Sorry, but as always, correlation does not imply causation. I highly doubt that people are buying less computers because of the iPad and highly suspect that it may have something to do with, you know, the economy. Or perhaps they're perfectly happy with the computers they already have (you know, because most people already have computers).
While it is a dumb story that doesn't hold importance to 99% of/.'s audience, you're still making an appeal to bigger problems. The same thing you just said could be said about every single story on the front page today.
"But if you're the sort of person who is going to install it today, then you already know what they are!"
I'm not the sort of person who is going to install it today and I would like some actual details in the summary instead of links to a marketing page and a blog post about something unrelated. I do try to keep up to date even with things I have no intention of purchasing; I work in an industry where it is advantageous to do such.
For those who aren't able to psychicly deduce the details about something that just came out, here's the list of new features.
It certainly was a while ago and he did apologize (after the backlash), and I agree that we shouldn't hold it against him forever. Still, I tend to be wary of NoScript these days because of it. I'm not sure I would trust someone who abused his position like that with a $10k grant is all. Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I don't think it's a big leap to think that someone who abused their position for monetary gain once might do so again. And it's definitely something that I think people who use NoScript should know about, old or not.
PLEASE mod parent up. I had been watching the anime that the project was renamed to and there's nothing offensive about it unless maybe you're Amish. Seriously, there's a love triangle and some romantic scenes, but nothing past PG-13 and certainly nothing that warrants this amount of FUD. I'm genuinely pissed off about the misinformation this Violet person is putting out.
Mod parent up. EA's customer service is horrible. I decided to give Origin a preliminary try because I wanted to get Battlefield 2142 (one of the few BF games I haven't played the full version of; I loved the demo). I tried to register BF2, which the support documents led me to believe could be registered with the service if I had a physical copy.
I talked to a customer service rep for about two hours after about three searching for how I could possibly do this with their broken links and various other problems on their "service" with no real guidance. I told the rep that I was trying to register Battlefield 2 with the service and that it wasn't accepting the keys. He told me that my key was invalid when he looked at it. I said no, it wasn't invalid, I had the box right in front of me. He asked me to take a picture, so I did (I signed my name and timestamped it so he'd know it was me).
He told me that he had seen this picture online before and would no longer help me
WHAT?!
I told him that the picture was signed with my name and timestamped (with a current date and time!) and that I could take another one. After giving me the run-around for another half-hour or so, he realized that he had misunderstood what I had said (despite repeating it about 5 times throughout the conversation) and that he thought I was trying to register Bad Company 2 and not Battlefield 2 and that Battlefield 2 couldn't be registered on the service. Thanks for wasting two hours of my life, EA. I uninstalled after that. Valve may be slow to release first party games, but at least they treat their customers well (even the whiny ones on the forums). I was genuinely insulted by the whole ordeal.
Short answer: no. Long answer: nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Seriously, everyone knows code reviews are a good thing unless your ego is friggen huge. The problem is convincing the higher-ups that it's worth taking an extra X days off the release schedule.
I second this. My experience with MUDs was never that great, and it got worse the more players began to leave. They seemed like they wanted to be both a social experience and a game, but failed at both.
Conversely, my experience with modern games has been great. There are plenty of great games these days that are tons of fun to play (I think I put somewhere upward of 700 hours in Left 4 Dead 1 over the course of about a year, Team Fortress 2 is probably even higher), and Steam is exposing me to a lot of independent games I hadn't heard of before (Braid, a single-player game, is probably somewhere in my top 25 games). Plus you've got Blizzard releasing Starcraft 2 and (sometime soon, hopefully) Diablo 3, and Battlefield 3 is coming out soon. And the best thing is that I've met a ton of great people on most of these games. Voice chat is a feature in almost every first person shooter, and if you play on the same servers most of the time you get to know some great people. Other games still have text chat; I can't tell you how many people I met online back in high school playing Diablo 2 or Starcraft over battle.net, which was rather like its own IRC network back then (I'm still friends with one of the guys I met on there).
I think the success for the social aspects of these games relies on the fact that they're not trying to be a social experience at the same time; they're just trying to be fun games. When you make a fun game with even the most basic communication features, people will build a community around it. If it's not fun, nobody will care how much social integration there is.
The reason the social networking games are still around and making money despite this is because they approach it differently. Rather than try to make a fun game, they make a minimal game with some minor RPG elements, and then tie things like leveling up to the number of people you've coerced into playing the game for your benefit. The more people you get involved, the more you benefit. It's kind of like a pyramid scheme. Actually, scratch that; it is a pyramid scheme, except that people on the lower rungs can pay hard money to move up. And nobody in the pyramid actually profits except the people who made it.
