The problem was that Netscape was making Mozilla the open source world and not for their corporate masters at AOL. They five or six years dinking around writing UI toolkits and bugbases and pontificating on standards, and when they finally released something (NS 6), it was a pile of ass.
It wasn't 5 or 6 years. It was approximately 3 years to write a modern standards compliant brower from scratch to the point that AOL could have taken it up. Netscape 6 wasn't much to write home about, but even that was embeddable, as evidenced by the Compuserve 2000 client. The CS2000 client is basically an AOL client with some different DLLs, graphics and content. It was proof of concept that Gecko could run in the AOL client. By the time of Netscape 7, the performance was vastly improved and Gecko was miles better than IE - more stable, smaller footprint, better rendering. AOL could have used it and did use it in beta versions of the client. Betas running the Gecko engine actually crashed less than the IE version. The reason it never materialised in the final release was because marketing couldn't cope with the short term pain that might entail from the transition - sites running VBScript, ActiveX controls and so on. That's what it boiled down to.
They could have used XUL too, for example when AOL Communicator was being written, but they didn't. Netscape demonstrated a standalone AOL mail app written entirely in XUL. For reasons unfathomable, they chose to write an almost identical UI entirely in C++ instead. Gecko did make an appearance - providing HTML mail rendering support, but it's hardly an impressive use of the technology. Making apps like AOL Communicator is what XUL was designed for and it was ignored.
XUL could also have been used to replace the really ancient AOL format (whose name escapes me) used for the start page and elsewhere. Partners had been bitching about it forever. XUL would have been the perfect tool to replace it with.
In fact Netscape bent over backwards to get AOL to use Gecko in a lot of places, but there was a lot of infighting, inertia and conservatism that ultimately 'won'. I say 'won' because the result is that the AOL client is even more arcane looking than it was then. You can only polish a turd for so long. It's no wonder users are deserting in droves when their product is so ancient and monolithic.
As for WinAmp, basically AOL could have told the guys in Nullsoft to work up a music store and they would have done it. I'm sure they would have jumped at it. In fact I am certain that Nullsoft have pitched the idea of just such an idea on numerous occasions. Again, it would not surprise me if they were beaten down by the same conservatism and marketing stupidity that did in Netscape.
AOL Client is a revenue stream. Netscape and Winamp never got past being Internet Freebies.
Netscape was a revenue stream too. And clearly it still is since AOL recently paid Mozilla.org to produce Netscape 7.2.
And so were Winamp & Spinner. They all generated revenue. Of course if AOL were serious about generating revenue, they wouldn't have sidelined them the way they did.
Nullsoft/AOL would have had to have a music store from the getgo
AOL is part of Time Warner. It has tens of thousands of music tracks for sale. And films. And TV / Radio channels already experienced in negotiating broadcast rights. Plus close contacts with the rest of the music industry. Plus a huge marketing department. Plus 27 million AOL users held captive to sell them to. Plus anyone else who wants to buy them (e.g. Winamp users).
They could have made it work back when they were bleating about 'synergies' way back during the merger. Hell, they could even do it now. I expect that if AOL Broadband tossed in some free tracks, a free movie or two in as part of their service every month, it would be a major selling point.
No it wasn't that. You give them too much credit. AOL are simply incompetant.
At one time, Netscape, Nullsoft, Spinner etc. were considered to be 'divlets', all with their own identity, all churning out cool stuff that could be reused etc. You think about what these groups produced:
Netscape made Mozilla & Gecko. Enough said. It also had a great portal until some dickheads started infesting it with popup windows, rendering it unusable.
Spinner.com made a great radio system. I still play it on occasion.
Nullsoft made the best, bar none damned media player for Windows, plus NSV streaming, NSIS and more.
So what does AOL do? Drive them all into the ground and suck Microsoft's cock. Oh I think some of these things are offhandedly in the AOL client (e.g. radio) but innovation? What's that?
