Many subscription based companies are like that these days. I suscribe to Sky TV which is a UK satellite service and after navigating the options for a bit it says something like "If you want to order a movie press 1, if you want to upgrade your Sky package press 2, if you are thinking of cancelling and want to speak to one of our subscription consultants then press 3". So Sky instills fear doubt and hassle for any detrimental (for Sky) choices.
Anyway, ring up 3 and you're put through to the consultant who'll do the usual tricks to keep you subscribed. In my case I said I wanted to cancel because my box was broken and the 'consultant' persuaded me to stay on the promise of a cheap engineer call-out and a replacement box.
Fortunately that is what I wanted them to offer me this and I had no intention of cancelling, so it went pretty well in the end. Still, it annoys me that they can't play straight.
And how many hundreds of millions of dollars has AOL pumped into these things?
Mozilla alone must have required several hundred million dollars of investment and yet at the end of it, it's still an open source browser and a remarkably good one at that. If they'd just abandoned it as they'd found it then it would be a crusty lump of crap based on the 'classic' (i.e. Communicator 4.x) codebase and no one would be using it. You'd have to wonder what browser if any Linux would have to compete with IE if that were the case.
And Winamp is still free and advert free, and still remains one of the best players around.
And ICQ has as much baroque over the top menus and functionality as ever:) But it too benefits from sharing the same hardware and backend that drives AIM.
So what's wrong with colorful graphics and cartoonish characters? Do games have to feature gore and ultra-violence to be entertaining? Hell no.
Let's turn that around.
So what's wrong with gore and ultra-violence? Do games have to feature colorful graphics and cartoonish characters to be entertaining? Hell no.
The point is, a game in different genres can be entertaining, but a games console that shies away from violent games from arbitrary reasons is going to find itself on the scrapheap. People want choice and turning away half your potential business is commercial suicide. And yes and half would be no exagerration since I truly expect that GTA Vice City and similar games will sell that many PS2s this Christmas.
Well that's great but while Nintendo are restrict themselves to the young at heart, the Playstation and XBox will give the rest of the world what they want - choice. Be it cute and cuddly or ultraviolence and offal.
Personally I'd love to pick up a Gamecube to play with but this arbitrary restriction to the kind of games that Nintendo will licence mean I won't bother and many games companies won't bother porting their games either. It's no good being the cheapest if all your games suck.
Actually I know exactly what the word means and since I played EQ for a good two years, enough to spot its faults I know it is cheating.
My definition is simple - rolling one or more chars for fetching junk, trade skills, running into agro cities to buy stuff, sitting/auc'ing all day & raising cash and another that goes and kills stuff.
It is cheating because it offers an unfair advantage. I don't care how rich someone might be to afford two accounts, two computers and two copies of EQ+expansion packs, that should not entitle them to an advantage over other players.
Muling shouldn't be allowed, period. It is just a form of cheating and it doesn't matter how many accounts a person sets up, there should be a ban on using one character to supply / twink / buff another, or spy on rival factions or whatever. If the game balance were right in the first place, there would be little need for this, or least players would have to pay someone else for the privilege of fetching stuff for them.
I don't see that it would be necessarily hard to catch most cheats. Correlating transactions between players, IP addresses, credit cards, addresses and other personal info should enable it quite easily. A player so flagged could be monitored by an admin and kicked when they were caught doing it.
Lots of people don't have DVDs/books/games before they're released at all. While it is possible someone might pick up an advance copy a couple of weeks before general release, we're talking about reviews appearing for products that are months and months away. Look at any title on pre-order in Amazon and you'll see dickheads giving it five stars when they have no clue what it will be like. I bet within 1 day of Amazon taking orders on the next Harry Potter book, you'll have hundreds of 'reviews' for it.
Amazon simply shouldn't allow it, or it should mark those reviews in some visible way and wipe them when the thing actually does goes on release. It totally destroys any trust in their review system.
Amazon doesn't give a damn about their rating system. They'll happily let idiots give five star ratings to DVDs/books/games etc. that haven't even been released yet! How the hell do they expect people to judge an item when that happens?
Just as bad, they allow ballot stuffing. Just pick any random L Ron Hubbard book and read the gushing reviews by cult members. You can't write more accurate, derogatory reviews for LRH books because they've flagged the book as controversial or something and toss out new reviews.
It must be possible to produce a rating system that accurately reflects a books true worth. Perhaps they should model theirs on the IMDB system - your vote only counts so long as you're active. As it stands Amazon ratings are seriously flawed and in a lot of cases aren't worth shit.
