Speaking of Paypal, your Paypal link doesn't show up in the latest nighlies of Mozilla. No graphic is shown and there's no link where the graphic should be. I have no clue if its your bug or a Mozilla bug. It works fine in Netscape 4.7x.
Honestly, if you're not gung-ho about bug-fixing and bug-reporting, you probably shouldn't be using the Mozilla nightlies. That's the audience the nightlies are aimed for. There's no problem with the image/icon in Mozilla 0.9.8, but if it's not showing up in the nightlies, then that's a bug there. Whenever you suspect a bug, compare the results to a stable release like 0.9.8. If it looks like a nightlies bug, then report it.
There's a big difference in the required security for a list of credit card numbers, and a list of passwords for essentially-worthless slashdot accounts.
To see this in it's most obvious form, look at Nike. Their ads don't even mention their shoes. Heck, they don't mention the name. It's just a sort of video art piece with a nike swoosh and maybe "just do it" at the end.
The thing is, people buy Nike, not because the quality is better but because of branding. Thus prices can be raised because people will pay more for what may in fact be an inferior product.
Hell, this applies for just about all "designer" wear. Are Levis really that much better? Are Tommy Hilfiger shirts so much better than non-Tommy's? Of course not.
Be reasonable. D1 was great in its day. I lost thousands of hours to it. But D1 is a dead product, superceded by D2.
The problem is, the worst of Diablo2's bugs are still unfixed after all this time. These include bugs like:
The buggy syncronization between client and server. When playing an online game, even on a local lan, where monsters appear on the screen are often not where the server thinks they are. This is fine for targeted spells and click-attack moves, but for area-effect spells like war-cry, meteor, firewall (depending on how you use it), blizzard, etc, you'll sometimes miss because they're not aimed at the monsters themselves but close to where they appear to be.
The fend/fury/zeal bug (which I suspect may be a syncronization issue as well).
The dupe bugs which STILL plauge battle.net and have destroyed the economy there. You can no longer trade items, since you don't know if the item you will receive is actually a dupe which will be automatically deleted later. There've also been a number of trade-hack bugs which cheated people out of their items, but at least most of these have been fixed.
No new runewords. Ok, this isn't a bug, but a long-promised feature that still hasn't been added. It is EXTREMELY easy to add a runeword (it takes all of 10 minutes with the tools Blizzard should have), yet Blizzard still hasn't added new runewords, even though this was a feature they hyped. These new runewords were published in the October issue of Computer Gamers (gaming?) Weekly.. and we never heard of them again.
People want these problems fixed, but Blizzard doesn't seem to want to add anything to the game anymore. I'd say D2 is a dead product, superceded by the imminent Warcraft III.
Laserdiscs are not MPEG anything! That's why there are no compression artifacts, like on any DVD I've seen that fades to black, the posterizing is terrible! (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as well as The Crimson Rivers)
BTW, this is usually the fault of the DVD player instead of the DVD. My old Apex 600a had terrible picture quality -- like you said when fading to black, showing a flat image that's almost monochromatic (like a clear sky), the artifacts were very noticable. On my PS2, however, I can't see any of these problems.
I think they're more worried about the current situation of losing money on b.net in-game advertising.
Yeah, right. The days of the advertising gold rush on the Internet are long gone. It costs, in terms of hardware, maintenance, and bandwidth, much more to support a client on battle.net than the advertising revenue that client will bring in.
No, you bought a copy of the game (not the game itself) and a license which allows you to run it; you do not own the game. The copy of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade poster hanging on my wall is a copy, not the original, and I can't do things to it that I could do if I owned the original (i.e., make copies of my own and sell them). I couldn't go and make my own copies of the board game Diplomacy, but I own a copy.
You have the terms wrong here. You own, completely, that copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but you do not own the copyright. Ownership and copyright ownership are seperate. You own that poster though, so you can do whatever you want with it short of giving away/selling copies.
There is no true need to rely on the DMCA for this argument, it comes down to a license: you bought the product, you agreed to the license. Don't buy it and don't play it if you disagree with said license.
You're right about one thing, the DMCA has little to do with the license and whether you're bound by it. California (where Blizzard is based) courts have ruled that software licenses are not legally enforceable though. If the license tells me I can play the game, but only under the conditions set forth by the game company, it's just fine for me to ignore that part of the license. I bought the game, not a license.
I fail to see that wanting people to pay for a service is greed. I just do.
Wanting people to pay for a service isn't greed, but using shady laws to shut down competing services is greed. Of course, that's neither here nor there, since Battle.Net isn't a charge service at the moment.
Does FSGS support version checking/upgrading? With 1.09, Starcraft now requires version checking from the server, and if the server skips this step, the client won't connect. This requires downloading some mpqs from battle.net...