The reason for all this is that AOL has a corporate culture of infighting and conservatism. If two groups compete for some work, it is the one that doesn't rock the boat, that promises the fastest results and with a vision compatible with marketing drones that wins. The AOL client feature requirements and schedule dictates what goes ahead. It doesn't matter that an inferior product will go in or that it will become a millstone in a year or two.
Meanwhile the innovative product withers on the vine and the group responsible is shitcanned. Why? I don't know but I reckon IE & WMP are like comfort blankets to AOL marketing. If you start going all scary on them by showing them something without 'Microsoft' in the title, they get nervous. I bet even the Mac group in AOL feels like an unwanted child.
Consider what could have been. Winamp 5.0 has streaming music, videos, a library, a CD burner, ripping, an integrated browser. With a little push it could have been iTMS. Time Warner has tens of thousands of tracks and movies to sell and AOL is (or was) the perfect outlet to sell them. The much vaunted 'synergy' they kept talking about was right under their noses. But apparantly that's not much use to a massive multi media conglomerate. Oh no, "let's sack them all".
Or consider Gecko. It was cross-platform, standards compliant and modular. AOL could free themselves from Microsoft forever. They could develop a cross-platform and modern client. They wouldn't have to wait for MS to fix bugs, or workaround some broken implementation - they could do whatever they liked with it. So what does AOL do? It stumps for the bitrotten piece of crap from their mortal enemy. And I'm sure Microsoft is ecstatic about that, since it basically ties AOL's hands.
It really does boil down to incompetance. Sheer bloody incompetance.
I'm sure some people do want to become a Jedi, but I expect the fast majority would be happy to be immersed in the mythos of Star Wars. The same will be true when Middle Earth goes online.
The problem isn't with Star Wars. It's that that it's run by Verant / Sony. The consequence is that the game became an expensive level grind (or skill grind if you prefer) designed to string it out for as long as possible, to only reward hard core gamers, for the player to be a paying beta tester, and for features that should have been there since the beginning to be belatedly available a year later as an expansion pack for even more $$$.
I agree with 1) but everything else is wishful thinking. It would be nice if AOL offered an office suite, but the simple fact is AOL users are too computer illiterate to even cope with a normal email client. What chance do you have to promote Open Office to that kind of person? What chance is there when it would certainly double or triple support calls to AOL? They'd be better off to do a deal with Sun - offer Star Office to AOL users for cheap or even nothing and let Sun cope with the support in which ever way they feel like. There is potential for that kind of thing.
And number 3) is right out. The file format is the least of your problems when delivering streaming content. What you need are honking big servers capable of concurrently streaming to thousands of connected clients. Such servers and the software they run are the important things. It would be better for AOL to strike a deal with Real for that. Real is fairly platform agnostic and big chunks of it are even open source - something which couldn't be said for either Quicktime or WMP.
Now the reason I agree with 1) is because platform agnostic should be a buzz word for AOL. A while back they used to harp on about "AOL anywhere" and it made a lot of sense. AOL (or rather Time Warner) produces content. They shouldn't care about the pipes that gets it to the user - the more eyeballs / ears who get it the better. Open standards enable content to reach as wide an audience as possible. Using proprietary protocols such as DHTML / ActiveX controls in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows Media Player means only Microsoft users get the content. It means Microsoft (their main competitor) controls the pipes.
AOL may be have Microsoft's dick in their mouth because of the legal settlement, but maybe they should bite down instead of sucking it deep. If they can't or won't get rid of IE, they should still be marginalising it now. That means stop slapping stupid features into the AOL client that require ActiveX controls to function properly. Start cleaning up your content and cleaning up your users content (those who make homepages through the automatic tools).
What the hell am I saying? AOL is in self-destruct mode and has been for a long time. Their AOL client is stuck in a timewarp and the end will be nigh before they realise it.
It might be useful for driving a second screen on a spare monitor you may have lying around.
Re:I played Everquest up to level....19....
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Everquest 2 Launches
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It's hard to say. I also played EQ, up to level 23 or so before I gave in.
