Nothing wrong with applying a little common sense and doing it when it matters.
At the one end of the scale there's intra-project chatter. At the other end there's customer correspondence that might come back to bite you later during contracts negotiation.
Usually I find a read-through to be well worth the time though. It takes hardly any time at all for short mails, and the longer ones tend to warrant the time expenditure.
Blizzard probably doesn't want masses of users to be put at a disadvantage because they can't afford to buy the best add-ons.
That's overestimating the power of addons. This is a game about gear, not a pretty UI. Blizzard have made numerous changes to the API in the past to make sure addons cannot make decisions for you.
Blizzard probably doesn't want to deal with people suing them because these little business take hits every time there's an engine change that severely breaks an add-on or makes it irrelevant.
If that was their goal, the new policy would've been phrased to protect Blizzard from any such action, not banned such addons.
Which is why they are doing this to protect their end-users
How is this protecting the end-user? Anybody that has figured out how to install an addon, also knows how to uninstall it. Since the addons are completely sandboxed in, that solves any and all addon related problems.
What bugs me is, plenty of addons that would be just fine under these rules, are broken and totally screw up the user experience until removed. Why are those allowed, but the ones supported by full time developers and virtually bug free get banned?
Between the two of us I think we define both extremes of the debate.
I see no problem at all with addon authors charging for their work. I have no problem at all with them obfuscating their code. That code lives in a sandbox that cannot affect anything but my UI and that can be disabled at any time without any residual effect.
While I can see some reasons for them to control addons - like making sure nag screens doesn't cause their support hassle - there are many better ways to handle that. Like demanding any nag screen to include a button to disable the addon causing it, for example.
The new UI policy is of the "shooting bird with cannon" approach. Heck, if it weren't for addons I would no longer even be playing the game.
By all means, Blizzard should address actual issues. But this is just them being grumpy old men that doesn't want anybody to be able to charge for the time they spend making WoW a more pleasant experience.
Except addons at no point have access to any sensitive information, like login credentials. There's nothing they could send that would compromise your account.
Addons do not hijack accounts. In the vast majority of cases, the cause is the same kind of nutjob that runs every exe they get in email. Ie, they're doing it to themselves.
In some, rare, cases it's caused by something even more seasoned online denizens would've missed. But if the hundreds and hundreds of hours spent in WoW isn't worth the $6.50 insurance the Blizzard Authenticator is, I can't quite make myself feel sorry for those people either.
There's a lot more about programming than just "satisfying customers".
If you do it as a hobby, of course. If you do it for a living, no, not really. That doesn't mean there's no room for creativity, but in the end you have to produce something the customer wants to pay for, and in a reasonable amount of time.
Making something in C does not make it magically a higher quality product than if you make it in VB or some other high level language.
Comparing VisualBasic "rapid programming" to "real" software products is like comparing tunes created for TV commercials and "real" music.
You're mixing the development environment with the finished product now, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Jingles for TV commercials versus album tracks are completely different things. Because of their intended use, not because of the instruments used in creating them. I'm just not seeing a way to relate this to VB versus "some other language".
"Real programmers" love Visual Basic. It enables them to fulfil their customers' requests a lot quicker. Rather than spending a week in C they can spend a few hours in VB. This means happier customers, and more revenue.
The only ones that think Visual Basic has a bad reputation are kids in bedrooms that think there's some inherent value in using the lowest level language available, rather than the right tool for the job. VB isn't by any means the right tool for all jobs, but it is the right one for quite a few.
As for the actual topic, I agree with the others that feel this was just a very poorly phrased way of saying the architecture makes it complicated, but that it will pay off in the end. Having said that, the Sony person seems to equate "powerful hardware" with "difficult to develop for". That seems ridiculous.
Since you can't be arsed to read the article, let me quote the pertinent part for you.
Until now, it was thought Queen Elizabeth was using the same cannon technology as her father, Henry VIII. His flagship, the Mary Rose, was ultra-modern for its day.
However, it carried a bewildering variety of cannon - many designed for land warfare. They were all of different shapes and sizes, fired different shot at different rates with different killing power.
The point isn't the size or type of cannon. It's the notion of using a bunch of identical ones as opposed to a variety.
What spin? It's the word used in the newspaper article. I can't discern a shred of bias in that article.
As for the word, I don't see any issue. Swapping implies giving and receiving. Exchanging. P2P services do just that. Unlike "theft", for example, the definition of "swapping" does not require the loss of access to what they exchange. At least not in the dictionary I checked.
They Reduced the price by 50% on Steam, which "resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game
That explains why they increased prices in Europe by some 30% recently then. Oh wait..
I contacted support about it and they didn't respond. But with games on Steam now priced 30-40% above retail, they won't see any business from me anymore. Which is a pity, because I don't really fancy going to the store and getting some SecuROM infested version either.
Well perhaps - I was just responding to your claim that posting on Facebook was "no different than standing on a street corner yelling about your sex life".
