I'm as much a fan of WoW as the next person (probably more, considering the number of "get a life" people out there), but come on. We've been getting stories about them hitting random and odd subscriber marks since the game first came out.
We get it. It's popular. It had more people than any other MMO at something like the 250k mark. I'd be more impressed if I didn't get the running commentary about the size of the player base every other month.
..the same way we did opinion polls and studies to show us that our customers wanted to be wiretapped! Honestly. Everyone was emailing us, phoning us, saying that they wanted to be monitored. And who are we to deny our customers?
3cm is hardly a distance. All things being equal, I fail to see any rationalization for the power usage requisite in broadcasting something wirelessly from a distance 3 fingerwidths away from a computer, versus simply plugging it into a USB slot. I'd rather they spent their efforts in having a higher-capacity wired transfer rate.
In all seriousness, though. I'm as much for ease of use as the next guy, but come on. 3cm? I realize the whole idea of using a wire (or just plugging the drive into a computer) is extremely old-school, Web 1.0, pre-21st century talk, but 3cm kind of defeats the purpose. This seems more like a gimmicky thing than an actual tool, and'll probably see as much use as all those IR ports built into laptops: slim to none.
So...he pointed out a vulnerability, ended up with the FBI on his ass for 6 months (with them probably keeping an eye on him for the rest of his life), and that's poetic justice?
You keep using those words. I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.
If you don't have time, or you're just too lazy, to continue to add updates, and you want to make a quick buck off of it, don't OS it. It's that simple. OSS companies tend to sell support, and possibly custom-tailored upgrades.
If you think it'll be mildly popular, and you really want to OS it, throw up a paypal donation link. You may not get as much, but you'll be staying true to your scruples.
Not quite. I'll admit I got burned through this, through turning off auto-run-on-plugin but not turning off auto-run-on-double-click. The culprit was a Sansa e200 mp3 player.
I'm pretty paranoid about viruses and malware, and I've never so much as had an infection until this drive. And my computer was moderately more secure than most-- it didn't run the autorun feature the instant I plugged it in. Unless you consider trying to convince all Windows users to modify their registry keys to disable autorun on all drives, I would say this is less user education and more on the heads of either Microsoft to turn off this "feature" by default or the companies that produce and sell these drives to test them before shipping them and test them when people return them.
As for myself, I've taken up the habit of scrubbing any USB drives, MP3 players, and hard drives of any type out of the box now.
...and it's alot easier than extracting protein from gelatin and fleas. People have been making ice cream with smaller crystals by simply freezing it faster. Liquid Nitrogen, if you have access to it, will do the trick quite nicely.
There's a difference between "Not delaying" and "Not giving an unrealistically early release date that's inevitably going to get pushed back". And with that, which one of the following looks better?
We're releasing the game on May 5th! Oh, wait, no, we're releasing it on June 5th. Nope, wait, we're releasing it sometime in August. Wait, no, expect it in Q1 2009."
Expect a release date some time Q3 2009. Oh, wait, our dev team was on the ball! Expect a release date in Q1 2009.
So...I know it's against the whole Slashdot mindset to read the article, but I at least skimmed it, and here's what I got out of it.
1. It's a South Carolina thing (And who lives in S.C., anyways? Seriously.)
2. It's only in the case of evidence in court cases. (i.e., you'd have to have a PI license to submit evidence gleaned from a computer HD).
So all you people freaking out, even kiddingly, about not being able to tag -a at the end of your ls commands, you can calm down.
In 30 years we might not see what we would expect. The RIAA and MPAA has deeper pockets than the nerd crowd and they have a lot more to lose.
It doesn't matter how deep the nerd crowd's pockets are, that's the point. People aren't paying for movies and music. When new forms of DRM come out, hackers aren't charging the nerd crowd for workarounds. The only way this ends is when the laws and/or DRM start becoming so restrictive that every Joe, not just the niche geek crowd on/., says "Alright, enough", or the RIAA runs out of money with which to bribe the lawmakers.
Needless to say, this is going to go on for a long time to come.
The other thing is that by now, getting a parody by Weird Al is it's own form of (free) advertisement. There's several bands that I wouldn't know existed if not for hearing a Weird Al parody of them somewhere and saying "Hey, that tune is cool, I wonder what the original is?"
Except it won't, any time soon. It's not a matter of whether Google's innovative enough to surpass the utility of MS office. Until we have 100% uptime internet, free WiFi everywhere there's a laptop to take advantage of it, and wireless connections that never drop ever (the last two of which aren't likely to happen in our lifetime), people aren't going to say "Whoops! Drop everything, I want to write my stuff with an online program!"
And that's not even touching the would-be-bandwith-intensive graphical apps that people would have to drop to be truly "online", like Photoshop and Flash.
