"If you aren't doing anything wrong, then why don't you install it?"
Because I'm lazy? I've not installed the latest DRM-enabling patch for Windows Media Player either, but its only because I can't be bothered to download several megabytes of information over a 42kb/s connection when it doesn't actually do me much in the way of good.
Sure I'll do it if I'm legally required to. Sure I'll do it if the benefits outweigh the problems by enough. But I won't spend my own time, effort and money to install something that only helps a business I've no particularly good feelings about.
It matters to the thieves that have clients who demand to see the phone working before handing cash over, thats for sure. Or do you trust the guy down the pub selling you stolen goods to be telling you the truth when he says that it does work, honest guvnor?
I don't know if you're from the UK, or if you regularly go car booting, but if you did you'd probably notice how every one seems to have at least three stalls who do nothing but do this for people. I'd like it very much if the Police could raid these people at will and haul them off to jail; they are so clearly assisting mobile phone thieves and no-one else that its insane. Making it illegal won't stop it completely, but you can be certain it will make these scumbags lives more difficult.
"a designated, central computer located in the United States"
Since the Bertelsmann headquarters (and so therefore probably its mainframe) are in Germany, can we root them with impunity then? Defining any network as 'peer-to-peer' simply because the server is outside the US strikes me as asking for big trouble.
I get the impression he'd like to use an old NES pad, which I can't help with, but if its NES emulation you're after, the $250 mentioned in the parent post is silly money. A $50 Dreamcast can do emulation as well as a PC can, and can be both hooked straight to the TV and take the arcade-style joysticks.
Another non-trivial bonus is that a Dreamcast with two arcade sticks doubles as a superb Soul Calibur machine in its spare time, but you knew that, right?
http://www.dcemulation.com has all the Dreamcast emulation stuff you'd want; many older MAME games run full speed as well.
"I basically just didn't get the part about DVD making VHS _not_ work"
It does sound strange, I know, but I see people all the time who don't want too many boxes in their living room.
Also, every time consoles are mentioned on/. (or most other places) huge great flamewars break out over X-Box vs. Gamecube vs. PS2 vs. whatever, because some people won't buy them all. VI vs. Emacs arguments are legendary, and you can even run both in adjacent windows of the same machine!
Lots of people seem to think they can only own one of a type of technology at once; it seems to have turned into a hardware equivalent of supporting sports teams or something.
Why not just a Bloody Great Chunk Of Metal that just whips along absorbing everything that hits it? Or is getting something that heavy into orbit too much hassle?
"The other rumor was the resurrection of the Cube, bundled with 17" flatscreens"
I'll take one of those! Particularly if they make them in purple this time, to match my Nintendo Cube. A friend has one of the Apple Cubes from last time, and they are a thing of beauty and a joy to behold.
Aaah, I see. Its the 'our soldiers'=='innocent people' argument. Yes, I've seen that used as well, so if you really want to stretch it then you could possibly justify that. My basis for being offended at the source comment was that at no point in the game are you really given the opportunity to shoot at anyone other than terrorists, 'real' terrorists whose objective is to shoot you or plant a bomb, rather than the somewhat looser definition frequently used of 'whoever happens to wander in front of our boys guns'. No implementation of hostages yet that I've seen, and killing your fellow soldiers (team killing) causes the player to get chucked out of the game, which is hardly rewarding them.
Whatever your opinion of the morals of the game, its not quite Postal, Carmageddon or GTA. Besides, if you do believe that any killing in war is murder, then the expenditure of Army budget on a bunch of games rather than bullets strikes me as a good thing anyway. There is no shortage of games like this (many are even free mods for FPS games that the players will have already purchased as well), and its money that would have otherwise been spent of TV or Cinema adverts for the Army. Therefore I don't see a big threat.