By that point all the fun had evaporated. Each level got harder to do, more repetitive and the exp was pathetic. I'd spend hours camped in Kunark killing black / yellow con things and my blue bar would inch up a couple of pixels. If I was lucky I might get a drop I could use for jewelcrafting to break the monotony. When I got really sick of it all I might go on a crafting binge and hang out in the tunnel and/auc for a while. I made money, but it was grind, grind, grind.
I didn't ask myself "am I having fun?" because initially I was, but slowly with time it had been replaced with reptition. Then I read an article about Skinner Boxes (that someone posted on/.) and I reealised that was exactly what EQ had become. It wasn't fun - it was about pecking a box and being randomly rewarded with seed.
On top of that, the game was massively, horribly disproportionately top heavy. Practically every new zone was designed for high levels. Yeah there were a few new newbie zones but two full expansions contained nothing for anyone under level 35. The market was flooded with new elite gear. Crafted gear that took an age to make and used to command a premium wouldn't sell for 1pp. Newbies were twinked out in 500pp of armour from new zone drops and so on. The economy was fucked. It all became a waste of time in every sense of the word. The final straw was the botched upgrade when Shadows of Luclin came out. The game was unplayable for a month because of the new (and buggy) graphics engine. I gave up soon after.
Other MMPORGs have tried to fix the problems in EQ and some have screwed up in their own ways, but few have approached EQ for sheer brokeness.
Recently I played Star Wars Galaxies on 14 day trial (that someone in/. kindly pointed me to) and frankly I thought it was a heap of shit too. It didn't suffer the same top heaviness as EQ (yet) and the crafting and progression was far more sophisticated but the tread mill was clearly evident. I was a newbie for those days, and spent most of it shooting critters and digging ore to craft weapons. I could have also danced on a macro loop like some appeared to be doing - woo hoo! Frankly I saw nothing interesting or compelling in the game. It was another Skinner Box and not even one where you even felt immersed with anything approaching Star Wars. I sure hope the expansion pack with space ships improves it.
And this is the most worrisome thing about EQ2 - it has Verant, EQ and SWG as its parents. That's a very troublesome combination. It means high monthly fees, bugs, expansion packs (that are almost compulsary for higher levels) and an uncaring and indifferent management. I think I'll pass.
I sure hope it's not like Windows search - it's bloody awful! Not only is it excrutiatingly slow, but it is absolutely hopeless if you want to do something useful such as find all encrypted files.
Turning on the indexing service appears to make no discernable difference in search times either. It just means your machine periodically grinds away for an hour building up a table. I have no idea what it's doing but searches seem to take as long whether it's on or off.
I think in all, I'd prefer something simpler like slocate, that builds up a file index but doesn't attempt to read the contents. Even slocate takes a while to index, but at least it works as designed.
Meta info sounds better, but even that could be fraught. The idea failed miserably for the web. I can well imagine if the idea catches on for local files that over zealous apps could start stuffing their files full of useless meta info so you're continuously getting false hits.
GTA 3 / VC / SA were born on the console too, but I think you'd have to be insane to play them there. In fact I think you'd have to be insane to play any FPS or free view game on a console. It's impossible to play on a joystick unless the game has some kind of aid / cheat to lock in on a target.
GTA on the PC was incredible. It certainly had flaws (pedestrian / car dematerialization showed it's PS2 roots), but the mouse control and the glorious high res graphics more than made up for it. So the console is not always the best place way to see a game, even one that started off there.
In other words, make them look legit. Enter a well formed but bogus account / credit number, valid sort codes, expiry dates, names, PINs memorable dates etc. If you have an account with the target bank you could even ensure you enter an account number of the correct length and has the first four digits as your own.
The only way they have to separate the wheat from the chaff is to actually try them. If they're really stupid, they (or their underlings) may actually get caught when they attempt to withdraw cash or buy something. Now that would be funny.
Drown them in noise. Everytime you get one of these emails, visit the site and enter bogus information. That's what I do. It might not be enough to get the scumbags caught but it must certainly be an annoyance to them. And who knows, a few bogus logins might be enough to get alarm bells ringing at the bank.