Except how can you agree not to block them if you're one of the vast numbers of associates who run their pages from someone elses server?
If I was runnning a network being clobbered by Amazon I would put any barriers I felt like, such as dropping their packets and there is not a damned thing they could say or do to stop me. I'm not an associate and it's too bad for them that they can't see fit to play nice.
But you do have access to your mail through IMAP, not to mention via webmail.
The reason AOL software configures your dialup is pretty obvious when you look at who it's intended for and the hundred and one ways they could fuck things up. I guess AOL would rather do it for you than have their telephone support centres double in size.
Nonsense. The US is only the world's police force when it is in its own interests to be. There have been plenty of conflicts where the US has conveniently looked the other way or marginalised its involvement when the region in question isn't rich in oil or strategically important.
As for other people not policing, that too is nonsense. Lots of countries including neutral ones such as Ireland send peacekeeping forces under the UN flag, as well as NATO forces. Even the likes of France has troops in Africa doing peacekeeping work at the moment.
Why bother to even sprinkle it yourself? Just dump some of the crap on pavements at various strategic locations leading to stations and people will carry it onto the trains for you.
I hate Crichton books. It's like reading a movie treatment and when cute kids are part of the plot you just know he's hoping Spielberg will buy the movie rights. The Lost World book was absolutely ruined by the inclusion of those annoying little bastards.
Just for once, I'd like the cute kids to be introduced only to die horribly and painfully soon after. That might make his books barely tolerable even if the rest of it is one cinematic plot device after another.
The Samaritans have nothing to do with religion, the name is just an indication of the service they provide - solace and comfort to strangers. Primarily they are a suicide hotline but they accept all kinds of calls.
You're not listening. The Mozilla editor chews up the original HTML and parses it into a DOM and then spits out the DOM reconstituted as text. PHP markup is invalid content and will be parsed out. Any PHP designer worth their salt would stick with an HTML text editor that did not do this. A proper editor for professional server side content might do stuff such as highlighting or folding, but the text you type is the text that is saved. It would never run it through a DOM parser except for validation purposes.
The editor, XML/HTML parser and HTML/XML to text converters would all have to be radically reworked to support nonstandard markup.
Perhaps you would be better served by asking the PHP people to produce XML compliant markup because I don't see this bug being fixed any time soon, if ever. If you really want to see it fixed, then tag the bug helpwanted, or better yet supply a patch yourself.
Personally I believe that bug is of extremely low importance. Any designer worth their salt wouldn't be using the HTML editor in Mozilla anyway since it doesn't support the kind of precision professional design - it is for end users. If you want something for PHP/ASP then you should a proper text editor with highlighting which doesn't molest or digest/regurgitate what you type before saving.
Bugs like this get into final releases, because Mozilla releases are branched straight off the trunk and while they are reasonably tested, they do not receive anything like the amount of testing that a stable Netscape release gets. In other words, from time to time, a milestone release is going to contain a bug that might have been caught with more time and QA. Presumably in this case, Mozilla 1.3 is far enough away and the regression serious enough that they decided to pull 1.2 and release a fixed version.
Therefore the choice as always is use Mozilla if you want new features but run the risk of more bugs, or Netscape if you want ultra stable but with commercial stuff added. Of course the more eyeballs testing betas and nightlies, the more likely bugs like this won't happen in future.
A traditional online game has a goals of sorts - to adventure, to kill monsters, to work as a team, to compete against other teams, to acquire wealth and status etc.
How does the Sims Online correspond to that model? This might seem a jaded view, but it looks from the article as if you build houses and wander around. What else is there to do? Do they expect people to 'make their own fun' so to speak or is there actual advancement and tasks that give a point to the thing?
That depends on whether you're lucky enough to have a high speed line or not. I have RH8.0 running on ISDN and while it isn't several hours a day, it is several hours a week of patching. Any time some kernel exploit is found, or a new gcc, or a new glibc then you can look forward to a 20Mb download or more.
It wouldn't be so bad, but I suspect that for the most part that download contains a few hundred K of changes at best. I truly don't understand why Red Hat or other distros have not attempted to release patches as incremental diffs. It must be possible to do, at least in some circumstances and it would cut download times enormously and make more people bother with patches as well.
How can you be careful of where you browse if you've never visited a site before? And even if you have, who's to say that it doesn't run IIS and thanks to the latest MDAC problem or some other vulnerability that it hasn't been hacked and is infecting all its visitors?