Oh, that. You don't think it is? I'm assuming, obviously, you making a publicly available post. I don't see the difference between that and yelling on a street corner. Well, I guess you'd have to use one hell of a megaphone to reach the same amount of potential listeners.
Before, you could always end your account, but not with the new ToS.
That was just my point. If you put "mad photos" of yourself on Facebook, that's it. You've done it. If you in half a year decide to remove your Facebook page, that doesn't make it as if you never published those pictures. They live on in caches, 4chan or whatever and personal hard drives forever. They don't just vanish. That the new TOS makes no difference in this respect, was precisely my point. If you think you may regret it, don't post it. If you do post it, you can only blame yourself when those images are still floating round in ten years time.
I didn't address the insanity of the new TOS (it really is ridiculous), I was just answering to the specific privacy concerns exemplified by the other poster. And for those, I see no difference.
I didn't say it was. I was just responding to someone talking about privacy.
I also did not say privacy was all or nothing. I said that if you put something "out there", then that's it. You've done it. There's no taking it back even if you delete it from the specific service you first published it on.
As far as I could tell, the issues raised in the post I responded to weren't impacted by the new TOS. That's all I was trying to say.
To be clear: I'm not saying the new TOS doesn't seem insane. I was simply responding to what was said in the post I replied to. Nothing more, nothing less.
I didn't say it was best not to use any service. I said that if you do, then that data is "out there". If you post something in a public journal entry, you've already exposed that information. This change in TOS doesn't change that.
If you meant to say something else in the post I replied to, I misunderstood you.
If, for example, Facebook previously promised to protect and never touch any private journal entries, and this TOS changed that to "we reserve the right to sell your private entries", then your post makes more sense to me.
If you want to maintain privacy, keep your life private. That's not rocket science. If you put anything personal online on public sites, obviously people are going to *gasp* know personal things about you. It's no different than standing on a street corner yelling about your sex life. If you don't want people to know, don't fucking tell them.
I fail to see how this really relates to the issue at hand though. None of what you say would be any better protected with the old TOS than this new one. What you're talking about occurs when you put stuff on your page, not when you delete it. True, the new TOS is bollocks in that Facebook claims to retain rights even if you delete content, but the damage you are talking about already occurred so I don't get your point.
no dolphins were murdered in the making of this accident!
Indeed. Though I don't personally think submarines should swerve to avoid dolphins, they followed proper Greenpeace etiquette. A dolphin's life is worth more than a million subs!
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree. I've left mail unsent overnight before. On other occasions I've had someone else read through it before sending.
Nothing wrong with applying a little common sense and doing it when it matters.
At the one end of the scale there's intra-project chatter. At the other end there's customer correspondence that might come back to bite you later during contracts negotiation.
Usually I find a read-through to be well worth the time though. It takes hardly any time at all for short mails, and the longer ones tend to warrant the time expenditure.
Another solution is to always sit back and read through the entire message (and recipient list) before hitting send.
I mean that quite literally. Remove hands from keyboard, sit back and just read.
That habit has saved me a lot of trouble in the past.
Blizzard probably doesn't want masses of users to be put at a disadvantage because they can't afford to buy the best add-ons.
That's overestimating the power of addons. This is a game about gear, not a pretty UI. Blizzard have made numerous changes to the API in the past to make sure addons cannot make decisions for you.
Blizzard probably doesn't want to deal with people suing them because these little business take hits every time there's an engine change that severely breaks an add-on or makes it irrelevant.
If that was their goal, the new policy would've been phrased to protect Blizzard from any such action, not banned such addons.
Which is why they are doing this to protect their end-users
How is this protecting the end-user? Anybody that has figured out how to install an addon, also knows how to uninstall it. Since the addons are completely sandboxed in, that solves any and all addon related problems.
What bugs me is, plenty of addons that would be just fine under these rules, are broken and totally screw up the user experience until removed. Why are those allowed, but the ones supported by full time developers and virtually bug free get banned?
Between the two of us I think we define both extremes of the debate.
I see no problem at all with addon authors charging for their work. I have no problem at all with them obfuscating their code. That code lives in a sandbox that cannot affect anything but my UI and that can be disabled at any time without any residual effect.
While I can see some reasons for them to control addons - like making sure nag screens doesn't cause their support hassle - there are many better ways to handle that. Like demanding any nag screen to include a button to disable the addon causing it, for example.
The new UI policy is of the "shooting bird with cannon" approach. Heck, if it weren't for addons I would no longer even be playing the game.
By all means, Blizzard should address actual issues. But this is just them being grumpy old men that doesn't want anybody to be able to charge for the time they spend making WoW a more pleasant experience.
Except addons at no point have access to any sensitive information, like login credentials. There's nothing they could send that would compromise your account.
Addons do not hijack accounts. In the vast majority of cases, the cause is the same kind of nutjob that runs every exe they get in email. Ie, they're doing it to themselves.
In some, rare, cases it's caused by something even more seasoned online denizens would've missed. But if the hundreds and hundreds of hours spent in WoW isn't worth the $6.50 insurance the Blizzard Authenticator is, I can't quite make myself feel sorry for those people either.