I reckon banks could do something similar too. Create some honeypot accounts, and track how the criminals attempt to access it. I'm sure they could play a few tricks with a seemingly big fat balance that could make the criminals reveal their hand.
Except there is no soundly gathered evidence. Not a sausage. Nothing. No properly controlled study has has found evidence for any "New Age" phenomena be it ghosts, esp, remote viewing, spoon bending or whatever.
How long do you continue to waste your time looking? How long before you conclude it's all in the imagination?
And crime is easily prevented by installing bolts, steel doors, alarms to a property. And a moat.
Does that mean the person who does attempt to break-in isn't committing a crime?
Besides, spamming is a generic term that incorporates numerous and extremely onerous acts including identity theft, theft of service, theft of bandwidth, credit card fraud, fraudulent / fake products & services and more.
Spammers deserve to be fined heavily and in the worst cases thrown into prison for very lengthy periods of time. They are fucking scum, easily comparable with con men and other criminal low lifes.
Real ales are making somewhat of a comeback. Even chain pubs in Britain offer a 'guest ale' or two, and some such as Wetherspoons make a big thing of having four or five to try. Not only are they often very drinkable, but they're often significantly cheaper than Bud and other branded fizzy alcohols.
LOL, less! Currently trading at 2.91 as I write this. I thought they'd tank a lot faster than they have, but I suppose there were a lot of fingers of the scales bolstering the price before now. With Baystar bailing out as fast as possible, I wonder if the pace will accelerate.
As if evolutionary dogma masquerading as good science should go unchallenged.
Which dogma would that be?
Ever ponder the question why is it so important to some people that God not exist and be removed from the schools?
Evolution has no opinion on the existence of god or not. Nor does it have an opinion on magical fairies, unicorns or dancing hippos. Why does it have no opinion? Because magical, unprovable or unobservable notions such as god are not required at any stage to make it work. That's why it's called a theory (as in the stronger scientific sense) and is also a fact (also in the strong scientific sense).
Getting kids to think outside themselves... nah - horrible idea. "You are the product of the survival of the fittest: go forth and beat the weak - for you have no soul, and therefore your actions matter not - as long as you don't get caught."
Excuse me. Are you saying that if you don't believe in a god that you are incapable of moral actions and thought? That if you don't have the threat of hell constantly hanging over you'll go out and beat up a bunch of cripples? I get it now, you're fucking lunatic.
Yes it is a fact. Someone has already provided a link to talkorigins.org where you will see ample evidence that it is and plenty of refutations for all the other nonsense that passes for creation 'science'. As for ignoring them, that's fine by me as long as they keep their nose out of the school science curriculum where it doesn't belong.
a) Evolution is a fact as well as theory. Evolution can be observed and thus it is a fact. There are certainly areas of disagreement and uncertainty within the (vast) field, but nothing comes even remotely close to displacing or disproving evolution. Nothing. Not one bit.
b) Creationists don't have a theory. Spouting 'god did it', or resorting to dubious pseudo-scientific rhetoric is no subsitute for evidence. You need evidence to form a theory.
By which you mean they feel quite affronted that religious dogma masquerading as bad science should be taught alongside a scientific fact. Is it any wonder?
I don't want to seem harsh, but if you caught 3 virii in the first week, you don't need a Mac, you need a virus checker, and a clue. I have to wonder what kind of software is infecting you with all these trojans / viruses. If it was warez, it was your own damned fault.
As for the Mac... it only does do much to protect you from yourself. For example it restricts admin rights but it won't save you from malicious warez that does something nasty to your system during installation. It might not need a virus checker like Windows, but then you presumably bought the PC to play games. It would not surprise me if Macs had even 1/10th the number of titles.
Neither does it help if the hardware breaks in some form. Macs are fairly well built (they should be for the price) but they're not invulnerable or infallible. A busted fan is a busted fan. A busted hard drive is a busted harddrive. The solution is to use good quality parts in the first place. If your PC is as broken as you say that you replace it with one with a better build.