I never got this argument. It couldn't have taken him more than a minute or two to type that, it's not like there aren't many more in a given day. Not to mention you're insulting him for something he didn't even suggest (that we should be helping people in need; rather, he said that people need to pay to live in a developed world, which is absolutely true and doesn't require any time investment at all, really) and that could be said equally to GP (that he's wasting time typing it, which is arguable).
I don't know, but they've been doing significant development on it. The interface has radically changed since the last version Sun put out. Or perhaps it's not that they've done significant development, but that the old developers just haven't been hindered by Oracle.
I've never offered anyone free service other than my parents (seeing as how they raised me and all) and only had a few complaints, mostly from people I don't really know all that well (most of those people could fix their own computers). I told those people that I'd do it for "free" if they spent an equal or greater time doing some tedious chore that I needed done and they all paid up because their alternatives are far worse.
I had a similar experience adding some minor details to a page. I wasn't particularly busy that day, so I quoted enough Wikipedia bureaucracy at them to fill a book and they finally left the details in.
The problem with Wikipedia is just as you say; too many people have their little pet pages and to get anything done you need to throw the book at them. Nobody's going to bother doing that.
I'm with you. I never see this mythical harassment that sites like this seem to talk about and I play a wide variety of PC games for a great deal of my spare time (and I have since the early days of Starcraft 1). Maybe it's worse in games with younger or less mature audiences (such as Halo or Call of Duty), but I haven't seen any of this harassment in games I play (mostly Valve shooters like L4D and TF2, but also other games such as Battlefield and WoW).
I do see significant sex discrimination on imageboards and some IRC channels, though.
The only people I've met who dislike Steam are people who haven't used it or haven't used it in the past four or five years.
It is an excellent service that makes it convenient and easy for me to play my games however I want and makes buying and downloading games a breeze. If that's what you call DRM, then I'm fine with it.
As someone who uses Steam and loves it (among the many who do), I would recommend you try the current version before you bash it. I don't care if it's DRM if it's DRM that makes it easy for me to play my games anywhere.
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I'm looking forward to the first official-status release of Lubuntu as part of the Ubuntu family. I wonder what its boot time will be?
So either EA loses, or a patent troll loses. I think we can all agree that this is a win-win situation.
Sorry, but as always, correlation does not imply causation. I highly doubt that people are buying less computers because of the iPad and highly suspect that it may have something to do with, you know, the economy. Or perhaps they're perfectly happy with the computers they already have (you know, because most people already have computers).
While it is a dumb story that doesn't hold importance to 99% of /.'s audience, you're still making an appeal to bigger problems. The same thing you just said could be said about every single story on the front page today.
"But if you're the sort of person who is going to install it today, then you already know what they are!"
I'm not the sort of person who is going to install it today and I would like some actual details in the summary instead of links to a marketing page and a blog post about something unrelated. I do try to keep up to date even with things I have no intention of purchasing; I work in an industry where it is advantageous to do such.
For those who aren't able to psychicly deduce the details about something that just came out, here's the list of new features.
It certainly was a while ago and he did apologize (after the backlash), and I agree that we shouldn't hold it against him forever. Still, I tend to be wary of NoScript these days because of it. I'm not sure I would trust someone who abused his position like that with a $10k grant is all. Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I don't think it's a big leap to think that someone who abused their position for monetary gain once might do so again. And it's definitely something that I think people who use NoScript should know about, old or not.
Did they also get a grant for messing with other addon settings so their ads show up on their homepage?
And it would be called "iSpy."
The summary doesn't imply otherwise (surprisingly). I fail to see why you brought that up.
As far as I can tell, the agency in question hasn't filed a formal C&D yet, so their requests hold no weight. They're just requests.
PLEASE mod parent up. I had been watching the anime that the project was renamed to and there's nothing offensive about it unless maybe you're Amish. Seriously, there's a love triangle and some romantic scenes, but nothing past PG-13 and certainly nothing that warrants this amount of FUD. I'm genuinely pissed off about the misinformation this Violet person is putting out.
Mod parent up. EA's customer service is horrible. I decided to give Origin a preliminary try because I wanted to get Battlefield 2142 (one of the few BF games I haven't played the full version of; I loved the demo). I tried to register BF2, which the support documents led me to believe could be registered with the service if I had a physical copy.
I talked to a customer service rep for about two hours after about three searching for how I could possibly do this with their broken links and various other problems on their "service" with no real guidance. I told the rep that I was trying to register Battlefield 2 with the service and that it wasn't accepting the keys. He told me that my key was invalid when he looked at it. I said no, it wasn't invalid, I had the box right in front of me. He asked me to take a picture, so I did (I signed my name and timestamped it so he'd know it was me).
He told me that he had seen this picture online before and would no longer help me
WHAT?!