Since hackers tend to go after the biggest fish, perhaps a better strategy (applied with other common sense measures), is to protect yourself by going heterogeneous. Pick a perfectly fine alternative browser such as Mozilla, run on a Mac or Linux and throw in a couple of other variables that automated exploits won't work for. It doesn't make you immune from attack but it certainly saves you from the latest exploit du jour. If you think you're safe sticking with IE, you should try taking the Anonymizer.com Snoop Test.
The same strategy applies for email. I reckon I get a macro / mime exploit virus in my inbox once a week, but thanks to the simple fact that I don't even run Outlook, I get a level of built-in protection reaching which so far has been 100%. Moz Mail still has vulnerabilities (every software does), but since it takes security seriously to begin with and is a much smaller target, it is considerably safer (and dare I say better and more usable) than Outlook. Using Outlook or IE is like waving a red flag to a bull.
I wonder how many people Santa will turn into unwitting victims this Christmas when they get a brand new PC with Outlook and IE installed on it.
If I had to pick a MMPORG comparable to real life (excusing the fact you're killing dragons etc.) it would be Dark Age of Camelot, since it really brings across the sense you're in a vast world and the world is alive around you. To be truthful I dumped DAoC after 30 days because of other faults such as the pointless loot system, however I loved the UI (intuitive, easy, great at hight resolutions), and the ambient atmosphere of the place, the mythology, and the level advancement. The place felt alive, which brought it much closer to real life than EQ by miles.
By contrast EQ has a terrible UI, atmosphere consists of people/auc'ing and the mythology feels like a shoddy Lord of the Rings ripoff. I could forgive all that if the gameplay were compelling, but it isn't - camp, kite, loot,/auc, camp, kite, loot etc. There is no variety at all and Verant don't seem intent on adding any - new zones with the mobs & npcs acting in the same dumb repetitive way as the old ones is not variety. Furthermore, rather than make the game more interesting for everyone by improving the engine (e.g. not letting mobs walk through walls, adding group behaviour, weapons/armour that need repair etc.) they just slap in some more L50+ zones with uberloot to further destroy the economy and think that's sufficient.
That is my fear for Star Wars: Galaxies. I also notice their website already talks about the first expansion which leads me to believe they've thrown out a lot of the planned functionality in the first cut. I wonder if the release is going to be the disaster that Shadows of Luclin was.
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Oh well, Fink is an extremely good set of Unix tools as I can say from personal experience. It is recommended for building Mozilla too.
Anyway, ring up 3 and you're put through to the consultant who'll do the usual tricks to keep you subscribed. In my case I said I wanted to cancel because my box was broken and the 'consultant' persuaded me to stay on the promise of a cheap engineer call-out and a replacement box.
Fortunately that is what I wanted them to offer me this and I had no intention of cancelling, so it went pretty well in the end. Still, it annoys me that they can't play straight.
Mozilla alone must have required several hundred million dollars of investment and yet at the end of it, it's still an open source browser and a remarkably good one at that. If they'd just abandoned it as they'd found it then it would be a crusty lump of crap based on the 'classic' (i.e. Communicator 4.x) codebase and no one would be using it. You'd have to wonder what browser if any Linux would have to compete with IE if that were the case.
And Winamp is still free and advert free, and still remains one of the best players around.
And ICQ has as much baroque over the top menus and functionality as ever
Let's turn that around.
So what's wrong with gore and ultra-violence? Do games have to feature colorful graphics and cartoonish characters to be entertaining? Hell no.
The point is, a game in different genres can be entertaining, but a games console that shies away from violent games from arbitrary reasons is going to find itself on the scrapheap. People want choice and turning away half your potential business is commercial suicide. And yes and half would be no exagerration since I truly expect that GTA Vice City and similar games will sell that many PS2s this Christmas.
Personally I'd love to pick up a Gamecube to play with but this arbitrary restriction to the kind of games that Nintendo will licence mean I won't bother and many games companies won't bother porting their games either. It's no good being the cheapest if all your games suck.
Nintendo should grow up or will go under.
My definition is simple - rolling one or more chars for fetching junk, trade skills, running into agro cities to buy stuff, sitting
It is cheating because it offers an unfair advantage. I don't care how rich someone might be to afford two accounts, two computers and two copies of EQ+expansion packs, that should not entitle them to an advantage over other players.
I don't see that it would be necessarily hard to catch most cheats. Correlating transactions between players, IP addresses, credit cards, addresses and other personal info should enable it quite easily. A player so flagged could be monitored by an admin and kicked when they were caught doing it.
Amazon simply shouldn't allow it, or it should mark those reviews in some visible way and wipe them when the thing actually does goes on release. It totally destroys any trust in their review system.