And how do they tell? Are you expected to throw any kitten progeny into the river? Are you liable if your cat knocks up / is knocked up by some neighbourhood cat? Once this happens, and after say five or six cat generations, the genes will truly be in the wild. Let's hope this genetic manipulation has no harmful side effects, for the cat or anyone else.
In fact I can't see any way they could possible stop your cat breeding, except the obvious one. And that would probably be what happens. Your expensive cat will be neutered when you get it, thus ensuring it cannot breed. In fact the only gene modified cats that will be able to breed are the ones Allerca have locked up in their cat farm churning out kittens at $3500 a pop.
Personally I wouldn't buy a pet from a dog / cat farm whether it were hypo-allergenic or not. Frankly I hope the business falls flat on its face.
Actually, the *only* reason the iPod doesn't do video is because it can't. Look at the new iPod and it's pretty clear what it is - a rehash of the old iPod with some new firmware, and a colour screen. It's a point upgrade. Rendering jpegs is within the capability of the existing hardware. Delivering 30fps video *and* sound isn't something it would likely be able to support ever.
As for the photo support; the Apple PR makes it sound distinctly underwhelming. So you can show pictures on the iPod on a minuscule 2 inch screen - big deal. This feature seems more like it is there to justify the colour screen than the other way around. Probably the rest of the device from the wheel, the battery and the PCB is probably 90% identical with other devices in the range.
I'm sure Apple are producing a proper multi-media device but this isn't it.
When you get around to porting this to the PC, please, please with a cherry on top sort out the frigging pedestrian / car behaviour.
In the previous two games you could stand still, do a 360 turn and pedestrians / cars who were visible a moment ago have been replaced with other pedestrians / cars. Such behaviour might be unavoidable in the PS2 version, but it's seriously annoying in the PC version.
There were some very dumb pathing issues too. A common thing in previous games was to stand under a bridge and watch as police etc., jumped straight off it to their deaths to get you. Or they would drive straight into the water etc.
It's amusing but it screws up some missions too. One mission had you rescuing your buddy from a scrap yard. I did that part and he followed me out. I ran across a bridge and turned around to see him fall straight into the water and drown. The pathing had him make a beeline straight for my character without checking whether he would drown in the process.
Still, GTA games are excellent, but that AI needs work.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't 5 or 6 years. It was approximately 3 years to write a modern standards compliant brower from scratch to the point that AOL could have taken it up. Netscape 6 wasn't much to write home about, but even that was embeddable, as evidenced by the Compuserve 2000 client. The CS2000 client is basically an AOL client with some different DLLs, graphics and content. It was proof of concept that Gecko could run in the AOL client. By the time of Netscape 7, the performance was vastly improved and Gecko was miles better than IE - more stable, smaller footprint, better rendering. AOL could have used it and did use it in beta versions of the client. Betas running the Gecko engine actually crashed less than the IE version. The reason it never materialised in the final release was because marketing couldn't cope with the short term pain that might entail from the transition - sites running VBScript, ActiveX controls and so on. That's what it boiled down to.
They could have used XUL too, for example when AOL Communicator was being written, but they didn't. Netscape demonstrated a standalone AOL mail app written entirely in XUL. For reasons unfathomable, they chose to write an almost identical UI entirely in C++ instead. Gecko did make an appearance - providing HTML mail rendering support, but it's hardly an impressive use of the technology. Making apps like AOL Communicator is what XUL was designed for and it was ignored.
XUL could also have been used to replace the really ancient AOL format (whose name escapes me) used for the start page and elsewhere. Partners had been bitching about it forever. XUL would have been the perfect tool to replace it with.
In fact Netscape bent over backwards to get AOL to use Gecko in a lot of places, but there was a lot of infighting, inertia and conservatism that ultimately 'won'. I say 'won' because the result is that the AOL client is even more arcane looking than it was then. You can only polish a turd for so long. It's no wonder users are deserting in droves when their product is so ancient and monolithic.