If you do it as a hobby, of course. If you do it for a living, no, not really. That doesn't mean there's no room for creativity, but in the end you have to produce something the customer wants to pay for, and in a reasonable amount of time.
Making something in C does not make it magically a higher quality product than if you make it in VB or some other high level language.
You're mixing the development environment with the finished product now, and I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Jingles for TV commercials versus album tracks are completely different things. Because of their intended use, not because of the instruments used in creating them. I'm just not seeing a way to relate this to VB versus "some other language".
"Real programmers" love Visual Basic. It enables them to fulfil their customers' requests a lot quicker. Rather than spending a week in C they can spend a few hours in VB. This means happier customers, and more revenue.
The only ones that think Visual Basic has a bad reputation are kids in bedrooms that think there's some inherent value in using the lowest level language available, rather than the right tool for the job. VB isn't by any means the right tool for all jobs, but it is the right one for quite a few.
As for the actual topic, I agree with the others that feel this was just a very poorly phrased way of saying the architecture makes it complicated, but that it will pay off in the end. Having said that, the Sony person seems to equate "powerful hardware" with "difficult to develop for". That seems ridiculous.
Remember what site you are on. You should know better than to trust the editors.
Since you can't be arsed to read the article, let me quote the pertinent part for you.
The point isn't the size or type of cannon. It's the notion of using a bunch of identical ones as opposed to a variety.
What spin? It's the word used in the newspaper article. I can't discern a shred of bias in that article.
As for the word, I don't see any issue. Swapping implies giving and receiving. Exchanging. P2P services do just that. Unlike "theft", for example, the definition of "swapping" does not require the loss of access to what they exchange. At least not in the dictionary I checked.
It does not infer legality in any way.
That explains why they increased prices in Europe by some 30% recently then. Oh wait..
I contacted support about it and they didn't respond. But with games on Steam now priced 30-40% above retail, they won't see any business from me anymore. Which is a pity, because I don't really fancy going to the store and getting some SecuROM infested version either.
I'm sure you read that correctly. But you didn't read it in my post, which is what you were replying to.
Please quote where I stated you forfeit your copyright by posting something.
Right, we're done then.
Oh, that. You don't think it is? I'm assuming, obviously, you making a publicly available post. I don't see the difference between that and yelling on a street corner. Well, I guess you'd have to use one hell of a megaphone to reach the same amount of potential listeners.
That was just my point. If you put "mad photos" of yourself on Facebook, that's it. You've done it. If you in half a year decide to remove your Facebook page, that doesn't make it as if you never published those pictures. They live on in caches, 4chan or whatever and personal hard drives forever. They don't just vanish. That the new TOS makes no difference in this respect, was precisely my point. If you think you may regret it, don't post it. If you do post it, you can only blame yourself when those images are still floating round in ten years time.
I didn't address the insanity of the new TOS (it really is ridiculous), I was just answering to the specific privacy concerns exemplified by the other poster. And for those, I see no difference.
I didn't say it was. I was just responding to someone talking about privacy.
I also did not say privacy was all or nothing. I said that if you put something "out there", then that's it. You've done it. There's no taking it back even if you delete it from the specific service you first published it on.
As far as I could tell, the issues raised in the post I responded to weren't impacted by the new TOS. That's all I was trying to say.
To be clear: I'm not saying the new TOS doesn't seem insane. I was simply responding to what was said in the post I replied to. Nothing more, nothing less.
I didn't say it was best not to use any service. I said that if you do, then that data is "out there". If you post something in a public journal entry, you've already exposed that information. This change in TOS doesn't change that.
If you meant to say something else in the post I replied to, I misunderstood you.
If, for example, Facebook previously promised to protect and never touch any private journal entries, and this TOS changed that to "we reserve the right to sell your private entries", then your post makes more sense to me.
I haven't used it, ever. Not out of any privacy concerns, I've just never seen any value in it for me.
We're talking about a very specific change in their TOS. From them deleting stuff when you remove your page, to them retaining it.
I cannot see how that change was relevant to anything in the post I was replying to.
If you want to maintain privacy, keep your life private. That's not rocket science. If you put anything personal online on public sites, obviously people are going to *gasp* know personal things about you. It's no different than standing on a street corner yelling about your sex life. If you don't want people to know, don't fucking tell them.
I fail to see how this really relates to the issue at hand though. None of what you say would be any better protected with the old TOS than this new one. What you're talking about occurs when you put stuff on your page, not when you delete it. True, the new TOS is bollocks in that Facebook claims to retain rights even if you delete content, but the damage you are talking about already occurred so I don't get your point.
Indeed. Though I don't personally think submarines should swerve to avoid dolphins, they followed proper Greenpeace etiquette. A dolphin's life is worth more than a million subs!
I appreciate the suggestion, but that's not exactly convenient either.
Either they fix this properly at some point and I hopefully hear about it so I can buy it, or they don't. It's just a game.
Do you tell putting the plug back in fixes it?
It's been available in limited stock since late November/early December. Can still be a chore to get a hold of many places.