Like it or not, the desktop monopoly isn't going to be broken this way.
If you aren't doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide.
The problem with this is that you're saying everyone with access to these records is trustworthy. Which they aren't. The same argument and reply goes to ISPs logging emails and the government wiretapping without a warrant.
So Yahoo et al are handing over information about people leaving the person open to persecution, and now one person is suggesting a law that he know won't get passed so he can put "cares about your privacy" in his commercials next time reelection day comes around.
Penny Arcade has an excellent approach to it: They only advertise games they like. If someone approaches them with a game ad, they require either playing it or seeing it played, the reason being an issue exactly like this. They put ads up first, they played the game, panned it, and the game advertisers bitched.
Admittedly, now that GS has pulled this, no one will be able to trust the difference between "We only advertise games we give good ratings to" and "We give good ratings to the games we advertise", even if they were to do this sort of thing.
So you botted traveling, you botted collecting, and you botted combat. What parts of the game are left, standing around in Stormwind and inserting the word "Murloc" into the names of movies?
It also would have helped if the L an R buttons could have controlled different items, like how in almost all zeldas since ocarina you cna have multiple gadgets equipped on different buttons somehow.
Would have defeated the purpose. You'll note that the D-pad and Buttons are mirror controls, to accomodate left handed and right handed people at the same time; having someone holding the DS with their left trying to click the right shoulder button (or vice versa) would be too onerous.
Too lazy to RTFA, but from the summary, a thought occurs:
If you're gay, and you're trying to hide it, and someone online says "OFMG U R TEH GAYZ", do you
A, say "Haha, you're stupid. No I'm not.", or do you
B, sue them for revealing your secret?
Someone should see if this works on the government. "OFMG U R TEH WIRETAPPING US D:"
I bought the orange box to show my support for the games that Valve does, and promptly put it in a cabinet and torrented the games. I'll break it open once I feel like playing TF2, probably, but I'll be damned if I can't play single player games without an internet connection.
There's a difference between "dumbing down" and making controls easier. To draw a comparison to console games, look at Soul Calibur and Super Smash Brothers. One has combos and controls on a list the length of your arm that you have to memorize to get anywhere. The other has a control scheme that takes about a minute to memorize and a half hour max to get the hang of. I don't have the sales charts or popularity scales sitting in front of me, but I've seen a lot more SSB tourneys than I have SC ones.
And with that, having a simpler control scheme doesn't mean complete newbies can pick up a controller and smack down someone who knows what they're doing. It just means they can start learning how to actually play the game without having a horrible obtuse control scheme standing in the way.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm as much a fan of WoW as the next person (probably more, considering the number of "get a life" people out there), but come on. We've been getting stories about them hitting random and odd subscriber marks since the game first came out.
We get it. It's popular. It had more people than any other MMO at something like the 250k mark. I'd be more impressed if I didn't get the running commentary about the size of the player base every other month.
..the same way we did opinion polls and studies to show us that our customers wanted to be wiretapped! Honestly. Everyone was emailing us, phoning us, saying that they wanted to be monitored. And who are we to deny our customers?
...they've just changed Office to an unintelligible XML format that's defective by design.
3cm is hardly a distance. All things being equal, I fail to see any rationalization for the power usage requisite in broadcasting something wirelessly from a distance 3 fingerwidths away from a computer, versus simply plugging it into a USB slot. I'd rather they spent their efforts in having a higher-capacity wired transfer rate.
Just what we need, more invisible flying data clogging other invisible data up.
In all seriousness, though. I'm as much for ease of use as the next guy, but come on. 3cm? I realize the whole idea of using a wire (or just plugging the drive into a computer) is extremely old-school, Web 1.0, pre-21st century talk, but 3cm kind of defeats the purpose. This seems more like a gimmicky thing than an actual tool, and'll probably see as much use as all those IR ports built into laptops: slim to none.
So...he pointed out a vulnerability, ended up with the FBI on his ass for 6 months (with them probably keeping an eye on him for the rest of his life), and that's poetic justice?
You keep using those words. I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.
If you don't have time, or you're just too lazy, to continue to add updates, and you want to make a quick buck off of it, don't OS it. It's that simple. OSS companies tend to sell support, and possibly custom-tailored upgrades.
If you think it'll be mildly popular, and you really want to OS it, throw up a paypal donation link. You may not get as much, but you'll be staying true to your scruples.
Your choice.
Not quite. I'll admit I got burned through this, through turning off auto-run-on-plugin but not turning off auto-run-on-double-click. The culprit was a Sansa e200 mp3 player.