As for WinAmp, basically AOL could have told the guys in Nullsoft to work up a music store and they would have done it. I'm sure they would have jumped at it. In fact I am certain that Nullsoft have pitched the idea of just such an idea on numerous occasions. Again, it would not surprise me if they were beaten down by the same conservatism and marketing stupidity that did in Netscape.
AOL Client is a revenue stream. Netscape and Winamp never got past being Internet Freebies.
Netscape was a revenue stream too. And clearly it still is since AOL recently paid Mozilla.org to produce Netscape 7.2.
And so were Winamp & Spinner. They all generated revenue. Of course if AOL were serious about generating revenue, they wouldn't have sidelined them the way they did.
AOL is part of Time Warner. It has tens of thousands of music tracks for sale. And films. And TV / Radio channels already experienced in negotiating broadcast rights. Plus close contacts with the rest of the music industry. Plus a huge marketing department. Plus 27 million AOL users held captive to sell them to. Plus anyone else who wants to buy them (e.g. Winamp users).
They could have made it work back when they were bleating about 'synergies' way back during the merger. Hell, they could even do it now. I expect that if AOL Broadband tossed in some free tracks, a free movie or two in as part of their service every month, it would be a major selling point.
At one time, Netscape, Nullsoft, Spinner etc. were considered to be 'divlets', all with their own identity, all churning out cool stuff that could be reused etc. You think about what these groups produced:
So what does AOL do? Drive them all into the ground and suck Microsoft's cock. Oh I think some of these things are offhandedly in the AOL client (e.g. radio) but innovation? What's that?
The reason for all this is that AOL has a corporate culture of infighting and conservatism. If two groups compete for some work, it is the one that doesn't rock the boat, that promises the fastest results and with a vision compatible with marketing drones that wins. The AOL client feature requirements and schedule dictates what goes ahead. It doesn't matter that an inferior product will go in or that it will become a millstone in a year or two.
Meanwhile the innovative product withers on the vine and the group responsible is shitcanned. Why? I don't know but I reckon IE & WMP are like comfort blankets to AOL marketing. If you start going all scary on them by showing them something without 'Microsoft' in the title, they get nervous. I bet even the Mac group in AOL feels like an unwanted child.
Consider what could have been. Winamp 5.0 has streaming music, videos, a library, a CD burner, ripping, an integrated browser. With a little push it could have been iTMS. Time Warner has tens of thousands of tracks and movies to sell and AOL is (or was) the perfect outlet to sell them. The much vaunted 'synergy' they kept talking about was right under their noses. But apparantly that's not much use to a massive multi media conglomerate. Oh no, "let's sack them all".
Or consider Gecko. It was cross-platform, standards compliant and modular. AOL could free themselves from Microsoft forever. They could develop a cross-platform and modern client. They wouldn't have to wait for MS to fix bugs, or workaround some broken implementation - they could do whatever they liked with it. So what does AOL do? It stumps for the bitrotten piece of crap from their mortal enemy. And I'm sure Microsoft is ecstatic about that, since it basically ties AOL's hands.
It really does boil down to incompetance. Sheer bloody incompetance.
The problem isn't with Star Wars. It's that that it's run by Verant / Sony. The consequence is that the game became an expensive level grind (or skill grind if you prefer) designed to string it out for as long as possible, to only reward hard core gamers, for the player to be a paying beta tester, and for features that should have been there since the beginning to be belatedly available a year later as an expansion pack for even more $$$.
And number 3) is right out. The file format is the least of your problems when delivering streaming content. What you need are honking big servers capable of concurrently streaming to thousands of connected clients. Such servers and the software they run are the important things. It would be better for AOL to strike a deal with Real for that. Real is fairly platform agnostic and big chunks of it are even open source - something which couldn't be said for either Quicktime or WMP.