Version 1.09 of Starcraft/Brood War, which was released quite recently, has only 2 options for multiplayer now: TCP/IP and Battle.net.
Actually, this is incorrect. V1.09 of Starcraft has 5 options under multiplayer:
Battle.Net
Local Area Network (IPX)
Modem (never used this before.. it allows one player to use the modem in receiver mode, and the other player calls that number -- I have never seen a game which dials the modem like this, but I didn't play online games before the Internet era...)
Direct Cable Connection (NULL serial cable, I assume)
Local Area Network (UDP) (this is the new option added in 1.09. Once again, it doesn't work over the Internet.. just the local LAN)
Unfortunately, there's still no more TCP/IP option, at least not one which works over the Internet, like there is in Diablo 2.
(No more having to use IPX if I want to play with PC users on a LAN:D).
Pardon my ignorance, but what's wrong with IPX on a fast LAN? The only problem I've seen with IPX is over WANs with tunnelers like Kali and such.
Take the site, and have it hosted by a european country which doesn't like the DMCA.
This is sticking your head in the sand. What about when the EU passes its version of the DMCA? (I'll give you a hint -- the answer is "very soon" if they're WIPO signatories)
Heck, have it hosted by a Russian ISP.
And have all the programmers living in Russia? Hint: simply hosting in Russia doesn't offer a project immunity. Remember in the Adobe case, the Russian programmer was arrested pretty quickly once he entered the US. I guarantee you any US programmer on the bnetd project would be arrested if Blizzard decided to go through with it, even if it were hosted in Russia.
It has nothing to do with the DMCA. AFAIK, Blizzard don't really do anything to prevent copying the disc.
Actually, they do. Blizzard's most recent release, Diablo II, uses "Safedisc" on the CD. I haven't really looked towards what safedisc does, but it is extremely difficult for your average cdrom/burner to rip/burn a perfect duplicate of the Diablo II CD. If you get it wrong, the game can tell that you're using a burned copy and refuses to run, asking you to put the original cd in the drive.
This was a pain in the ass for some Diablo2 users.. myself, I wanted to swap items among my single-player characters using my main computer and my laptop... which requires two copies of the game running at the same time. This was a pain until I found if turned off the music and removed the CD from the host, it would continue to run as long as I didn't leave town.
A friend of mine had worse problems -- he had a laptop with a CD-ROM the copy protection didn't like. Whenever he put his original CD in, the game would eject it and tell him to insert the original CD. This has happened with all sorts of different CDrom drives, and Blizzard released patch after patch trying to fix this. One patch would fix these problems for some people, while starting problems for other people. Neither of us pirated the game, but we got screwed all the same. Blizzard's response to some people who complained: "Buy another cd drive."
Interesting. Everyone I know who uses it (I run a bnetd server myself) uses it because Battle.Net is unstable and laggy as hell at times. I downloaded it and compiled it in a fit of frustration one night after myself and 4 friends were unable to even create/join the same game together due to the lagged servers. We tried Kali, but the lag over that was terrible (Starcraft's IPX code seems to assume everyone is on the fast local LAN, and it syncs all play to the laggiest person -- not good if someone is on a slow modem). We tried to get on to Battle.Net for a little Starcraft party that night, and it just wasn't an option until bnetd was set up.
I had a CD-ROM that Diablo II wouldn't read its copy protection from. Their answer was for me to buy a new CD-ROM. They could have refunded my money, or sent me an.exe without the copy protection or many other things. Nope.
Do you know if it still has that problem? I think they have most of those problems solved in the latest patches. A friend of mine couldn't play Diablo2 after 1.04b because the copy protection thing wasn't working right. It started working in 1.06 again though.. I used that as an example of how copy protection doesn't hurt the pirate, all it does it screw the people who buy the game.
Have you *read* the user comments? A good many of them (though I wouldn't go so far as to say most) say exactly what you said, that it's similar to a CDDB cache. A good many of them also point out that CDDB is completely anonymous, while Windows Media Player sends a unique ID. If this were just a cddb cache, I doubt there'd be much uproar, since the gnome cd player, xmcd, xmms do the same as well.
In Diablo2 you can host/join TCP network games without the valid CD-key.
In Starcraft, you can install "spawn" copies legally from the main install menu. You don't need multiple copies or multiple CD keys. I don't think it checks for CD keys on LAN games either.
A poor guy's kid needs a heart transplant. The heart transplant costs a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS. The guy can't afford it. The guy takes a gun and steals the procedure. This makes him a hero? ... I don't get it.
You know, in some countries, kids die because they can't afford food and clean water. Oh, wait - this is an *American* kid - that makes this sort of thing OK - I see now...
That's right, this is America, where so many have grown up with a sense of entitlement and ego -- "MY kid is so much more important than all these other people." Entitlement and ego.