I'm pretty paranoid about viruses and malware, and I've never so much as had an infection until this drive. And my computer was moderately more secure than most-- it didn't run the autorun feature the instant I plugged it in. Unless you consider trying to convince all Windows users to modify their registry keys to disable autorun on all drives, I would say this is less user education and more on the heads of either Microsoft to turn off this "feature" by default or the companies that produce and sell these drives to test them before shipping them and test them when people return them.
As for myself, I've taken up the habit of scrubbing any USB drives, MP3 players, and hard drives of any type out of the box now.
...and it's alot easier than extracting protein from gelatin and fleas. People have been making ice cream with smaller crystals by simply freezing it faster. Liquid Nitrogen, if you have access to it, will do the trick quite nicely.
So...I know it's against the whole Slashdot mindset to read the article, but I at least skimmed it, and here's what I got out of it.
1. It's a South Carolina thing (And who lives in S.C., anyways? Seriously.)
2. It's only in the case of evidence in court cases. (i.e., you'd have to have a PI license to submit evidence gleaned from a computer HD).
So all you people freaking out, even kiddingly, about not being able to tag -a at the end of your ls commands, you can calm down.
It doesn't matter how deep the nerd crowd's pockets are, that's the point. People aren't paying for movies and music. When new forms of DRM come out, hackers aren't charging the nerd crowd for workarounds. The only way this ends is when the laws and/or DRM start becoming so restrictive that every Joe, not just the niche geek crowd on
Needless to say, this is going to go on for a long time to come.
The other thing is that by now, getting a parody by Weird Al is it's own form of (free) advertisement. There's several bands that I wouldn't know existed if not for hearing a Weird Al parody of them somewhere and saying "Hey, that tune is cool, I wonder what the original is?"
Except it won't, any time soon. It's not a matter of whether Google's innovative enough to surpass the utility of MS office. Until we have 100% uptime internet, free WiFi everywhere there's a laptop to take advantage of it, and wireless connections that never drop ever (the last two of which aren't likely to happen in our lifetime), people aren't going to say "Whoops! Drop everything, I want to write my stuff with an online program!"
And that's not even touching the would-be-bandwith-intensive graphical apps that people would have to drop to be truly "online", like Photoshop and Flash.
Like it or not, the desktop monopoly isn't going to be broken this way.
If you aren't doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide.
The problem with this is that you're saying everyone with access to these records is trustworthy. Which they aren't. The same argument and reply goes to ISPs logging emails and the government wiretapping without a warrant.
Fixed.
Penny Arcade has an excellent approach to it: They only advertise games they like. If someone approaches them with a game ad, they require either playing it or seeing it played, the reason being an issue exactly like this. They put ads up first, they played the game, panned it, and the game advertisers bitched.
Admittedly, now that GS has pulled this, no one will be able to trust the difference between "We only advertise games we give good ratings to" and "We give good ratings to the games we advertise", even if they were to do this sort of thing.
When I read this, I thought it was going to be a complaint about the laptop having some anti-spam software on it.
So you botted traveling, you botted collecting, and you botted combat. What parts of the game are left, standing around in Stormwind and inserting the word "Murloc" into the names of movies?
Hypocracy is the new national pastime. Didn't you get the memo?
It also would have helped if the L an R buttons could have controlled different items, like how in almost all zeldas since ocarina you cna have multiple gadgets equipped on different buttons somehow.
Would have defeated the purpose. You'll note that the D-pad and Buttons are mirror controls, to accomodate left handed and right handed people at the same time; having someone holding the DS with their left trying to click the right shoulder button (or vice versa) would be too onerous.
Too lazy to RTFA, but from the summary, a thought occurs:
If you're gay, and you're trying to hide it, and someone online says "OFMG U R TEH GAYZ", do you
A, say "Haha, you're stupid. No I'm not.", or do you
B, sue them for revealing your secret?
Someone should see if this works on the government. "OFMG U R TEH WIRETAPPING US D:"
I bought the orange box to show my support for the games that Valve does, and promptly put it in a cabinet and torrented the games. I'll break it open once I feel like playing TF2, probably, but I'll be damned if I can't play single player games without an internet connection.
There's a difference between "dumbing down" and making controls easier. To draw a comparison to console games, look at Soul Calibur and Super Smash Brothers. One has combos and controls on a list the length of your arm that you have to memorize to get anywhere. The other has a control scheme that takes about a minute to memorize and a half hour max to get the hang of. I don't have the sales charts or popularity scales sitting in front of me, but I've seen a lot more SSB tourneys than I have SC ones.
And with that, having a simpler control scheme doesn't mean complete newbies can pick up a controller and smack down someone who knows what they're doing. It just means they can start learning how to actually play the game without having a horrible obtuse control scheme standing in the way.
http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF055AD-Game_System.jpg#122
Sorry, couldn't resist.