Now the reason I agree with 1) is because platform agnostic should be a buzz word for AOL. A while back they used to harp on about "AOL anywhere" and it made a lot of sense. AOL (or rather Time Warner) produces content. They shouldn't care about the pipes that gets it to the user - the more eyeballs / ears who get it the better. Open standards enable content to reach as wide an audience as possible. Using proprietary protocols such as DHTML / ActiveX controls in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows Media Player means only Microsoft users get the content. It means Microsoft (their main competitor) controls the pipes.
AOL may be have Microsoft's dick in their mouth because of the legal settlement, but maybe they should bite down instead of sucking it deep. If they can't or won't get rid of IE, they should still be marginalising it now. That means stop slapping stupid features into the AOL client that require ActiveX controls to function properly. Start cleaning up your content and cleaning up your users content (those who make homepages through the automatic tools).
What the hell am I saying? AOL is in self-destruct mode and has been for a long time. Their AOL client is stuck in a timewarp and the end will be nigh before they realise it.
It might be useful for driving a second screen on a spare monitor you may have lying around.
By that point all the fun had evaporated. Each level got harder to do, more repetitive and the exp was pathetic. I'd spend hours camped in Kunark killing black / yellow con things and my blue bar would inch up a couple of pixels. If I was lucky I might get a drop I could use for jewelcrafting to break the monotony. When I got really sick of it all I might go on a crafting binge and hang out in the tunnel and
I didn't ask myself "am I having fun?" because initially I was, but slowly with time it had been replaced with reptition. Then I read an article about Skinner Boxes (that someone posted on
On top of that, the game was massively, horribly disproportionately top heavy. Practically every new zone was designed for high levels. Yeah there were a few new newbie zones but two full expansions contained nothing for anyone under level 35. The market was flooded with new elite gear. Crafted gear that took an age to make and used to command a premium wouldn't sell for 1pp. Newbies were twinked out in 500pp of armour from new zone drops and so on. The economy was fucked. It all became a waste of time in every sense of the word. The final straw was the botched upgrade when Shadows of Luclin came out. The game was unplayable for a month because of the new (and buggy) graphics engine. I gave up soon after.
Other MMPORGs have tried to fix the problems in EQ and some have screwed up in their own ways, but few have approached EQ for sheer brokeness.
Recently I played Star Wars Galaxies on 14 day trial (that someone in
And this is the most worrisome thing about EQ2 - it has Verant, EQ and SWG as its parents. That's a very troublesome combination. It means high monthly fees, bugs, expansion packs (that are almost compulsary for higher levels) and an uncaring and indifferent management. I think I'll pass.
Turning on the indexing service appears to make no discernable difference in search times either. It just means your machine periodically grinds away for an hour building up a table. I have no idea what it's doing but searches seem to take as long whether it's on or off.
I think in all, I'd prefer something simpler like slocate, that builds up a file index but doesn't attempt to read the contents. Even slocate takes a while to index, but at least it works as designed.
Meta info sounds better, but even that could be fraught. The idea failed miserably for the web. I can well imagine if the idea catches on for local files that over zealous apps could start stuffing their files full of useless meta info so you're continuously getting false hits.
GTA on the PC was incredible. It certainly had flaws (pedestrian / car dematerialization showed it's PS2 roots), but the mouse control and the glorious high res graphics more than made up for it. So the console is not always the best place way to see a game, even one that started off there.
The only way they have to separate the wheat from the chaff is to actually try them. If they're really stupid, they (or their underlings) may actually get caught when they attempt to withdraw cash or buy something. Now that would be funny.
I reckon banks could do something similar too. Create some honeypot accounts, and track how the criminals attempt to access it. I'm sure they could play a few tricks with a seemingly big fat balance that could make the criminals reveal their hand.
... to pack a flashlight.
How long do you continue to waste your time looking? How long before you conclude it's all in the imagination?
Never underestimate the power of stupidity.
Does that mean the person who does attempt to break-in isn't committing a crime?
Besides, spamming is a generic term that incorporates numerous and extremely onerous acts including identity theft, theft of service, theft of bandwidth, credit card fraud, fraudulent / fake products & services and more.