I told him that the picture was signed with my name and timestamped (with a current date and time!) and that I could take another one. After giving me the run-around for another half-hour or so, he realized that he had misunderstood what I had said (despite repeating it about 5 times throughout the conversation) and that he thought I was trying to register Bad Company 2 and not Battlefield 2 and that Battlefield 2 couldn't be registered on the service. Thanks for wasting two hours of my life, EA. I uninstalled after that. Valve may be slow to release first party games, but at least they treat their customers well (even the whiny ones on the forums). I was genuinely insulted by the whole ordeal.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
Seriously, everyone knows code reviews are a good thing unless your ego is friggen huge. The problem is convincing the higher-ups that it's worth taking an extra X days off the release schedule.
I second this. My experience with MUDs was never that great, and it got worse the more players began to leave. They seemed like they wanted to be both a social experience and a game, but failed at both.
Conversely, my experience with modern games has been great. There are plenty of great games these days that are tons of fun to play (I think I put somewhere upward of 700 hours in Left 4 Dead 1 over the course of about a year, Team Fortress 2 is probably even higher), and Steam is exposing me to a lot of independent games I hadn't heard of before (Braid, a single-player game, is probably somewhere in my top 25 games). Plus you've got Blizzard releasing Starcraft 2 and (sometime soon, hopefully) Diablo 3, and Battlefield 3 is coming out soon. And the best thing is that I've met a ton of great people on most of these games. Voice chat is a feature in almost every first person shooter, and if you play on the same servers most of the time you get to know some great people. Other games still have text chat; I can't tell you how many people I met online back in high school playing Diablo 2 or Starcraft over battle.net, which was rather like its own IRC network back then (I'm still friends with one of the guys I met on there).
I think the success for the social aspects of these games relies on the fact that they're not trying to be a social experience at the same time; they're just trying to be fun games. When you make a fun game with even the most basic communication features, people will build a community around it. If it's not fun, nobody will care how much social integration there is.
The reason the social networking games are still around and making money despite this is because they approach it differently. Rather than try to make a fun game, they make a minimal game with some minor RPG elements, and then tie things like leveling up to the number of people you've coerced into playing the game for your benefit. The more people you get involved, the more you benefit. It's kind of like a pyramid scheme. Actually, scratch that; it is a pyramid scheme, except that people on the lower rungs can pay hard money to move up. And nobody in the pyramid actually profits except the people who made it.
I never got this argument. It couldn't have taken him more than a minute or two to type that, it's not like there aren't many more in a given day. Not to mention you're insulting him for something he didn't even suggest (that we should be helping people in need; rather, he said that people need to pay to live in a developed world, which is absolutely true and doesn't require any time investment at all, really) and that could be said equally to GP (that he's wasting time typing it, which is arguable).
I don't know, but they've been doing significant development on it. The interface has radically changed since the last version Sun put out. Or perhaps it's not that they've done significant development, but that the old developers just haven't been hindered by Oracle.
Er, sorry, that should be Scroogle.org, not .com.
You might like Scroogle, though it usually goes down for a few days whenever Google changes something.
I've never offered anyone free service other than my parents (seeing as how they raised me and all) and only had a few complaints, mostly from people I don't really know all that well (most of those people could fix their own computers). I told those people that I'd do it for "free" if they spent an equal or greater time doing some tedious chore that I needed done and they all paid up because their alternatives are far worse.
I had a similar experience adding some minor details to a page. I wasn't particularly busy that day, so I quoted enough Wikipedia bureaucracy at them to fill a book and they finally left the details in.
The problem with Wikipedia is just as you say; too many people have their little pet pages and to get anything done you need to throw the book at them. Nobody's going to bother doing that.
I'm with you. I never see this mythical harassment that sites like this seem to talk about and I play a wide variety of PC games for a great deal of my spare time (and I have since the early days of Starcraft 1). Maybe it's worse in games with younger or less mature audiences (such as Halo or Call of Duty), but I haven't seen any of this harassment in games I play (mostly Valve shooters like L4D and TF2, but also other games such as Battlefield and WoW).
I do see significant sex discrimination on imageboards and some IRC channels, though.
The only people I've met who dislike Steam are people who haven't used it or haven't used it in the past four or five years.
It is an excellent service that makes it convenient and easy for me to play my games however I want and makes buying and downloading games a breeze. If that's what you call DRM, then I'm fine with it.
As someone who uses Steam and loves it (among the many who do), I would recommend you try the current version before you bash it. I don't care if it's DRM if it's DRM that makes it easy for me to play my games anywhere.
Huxley had it right, though.
Given the recent finding over in Australia that sharks like AC/DC, I get the feeling that sharks just like to rock.