Oh really. Please don't use the word 'Murder' when you mean 'Warfare'. Whatever your views on the training capabilities of computer games (mine are that if you think teaching people that the best way to win a gunfight is to run in circles around the opposition having developed the ability to see through walls then you are a f*cking moron, but thats just me) or the morality of Bush's tactics in dealing with terrorists (here I'm against their 'whatever you do, its better to kill a couple hundred foreigners just in case, rather than investigate if they might actually be terrorists' 'strategy'), calling the game a 'murder-simulation' is just tabloid sensationalism.
According to the site, this is just the dedicated server at the moment. So if you actually want to play it, you'll be needing a Windows box anyway to install the client on as well. I'd hope that when they manage to get their Linux client (which they do say they are working on) up and released it will also be able to do an install from the CD, rather than having to have files copied from the Windows partition.
Since you so clearly agree that someone can decide what is more important for someone else, please understand that my need to get to the match in time is far more important than your boring, pointless little protest. So me doing 60 straight into and through the crowd, killing lots of stupid people is going to be perfectly reasonable. It really pisses me off when they people are so petty. This isn't a protest, its about real things, like 'soccer' (and to take a more straight face, the only person ever who didn't deserve a punch in the face for calling football that is Jon Hare) matches.
"And these protests have meant something -- for one, it's meant that the leaders of the 8 most important countries are having a clandestine meeting in the wilderness."
Sure. By that logic, Al-Qaieda's cause HAS to mean something, or Bush wouldn't spend money and lives hunting them down.
Either you are against protest altogether, or you have to accept that someone will crash a planeload of passengers into your office, apparently.
I mean, isn't innovation what made [insert your country of origin] great?
No, it was mostly the unfettered exploitation and persecution of the people we didn't like.
--
Sorry, its almost completely offtopic, but without any mod points to call my own, I thought it was worth the possible karma loss to highlight the above AC post. Quality wit display, on a day when I really needed it.
In my opinion at least. Would the average school gym budget stretch as far as the exhorbitant prices a set or two of maracas go for on ebay however?
More seriously, having read the article I see that they are using the actual $8000 a pop arcade machines, rather than the much cheaper mats for the console versions. Presumably the arcade mats are a lot more study, but is the difference in cost really worth it to them, do you think?
I guess there isn't a Blockbuster in your neighborhood, eh?"
Yuck! Renting DVDs from Blockbuster means having to buy local titles, not the US imports!
More importantly, when its only 3-5 times the cost to actually have the disc forever, delivered to your door rather than having to go out and rent it the very evening you want to see it, hoping against hope that they actually have that title in stock and that someone hasn't scratched the disc an hour into it, then going there again the following day just to drop it off and avoid late charges, I don't see the point in renting anything you think you might ever want to watch twice. Also, do you really have the time to get through all those funky extras in one evening as well as watch the film?
Finally, I refuse to give Blockbuster any money, as they attempting to force rental windows and pan/scan titles on the studios.
"(The reason the Bugzilla link isn't a proper href is that I tried to check it just now, and Bugzilla said links from Slashdot aren't allowed. Make of that what you will!)"
There is a perfectly simple reason for that, no conspiracy needed. They are just using the referrer to reduce their chances of a/.ing; the clueful can still read, but it reduces the amount of strain on the server if you have to put some effort in, if Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v counts as effort.
If this was aimed at stopping P2P use, then they would be doing things to individual ports, or even better blocking certain ports only for servers. What they are doing here is just going after anyone who does a lot of down-or-uploading, and so is costing them money. As someone who regularly downloads all 3 legal isos of Redhat or Mandrake, and watches plenty of those MPAA-sponsored high bandwidth trailers from Apple.com I would be being just as hit as someone who downloaded a bunch of mpg files illegally instead.
This is plain and simple charging people for use, rather than a flat rate that they can't stand you exploiting. Personally, I think its much fairer that way, but its got nothing to do with the legality of the information moving around.
"Comments in this thread suggest they're looking for medieval fantasy settings"
Great, just what the world needs, another medieval fantasy setting for an RPG. Would it KILL them to do something more different? I know that the rulesystem is really set up for this sort of world, and obviously there is a fair bit of difference between, say, the worlds of Robin Hobb and Terry Pratchett, but something that really stretched it would be far more interesting.