Spammers deserve to be fined heavily and in the worst cases thrown into prison for very lengthy periods of time. They are fucking scum, easily comparable with con men and other criminal low lifes.
Real ales are making somewhat of a comeback. Even chain pubs in Britain offer a 'guest ale' or two, and some such as Wetherspoons make a big thing of having four or five to try. Not only are they often very drinkable, but they're often significantly cheaper than Bud and other branded fizzy alcohols.
Bye bye SCO we hardly knew ye.
Which dogma would that be?
Ever ponder the question why is it so important to some people that God not exist and be removed from the schools?
Evolution has no opinion on the existence of god or not. Nor does it have an opinion on magical fairies, unicorns or dancing hippos. Why does it have no opinion? Because magical, unprovable or unobservable notions such as god are not required at any stage to make it work. That's why it's called a theory (as in the stronger scientific sense) and is also a fact (also in the strong scientific sense).
Getting kids to think outside themselves... nah - horrible idea. "You are the product of the survival of the fittest: go forth and beat the weak - for you have no soul, and therefore your actions matter not - as long as you don't get caught."
Excuse me. Are you saying that if you don't believe in a god that you are incapable of moral actions and thought? That if you don't have the threat of hell constantly hanging over you'll go out and beat up a bunch of cripples? I get it now, you're fucking lunatic.
Yes it is a fact. Someone has already provided a link to talkorigins.org where you will see ample evidence that it is and plenty of refutations for all the other nonsense that passes for creation 'science'. As for ignoring them, that's fine by me as long as they keep their nose out of the school science curriculum where it doesn't belong.
b) Creationists don't have a theory. Spouting 'god did it', or resorting to dubious pseudo-scientific rhetoric is no subsitute for evidence. You need evidence to form a theory.
By which you mean they feel quite affronted that religious dogma masquerading as bad science should be taught alongside a scientific fact. Is it any wonder?
As for the Mac... it only does do much to protect you from yourself. For example it restricts admin rights but it won't save you from malicious warez that does something nasty to your system during installation. It might not need a virus checker like Windows, but then you presumably bought the PC to play games. It would not surprise me if Macs had even 1/10th the number of titles.
Neither does it help if the hardware breaks in some form. Macs are fairly well built (they should be for the price) but they're not invulnerable or infallible. A busted fan is a busted fan. A busted hard drive is a busted harddrive. The solution is to use good quality parts in the first place. If your PC is as broken as you say that you replace it with one with a better build.
In fact I can't see any way they could possible stop your cat breeding, except the obvious one. And that would probably be what happens. Your expensive cat will be neutered when you get it, thus ensuring it cannot breed. In fact the only gene modified cats that will be able to breed are the ones Allerca have locked up in their cat farm churning out kittens at $3500 a pop.
Personally I wouldn't buy a pet from a dog / cat farm whether it were hypo-allergenic or not. Frankly I hope the business falls flat on its face.
As for the photo support; the Apple PR makes it sound distinctly underwhelming. So you can show pictures on the iPod on a minuscule 2 inch screen - big deal. This feature seems more like it is there to justify the colour screen than the other way around. Probably the rest of the device from the wheel, the battery and the PCB is probably 90% identical with other devices in the range.
I'm sure Apple are producing a proper multi-media device but this isn't it.
In the previous two games you could stand still, do a 360 turn and pedestrians / cars who were visible a moment ago have been replaced with other pedestrians / cars. Such behaviour might be unavoidable in the PS2 version, but it's seriously annoying in the PC version.
There were some very dumb pathing issues too. A common thing in previous games was to stand under a bridge and watch as police etc., jumped straight off it to their deaths to get you. Or they would drive straight into the water etc.
It's amusing but it screws up some missions too. One mission had you rescuing your buddy from a scrap yard. I did that part and he followed me out. I ran across a bridge and turned around to see him fall straight into the water and drown. The pathing had him make a beeline straight for my character without checking whether he would drown in the process.
Still, GTA games are excellent, but that AI needs work.