Re:Total transparency for us; total privacy for po
on
David Brin on Privacy
·
· Score: 1
Which is why a truly transparent society is just like the other perfect utopian societies -- they're interesting ideas, but they can never ever happen, no matter how hard anyone might try to erect them.
2) Unlicensed players are likely not to handle instructions/layered disks etc properly.
Well, NO. They can produce a player but they forget to implement the instruction set? Unlikely.
Actually, this is true. A number of players just don't impliment all of the instruction set or do it incorrectly. The famous Apex 600A for example, has quite a few problems with this sortof thing (like on the Abyss DVD..)
That wouldn't be the 600a, would it? The sound quality isn't bad (with digital out), but the picture quality is just terrible. My Playstation2 has better picture quality than the Apex's.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, if you're not gung-ho about bug-fixing and bug-reporting, you probably shouldn't be using the Mozilla nightlies. That's the audience the nightlies are aimed for. There's no problem with the image/icon in Mozilla 0.9.8, but if it's not showing up in the nightlies, then that's a bug there. Whenever you suspect a bug, compare the results to a stable release like 0.9.8. If it looks like a nightlies bug, then report it.
Thus the Onion article: "Nike to cease manufacturing products. 'From now on, we'll focus on just making ads,' says CEO."
The thing is, people buy Nike, not because the quality is better but because of branding. Thus prices can be raised because people will pay more for what may in fact be an inferior product.
Hell, this applies for just about all "designer" wear. Are Levis really that much better? Are Tommy Hilfiger shirts so much better than non-Tommy's? Of course not.
Of course, if the government mandates the use of DRM, that patent will last all of five seconds.
The problem is, the worst of Diablo2's bugs are still unfixed after all this time. These include bugs like:
- The buggy syncronization between client and server. When playing an online game, even on a local lan, where monsters appear on the screen are often not where the server thinks they are. This is fine for targeted spells and click-attack moves, but for area-effect spells like war-cry, meteor, firewall (depending on how you use it), blizzard, etc, you'll sometimes miss because they're not aimed at the monsters themselves but close to where they appear to be.
- The fend/fury/zeal bug (which I suspect may be a syncronization issue as well).
- The dupe bugs which STILL plauge battle.net and have destroyed the economy there. You can no longer trade items, since you don't know if the item you will receive is actually a dupe which will be automatically deleted later. There've also been a number of trade-hack bugs which cheated people out of their items, but at least most of these have been fixed.
- No new runewords. Ok, this isn't a bug, but a long-promised feature that still hasn't been added. It is EXTREMELY easy to add a runeword (it takes all of 10 minutes with the tools Blizzard should have), yet Blizzard still hasn't added new runewords, even though this was a feature they hyped. These new runewords were published in the October issue of Computer Gamers (gaming?) Weekly.. and we never heard of them again.
People want these problems fixed, but Blizzard doesn't seem to want to add anything to the game anymore. I'd say D2 is a dead product, superceded by the imminent Warcraft III.The USA listens to treaties very carefully when those treaties benefit US interests nicely.
Laserdiscs are not MPEG anything! That's why there are no compression artifacts, like on any DVD I've seen that fades to black, the posterizing is terrible! (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as well as The Crimson Rivers)
BTW, this is usually the fault of the DVD player instead of the DVD. My old Apex 600a had terrible picture quality -- like you said when fading to black, showing a flat image that's almost monochromatic (like a clear sky), the artifacts were very noticable. On my PS2, however, I can't see any of these problems.
Yeah, right. The days of the advertising gold rush on the Internet are long gone. It costs, in terms of hardware, maintenance, and bandwidth, much more to support a client on battle.net than the advertising revenue that client will bring in.
You have the terms wrong here. You own, completely, that copy of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but you do not own the copyright. Ownership and copyright ownership are seperate. You own that poster though, so you can do whatever you want with it short of giving away/selling copies.
There is no true need to rely on the DMCA for this argument, it comes down to a license: you bought the product, you agreed to the license. Don't buy it and don't play it if you disagree with said license.
You're right about one thing, the DMCA has little to do with the license and whether you're bound by it. California (where Blizzard is based) courts have ruled that software licenses are not legally enforceable though. If the license tells me I can play the game, but only under the conditions set forth by the game company, it's just fine for me to ignore that part of the license. I bought the game, not a license.
Wanting people to pay for a service isn't greed, but using shady laws to shut down competing services is greed. Of course, that's neither here nor there, since Battle.Net isn't a charge service at the moment.
Not according to Blizzard.
Sure, you can attempt to argue otherwise but they have more lawyers than you.
Yeah, well, California's (where both Blizzard and I live) courts have ruled otherwise, so I'm not too worried about that..
You don't have to deal with the assholes of battle.net, who seem to make about 90% of the userbase.
Does FSGS support version checking/upgrading? With 1.09, Starcraft now requires version checking from the server, and if the server skips this step, the client won't connect. This requires downloading some mpqs from battle.net...