Can you explain this one? If it were a 2d50 added together then yes, but surely for a tens and units pairing the histogram has to be flat; otherwise it wouldn't be for 1d10 either.
It can compete with DVD very easily, actually. The current DVD standard only gives a 480p resolution, while the D-VHS standard can go all the way up to 1080i and 720p HDTV broadcasts. The current plan by the DVD steering comittee is to cripple Hi-Def DVDs by a use of MPEG4 with a stupidly low bitrate, to avoid the cost of moving to Blue Laser, FMD or other new disc types.
Personally I do think that this will fail, but its because the hi-end Home Cinema fanatics are all used to the superiority of using a disc format - DVD, and before that Laserdisc and even in a few cases the HiVision laserdiscs that Pioneer produced in small numbers for demonstrating their HDTVs with in Japan (these are a thing of beauty and a joy to behold, by the way). They don't want to go back to tape, certainly not something with the VHS name on it.
So, it'll die, but through a combination of the inherent and percieved image problems of tapes, not because this doesn't offer anything over DVD.
Come on. Superbit DVD is just a way of Columbia Tristar saying 'look, we stuffed up the initial transfer with a low-bitrate overly edge-enhanced amateurish transfer. Would you like to pay more to buy the disc again without any of the special feature content, but with someone who at least has a clue doing the transfer?'
Go buy a Fox disc (not Lucasfilm's embarrassingly bad transfer of Episode 1, but an in-house job like Fight Club, Cast Away or From Hell to name but three) and see how it can be done right first time without needing to skimp on the extras.
Slashdot Mirror
Frenetic3 posted on Slashdot at 3ish:
:)
"junk@rpgexchange.com, a dummy address I have never used or published ever"
D'oh!
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, then why don't you install it?"
Because I'm lazy? I've not installed the latest DRM-enabling patch for Windows Media Player either, but its only because I can't be bothered to download several megabytes of information over a 42kb/s connection when it doesn't actually do me much in the way of good.
Sure I'll do it if I'm legally required to. Sure I'll do it if the benefits outweigh the problems by enough. But I won't spend my own time, effort and money to install something that only helps a business I've no particularly good feelings about.
"It doesn't matter a thieve anyway"
It matters to the thieves that have clients who demand to see the phone working before handing cash over, thats for sure. Or do you trust the guy down the pub selling you stolen goods to be telling you the truth when he says that it does work, honest guvnor?
I don't know if you're from the UK, or if you regularly go car booting, but if you did you'd probably notice how every one seems to have at least three stalls who do nothing but do this for people. I'd like it very much if the Police could raid these people at will and haul them off to jail; they are so clearly assisting mobile phone thieves and no-one else that its insane. Making it illegal won't stop it completely, but you can be certain it will make these scumbags lives more difficult.
"a designated, central computer located in the United States"
Since the Bertelsmann headquarters (and so therefore probably its mainframe) are in Germany, can we root them with impunity then? Defining any network as 'peer-to-peer' simply because the server is outside the US strikes me as asking for big trouble.
I get the impression he'd like to use an old NES pad, which I can't help with, but if its NES emulation you're after, the $250 mentioned in the parent post is silly money. A $50 Dreamcast can do emulation as well as a PC can, and can be both hooked straight to the TV and take the arcade-style joysticks.
Another non-trivial bonus is that a Dreamcast with two arcade sticks doubles as a superb Soul Calibur machine in its spare time, but you knew that, right?
http://www.dcemulation.com has all the Dreamcast emulation stuff you'd want; many older MAME games run full speed as well.
"I basically just didn't get the part about DVD making VHS _not_ work"
/. (or most other places) huge great flamewars break out over X-Box vs. Gamecube vs. PS2 vs. whatever, because some people won't buy them all. VI vs. Emacs arguments are legendary, and you can even run both in adjacent windows of the same machine!
It does sound strange, I know, but I see people all the time who don't want too many boxes in their living room.