Just as bad, they allow ballot stuffing. Just pick any random L Ron Hubbard book and read the gushing reviews by cult members. You can't write more accurate, derogatory reviews for LRH books because they've flagged the book as controversial or something and toss out new reviews.
It must be possible to produce a rating system that accurately reflects a books true worth. Perhaps they should model theirs on the IMDB system - your vote only counts so long as you're active. As it stands Amazon ratings are seriously flawed and in a lot of cases aren't worth shit.
If I was runnning a network being clobbered by Amazon I would put any barriers I felt like, such as dropping their packets and there is not a damned thing they could say or do to stop me. I'm not an associate and it's too bad for them that they can't see fit to play nice.
The reason AOL software configures your dialup is pretty obvious when you look at who it's intended for and the hundred and one ways they could fuck things up. I guess AOL would rather do it for you than have their telephone support centres double in size.
As for other people not policing, that too is nonsense. Lots of countries including neutral ones such as Ireland send peacekeeping forces under the UN flag, as well as NATO forces. Even the likes of France has troops in Africa doing peacekeeping work at the moment.
Why bother to even sprinkle it yourself? Just dump some of the crap on pavements at various strategic locations leading to stations and people will carry it onto the trains for you.
Fresh pigshit is too good for him. Let it ferment a few days to make the flavour good and ripe.
Just for once, I'd like the cute kids to be introduced only to die horribly and painfully soon after. That might make his books barely tolerable even if the rest of it is one cinematic plot device after another.
The Samaritans have nothing to do with religion, the name is just an indication of the service they provide - solace and comfort to strangers. Primarily they are a suicide hotline but they accept all kinds of calls.
To put this into perspective, the annual US defence budget is over 300 billion dollars. Who gives a shit about 40 billion over a decade or longer?
The editor, XML/HTML parser and HTML/XML to text converters would all have to be radically reworked to support nonstandard markup.
Perhaps you would be better served by asking the PHP people to produce XML compliant markup because I don't see this bug being fixed any time soon, if ever. If you really want to see it fixed, then tag the bug helpwanted, or better yet supply a patch yourself.
Personally I believe that bug is of extremely low importance. Any designer worth their salt wouldn't be using the HTML editor in Mozilla anyway since it doesn't support the kind of precision professional design - it is for end users. If you want something for PHP/ASP then you should a proper text editor with highlighting which doesn't molest or digest/regurgitate what you type before saving.
Therefore the choice as always is use Mozilla if you want new features but run the risk of more bugs, or Netscape if you want ultra stable but with commercial stuff added. Of course the more eyeballs testing betas and nightlies, the more likely bugs like this won't happen in future.
How does the Sims Online correspond to that model? This might seem a jaded view, but it looks from the article as if you build houses and wander around. What else is there to do? Do they expect people to 'make their own fun' so to speak or is there actual advancement and tasks that give a point to the thing?
What on earth has AOL got to do with what programs you've chosen to handle your news:, mailto: settings?
It wouldn't be so bad, but I suspect that for the most part that download contains a few hundred K of changes at best. I truly don't understand why Red Hat or other distros have not attempted to release patches as incremental diffs. It must be possible to do, at least in some circumstances and it would cut download times enormously and make more people bother with patches as well.
Since hackers tend to go after the biggest fish, perhaps a better strategy (applied with other common sense measures), is to protect yourself by going heterogeneous. Pick a perfectly fine alternative browser such as Mozilla, run on a Mac or Linux and throw in a couple of other variables that automated exploits won't work for. It doesn't make you immune from attack but it certainly saves you from the latest exploit du jour. If you think you're safe sticking with IE, you should try taking the Anonymizer.com Snoop Test.
The same strategy applies for email. I reckon I get a macro / mime exploit virus in my inbox once a week, but thanks to the simple fact that I don't even run Outlook, I get a level of built-in protection reaching which so far has been 100%. Moz Mail still has vulnerabilities (every software does), but since it takes security seriously to begin with and is a much smaller target, it is considerably safer (and dare I say better and more usable) than Outlook. Using Outlook or IE is like waving a red flag to a bull.
I wonder how many people Santa will turn into unwitting victims this Christmas when they get a brand new PC with Outlook and IE installed on it.
By contrast EQ has a terrible UI, atmosphere consists of people
That is my fear for Star Wars: Galaxies. I also notice their website already talks about the first expansion which leads me to believe they've thrown out a lot of the planned functionality in the first cut. I wonder if the release is going to be the disaster that Shadows of Luclin was.