intended when decursive is disabled.
Sadly, untrue where political parties are concerned.
In the United States, a very sad situation exists where politics and religion are extremely closely intertwined. The Republican Party has now become the party of the religious conservative, of which our country has an alarming number. So you get a lot of people who either think that religious fundamentalism is the way to go, or folks who think that sort of mentality is crazy.
Unfortunately the folks who are in between are completely marginalized by both parties.
I've heard Republican pundits on TV mention the popularity of 24 as a mandate of support from the American public for any sorts of "anti-terrorism" legislation/action.
Exactly. Terror is a philosophy. How do you declare war on a philosophy, on a tactic? A war on Al Quaeda? Ok, that I can get behind. But we have to sacrifice while the "war on terror" continues? Just when will that war end? When "terror" surrenders?
Half the money in the world? Are you sure about that?
If DeBeers eventually figures out they can make more money selling artificial diamonds, thereby causing them to greatly scale back on their child-labor/war diamonds, I figure it'll be a win for everyone. Sadly, it'll also be a win for DeBeers.
Maybe DeBeer's could appeal to the WTO. I get the feeling local subsidies to compete against foreign trade are a bit of a no-no to them.