Also, every time consoles are mentioned on
Lots of people seem to think they can only own one of a type of technology at once; it seems to have turned into a hardware equivalent of supporting sports teams or something.
(replying to myself because I hit send too quickly like the fool I am)
Massive bonus points to Nasa for naming it the Kubrick/Clarke debris sweeper, as its a blimmin' huge 1x4x9 block of black dense stuff.
Why not just a Bloody Great Chunk Of Metal that just whips along absorbing everything that hits it? Or is getting something that heavy into orbit too much hassle?
"The other rumor was the resurrection of the Cube, bundled with 17" flatscreens"
I'll take one of those! Particularly if they make them in purple this time, to match my Nintendo Cube. A friend has one of the Apple Cubes from last time, and they are a thing of beauty and a joy to behold.
Aaah, I see. Its the 'our soldiers'=='innocent people' argument. Yes, I've seen that used as well, so if you really want to stretch it then you could possibly justify that. My basis for being offended at the source comment was that at no point in the game are you really given the opportunity to shoot at anyone other than terrorists, 'real' terrorists whose objective is to shoot you or plant a bomb, rather than the somewhat looser definition frequently used of 'whoever happens to wander in front of our boys guns'. No implementation of hostages yet that I've seen, and killing your fellow soldiers (team killing) causes the player to get chucked out of the game, which is hardly rewarding them.
Whatever your opinion of the morals of the game, its not quite Postal, Carmageddon or GTA. Besides, if you do believe that any killing in war is murder, then the expenditure of Army budget on a bunch of games rather than bullets strikes me as a good thing anyway. There is no shortage of games like this (many are even free mods for FPS games that the players will have already purchased as well), and its money that would have otherwise been spent of TV or Cinema adverts for the Army. Therefore I don't see a big threat.
Might I suggest you try Counter-Strike? Or Rainbow 6? Or SWAT 3? Or Infiltration? Or Rogue Spear? Or indeed America's Army?
Frankly, these days I look forward to that rare FPS that _doesn't_ involve a Terrorist v Counter-terrorist scenario!
Oh really. Please don't use the word 'Murder' when you mean 'Warfare'. Whatever your views on the training capabilities of computer games (mine are that if you think teaching people that the best way to win a gunfight is to run in circles around the opposition having developed the ability to see through walls then you are a f*cking moron, but thats just me) or the morality of Bush's tactics in dealing with terrorists (here I'm against their 'whatever you do, its better to kill a couple hundred foreigners just in case, rather than investigate if they might actually be terrorists' 'strategy'), calling the game a 'murder-simulation' is just tabloid sensationalism.
According to the site, this is just the dedicated server at the moment. So if you actually want to play it, you'll be needing a Windows box anyway to install the client on as well. I'd hope that when they manage to get their Linux client (which they do say they are working on) up and released it will also be able to do an install from the CD, rather than having to have files copied from the Windows partition.
Since you so clearly agree that someone can decide what is more important for someone else, please understand that my need to get to the match in time is far more important than your boring, pointless little protest. So me doing 60 straight into and through the crowd, killing lots of stupid people is going to be perfectly reasonable. It really pisses me off when they people are so petty. This isn't a protest, its about real things, like 'soccer' (and to take a more straight face, the only person ever who didn't deserve a punch in the face for calling football that is Jon Hare) matches.
"And these protests have meant something -- for one, it's meant that the leaders of the 8 most important countries are having a clandestine meeting in the wilderness."
Sure. By that logic, Al-Qaieda's cause HAS to mean something, or Bush wouldn't spend money and lives hunting them down.
Either you are against protest altogether, or you have to accept that someone will crash a planeload of passengers into your office, apparently.
I mean, isn't innovation what made [insert your country of origin] great?
No, it was mostly the unfettered exploitation and persecution of the people we didn't like.
--
Sorry, its almost completely offtopic, but without any mod points to call my own, I thought it was worth the possible karma loss to highlight the above AC post. Quality wit display, on a day when I really needed it.
In my opinion at least. Would the average school gym budget stretch as far as the exhorbitant prices a set or two of maracas go for on ebay however?