Actually, this is incorrect. V1.09 of Starcraft has 5 options under multiplayer:
- Battle.Net
- Local Area Network (IPX)
- Modem (never used this before.. it allows one player to use the modem in receiver mode, and the other player calls that number -- I have never seen a game which dials the modem like this, but I didn't play online games before the Internet era...)
- Direct Cable Connection (NULL serial cable, I assume)
- Local Area Network (UDP) (this is the new option added in 1.09. Once again, it doesn't work over the Internet.. just the local LAN)
Unfortunately, there's still no more TCP/IP option, at least not one which works over the Internet, like there is in Diablo 2.(No more having to use IPX if I want to play with PC users on a LAN :D).
Pardon my ignorance, but what's wrong with IPX on a fast LAN? The only problem I've seen with IPX is over WANs with tunnelers like Kali and such.
This is sticking your head in the sand. What about when the EU passes its version of the DMCA? (I'll give you a hint -- the answer is "very soon" if they're WIPO signatories)
Heck, have it hosted by a Russian ISP.
And have all the programmers living in Russia? Hint: simply hosting in Russia doesn't offer a project immunity. Remember in the Adobe case, the Russian programmer was arrested pretty quickly once he entered the US. I guarantee you any US programmer on the bnetd project would be arrested if Blizzard decided to go through with it, even if it were hosted in Russia.
Actually, they do. Blizzard's most recent release, Diablo II, uses "Safedisc" on the CD. I haven't really looked towards what safedisc does, but it is extremely difficult for your average cdrom/burner to rip/burn a perfect duplicate of the Diablo II CD. If you get it wrong, the game can tell that you're using a burned copy and refuses to run, asking you to put the original cd in the drive.
This was a pain in the ass for some Diablo2 users.. myself, I wanted to swap items among my single-player characters using my main computer and my laptop... which requires two copies of the game running at the same time. This was a pain until I found if turned off the music and removed the CD from the host, it would continue to run as long as I didn't leave town.
A friend of mine had worse problems -- he had a laptop with a CD-ROM the copy protection didn't like. Whenever he put his original CD in, the game would eject it and tell him to insert the original CD. This has happened with all sorts of different CDrom drives, and Blizzard released patch after patch trying to fix this. One patch would fix these problems for some people, while starting problems for other people. Neither of us pirated the game, but we got screwed all the same. Blizzard's response to some people who complained: "Buy another cd drive."
Interesting. Everyone I know who uses it (I run a bnetd server myself) uses it because Battle.Net is unstable and laggy as hell at times. I downloaded it and compiled it in a fit of frustration one night after myself and 4 friends were unable to even create/join the same game together due to the lagged servers. We tried Kali, but the lag over that was terrible (Starcraft's IPX code seems to assume everyone is on the fast local LAN, and it syncs all play to the laggiest person -- not good if someone is on a slow modem). We tried to get on to Battle.Net for a little Starcraft party that night, and it just wasn't an option until bnetd was set up.
Do you know if it still has that problem? I think they have most of those problems solved in the latest patches. A friend of mine couldn't play Diablo2 after 1.04b because the copy protection thing wasn't working right. It started working in 1.06 again though.. I used that as an example of how copy protection doesn't hurt the pirate, all it does it screw the people who buy the game.
Have you *read* the user comments? A good many of them (though I wouldn't go so far as to say most) say exactly what you said, that it's similar to a CDDB cache. A good many of them also point out that CDDB is completely anonymous, while Windows Media Player sends a unique ID. If this were just a cddb cache, I doubt there'd be much uproar, since the gnome cd player, xmcd, xmms do the same as well.
In Diablo2 you can host/join TCP network games without the valid CD-key.
In Starcraft, you can install "spawn" copies legally from the main install menu. You don't need multiple copies or multiple CD keys. I don't think it checks for CD keys on LAN games either.
A poor guy's kid needs a heart transplant.
The heart transplant costs a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS.
The guy can't afford it.
The guy takes a gun and steals the procedure.
This makes him a hero?
...
I don't get it.
You know, in some countries, kids die because they can't afford food and clean water.
Oh, wait - this is an *American* kid - that makes this sort of thing OK - I see now...
That's right, this is America, where so many have grown up with a sense of entitlement and ego -- "MY kid is so much more important than all these other people." Entitlement and ego.
Which is why a truly transparent society is just like the other perfect utopian societies -- they're interesting ideas, but they can never ever happen, no matter how hard anyone might try to erect them.
Well, NO. They can produce a player but they forget to implement the instruction set? Unlikely.
Actually, this is true. A number of players just don't impliment all of the instruction set or do it incorrectly. The famous Apex 600A for example, has quite a few problems with this sortof thing (like on the Abyss DVD..)