but has no plans to change it at the risk of angering shareholders â" and even customers who benefit from the confusion
Somehow, when I read that, it came out all different in my head... something more like:
"but has no plans to change it as the risk of angering the company's customers -- oh yeah, and you little people who buy their software might benefit from it too"
Remember when a company's customers were actually the people buying from them, and not their shareholders... or at least they pretended that was the case?
The truly ironic part is that people like him do far more damage to this country than any cultural phenomena they point their fingers at.
Just imagine if he got his way.. how many of our rights would be trampled and how many would feel oppressed due to someone else's morality being forced upon them?
In the Slashdot world, following the laws lobbied by the corporations that are ultimately extremely unpopular and seem to be attacking the rights of citizens is a "hack".
And yet they can't figure out why companies view FOSS as a vehicle for technological advancement that circumvents their control and threatens their outdated business models.
There, fixed that for ya, at least from my point of view. I consider myself a law abiding citizen but I'm also realizing that many laws these days are not benefiting or protecting the citizens at all and are very unpopular. When you have such laws being passed that seem contrary to public desires, you start to wonder what is going on and who your government is really working for.
Furthermore, I've seen plenty of startups and even some actors and such that have embraced newer business models that don't necessarily depend on charging for content. I think the companies are terrified of this concept because this generally requires the content to actually be good to get the public to consume it. If the public isn't consuming it, you don't get advertisers and such. Most (not all) products and services out there have required the public to pay first. This was fine back in the day when good customer relations was key to keeping up sales. However, we've moved into an era where people are generally apathetic when they receive lackluster products and services and just shrug their shoulders.. the company doesn't care though because it still has their money. Even worse, we have situations where people are actually turning away from the product/services and the companies just find another way of getting the money, either through government intervention or litigation against their one time customers.
All I heard in my head while reading this comment was "Americuh! F*ck yeah! Freedom is the only way, yeah!"
I don't believe the parent's post was really meant in that way. The parent was speaking more of inalienable rights that belong to humanity as a whole, rights that each of us would have with or without governments as they are completely separate and independent of government. You may argue that it is not on anyone to decide others have these rights, but I really believe living, breathing, eating, enjoying something, communicating with your fellow human beings, love, hope, etc are all rights every living person has. Individual governments can try to convince people otherwise and even say you can't do some of these things, but a government telling people they can't live, love, communicate, etc can't possibly be right can it?
I'm certainly not saying freedom is the only way. The USA isn't even completely free as we're not an anarchy. Heck, there are plenty of people in this country who are practically begging for a dictator to take away all of that very hard and nasty decision making they have to do on a daily basis, and one day one will find them. Different things work for different people but obviously it isn't working for some over there or else there wouldn't be protests and the government wouldn't feel the need to cut off their people from communication.
The Middle East is not your playground. You are not the world's moral compass. We do not see you as something to aspire too, but simply another way of doing things. You're doing such a bang up job in Iraq and Afghanistan; Please, beseech your leader to enforce the indomitable will and unwavering ideology of Western Society on another Middle Eastern territory. They're completely ready to move away from the current political system they have, and won't descend into exactly the same situation in no time at all as the people are still living in a society where religion and law are still very closely knitted together.
It took Yeomanry and the Renaissance in Europe to get us out of a heavily feudal system, with separation of church and state. Leave them to it and they will get there.
No, it's not our playground and imposing morality on others, ironically, can often interfere with other people's inalienable rights we were just discussing. I don't really believe morality has anything to do with why we're in the Middle East anyways. I suspect it's far more political and, unfortunately, the politicians and the corporations that sponsor them probably do feel like the Middle East is their playground.
Ultimately I do agree with your philosophy on letting them be. You can't really "give" someone freedom of any kind or any amount (I'm not talking about USA freedoms or anything... more of just the general concept) as they'll not appreciate it and, eventually, they'll just slide back into the system that was running them and owning them before. People have to WANT it and then they have to want it enough to fight for it through politics, protests, and maybe even the battlefield. Developing countries need to develop naturally and not dragged along. The USA has plenty of developing left to do itself and I wouldn't really want our current state of affairs spreading anywhere as I'm starting to feel that we, as a people, have very little say in anything anymore and that the corporations are quickly becoming the true citizens of this country.
I'm actually very curious.. as an IP lawyer, how do you view the current state of copyright law?
I've begun to read up on copyright, in general, in the last few years and it amazes me at how much we, as a civilization, stand to lose and what we've already lost. The more I read about it, the more I realize that the original idea of copyright was an amazing thing... provide protection for a work so that the creator can profit from it for a reasonable amount of time and then release the work into public domain so that the work is never lost and everyone can freely be enriched by it. Since the work moves into public domain, the creator is encouraged to create another work if he/she wishes to continue making money in this way.
Now, instead, we seem to have a system where the creator can create a single work and then he/she and their children can profit off of that work for several human lifespans. Or, potentially worse, the creator creates a work which is then immediately owned by a corporation that then profits and locks the work for several human lifespans, assuming they don't find more ways to extend it even past that time-frame. When does the work pass into public domain in this model?