More seriously, having read the article I see that they are using the actual $8000 a pop arcade machines, rather than the much cheaper mats for the console versions. Presumably the arcade mats are a lot more study, but is the difference in cost really worth it to them, do you think?
"300 DVDs?
I guess there isn't a Blockbuster in your neighborhood, eh?"
Yuck! Renting DVDs from Blockbuster means having to buy local titles, not the US imports!
More importantly, when its only 3-5 times the cost to actually have the disc forever, delivered to your door rather than having to go out and rent it the very evening you want to see it, hoping against hope that they actually have that title in stock and that someone hasn't scratched the disc an hour into it, then going there again the following day just to drop it off and avoid late charges, I don't see the point in renting anything you think you might ever want to watch twice. Also, do you really have the time to get through all those funky extras in one evening as well as watch the film?
Finally, I refuse to give Blockbuster any money, as they attempting to force rental windows and pan/scan titles on the studios.
"(The reason the Bugzilla link isn't a proper href is that I tried to check it just now, and Bugzilla said links from Slashdot aren't allowed. Make of that what you will!)"
/.ing; the clueful can still read, but it reduces the amount of strain on the server if you have to put some effort in, if Ctrl+c, Ctrl+v counts as effort.
There is a perfectly simple reason for that, no conspiracy needed. They are just using the referrer to reduce their chances of a
If this was aimed at stopping P2P use, then they would be doing things to individual ports, or even better blocking certain ports only for servers. What they are doing here is just going after anyone who does a lot of down-or-uploading, and so is costing them money. As someone who regularly downloads all 3 legal isos of Redhat or Mandrake, and watches plenty of those MPAA-sponsored high bandwidth trailers from Apple.com I would be being just as hit as someone who downloaded a bunch of mpg files illegally instead.
This is plain and simple charging people for use, rather than a flat rate that they can't stand you exploiting. Personally, I think its much fairer that way, but its got nothing to do with the legality of the information moving around.
Thats only fair. Germany has just declared war on the Jones boys, after all.
"Comments in this thread suggest they're looking for medieval fantasy settings"
Great, just what the world needs, another medieval fantasy setting for an RPG. Would it KILL them to do something more different? I know that the rulesystem is really set up for this sort of world, and obviously there is a fair bit of difference between, say, the worlds of Robin Hobb and Terry Pratchett, but something that really stretched it would be far more interesting.
"the histogram would look like a hill for 2d10"
Can you explain this one? If it were a 2d50 added together then yes, but surely for a tens and units pairing the histogram has to be flat; otherwise it wouldn't be for 1d10 either.
It can compete with DVD very easily, actually. The current DVD standard only gives a 480p resolution, while the D-VHS standard can go all the way up to 1080i and 720p HDTV broadcasts. The current plan by the DVD steering comittee is to cripple Hi-Def DVDs by a use of MPEG4 with a stupidly low bitrate, to avoid the cost of moving to Blue Laser, FMD or other new disc types.
Personally I do think that this will fail, but its because the hi-end Home Cinema fanatics are all used to the superiority of using a disc format - DVD, and before that Laserdisc and even in a few cases the HiVision laserdiscs that Pioneer produced in small numbers for demonstrating their HDTVs with in Japan (these are a thing of beauty and a joy to behold, by the way). They don't want to go back to tape, certainly not something with the VHS name on it.
So, it'll die, but through a combination of the inherent and percieved image problems of tapes, not because this doesn't offer anything over DVD.
Come on. Superbit DVD is just a way of Columbia Tristar saying 'look, we stuffed up the initial transfer with a low-bitrate overly edge-enhanced amateurish transfer. Would you like to pay more to buy the disc again without any of the special feature content, but with someone who at least has a clue doing the transfer?'
Go buy a Fox disc (not Lucasfilm's embarrassingly bad transfer of Episode 1, but an in-house job like Fight Club, Cast Away or From Hell to name but three) and see how it can be done right first time without needing to skimp on the extras.