I would love to find a way to get students (and I don't mean just k-12 students... college and university students as well) as interested and involved in this as many of them even were during this last presidential election. Ultimately, if we don't find a way to get things under control, it will be they who will have to do it or suffer even worse consequences than we are now (imagine having to pay for a song every time you listen to it or, indeed, think about the lyrics in your head... we hope such a thing is a long way off but, when it's possible, we all know they won't hesitate to do it).
Since they only play for about 20 minutes per session and aren't focused on the mechanics of the game, SOE can get away with changes that are unfair to some players, as shown by a recent, oddly-handled item nerf in Free Realms."
So not only is Sony encouraging the ADD-like behavior that a lot of people are showing these days (anyone remember back when a movie could be 2 or 3 hours long and didn't require explosions every few seconds to keep an audience interested.. LotR and Titanic are the only ones I can think of) but they're also going to get used the idea of screwing players over without any real negative feedback?
Granted, I realize Sony screwing players over is no new thing (I played SWG back when it was good), but at least when they do it in most of their games there is some sort of lashback.
Am I the only one amused at people thinking they're putting in effort and hard work by sitting at a keyboard playing one of the easiest games ever created, and only getting ahead of everyone else because they don't have anything else to do?
Ah but it can be a lot of effort and hard work and I don't think its wrong to like to be possibly rewarded for putting in the extra time, at least more so than someone who decides not too. I raided though most of the original game and up to Illidan in TBC. Some of those encounters were laughably easy, the trash mostly boring, but some of the encounters were really damn hard and took the majority of those 40 people (at the time) to be performing at their best. I say majority because most of the fights could still be won with a few slackers although there were other fights that weren't as forgiving. I never got to kill C'Thun, for instance, because the guild I was in never quite got the fight down as a whole.
Back then I raided 3 or 4 nights a week and had a blast. It was more about the teamwork and the first kills (that excitement over voice chat after than the loot, but the loot was great fun too. I did this while having a full time job and hanging out with friends. I wasn't in a relationship, nor did I have kids or anything like that so I did have some free time. Back then we're talking like maybe 4 or 5 hours a night for some of the longer instances.
These days I've mostly backed off raiding although I try to do some with my guild one day a week on the weekends. It's MUCH easier to get a 10-man going these days and doing an entire raid instance in a rather short amount of time (Naxx may be an exception but that instances was originally designed to be long back for the 40-man days). Heck, some of these instances are pretty much entirely boss fights.. you walk in, kill something for 5 minutes, and walk out with epic gear.
The whole point of WoW's success is that everyone can get to the top levels, do all the raids and get all the gear. Five years and twenty million sales later, poopsockers are still telling us how Blizzard got it all wrong.
I don't think that they got it wrong. I may have had a semi-elitist mentality back in the 40-man days but honestly I still think that a good number of the people who didn't even make a small effort to get the gear just didn't want to put the effort out and some of them indeed wanted it handed to them. I mean, with even a few hours a night spread out over a week, a guild could have cleared MC. Sure, I'm sure there were plenty that tried and failed, and that sucks, especially since back then PvP hadn't fully developed yet. I don't think I ever thought myself better than anyone else simply because I had T2.. I was just excited to do the content and thought it was cool that succeeding in it allowed me to get some stuff not everyone had. At first I was a bit disappointed at the change to 25-man raids but not because I thought that just anyone would be able to do it and walk out with free epics but that it wasn't going to be as fun without 39 of my guildies in the raid with me.
In fact, I think Blizzard has recently hit upon the jackpot. This split of instances into 10-man and 25-man and then a further split into normal and hard modes opens up the content to pretty much everyone and you don't have to be uber-geared to hop into a 10-man normal mode raid. Heck, they've done it with normal instances too, with the heroic versions becoming available at 80. Furthermore, you get badges for completing these heroics and doing daily quests surrounding them.. badges which, when you have enough, you can use to buy loot that rivals the very latest hard-mode raid instance gear. In all of these, the gear is more powerful in the hard modes than normal, and more powerful in the 25 mans over the 10 mans.
The only unfortunate part that I see is that the gear pretty much all looks the same. This expansion has suffered from that since day one when even the quest rewards all looked the same. It would be cool if the 25-man heroic loot maybe looked a bit cooler in some way than the 10-man stuff but they probably don't have the man power for that.
So essentially you had health, mana and endurance? Gee, now that's new. Or at least was, around 1990 before MUDs came into existance.
Lets face it, what else is there?
Even if someone comes out with a game that calls them something completely different (indeed, as SWG did) we're still going to associate them with what we already know. Besides, these are easily identifiable and understood by most game players now.. why confuse things?
Even to knew players, anyone who understands the concept of the words "health" and "endurance" and pretty quickly figure out how they relate to their character.
SWG at least did something slightly different with them in that you could get "scars" or permanent damage to those bars that lowered your possible max until you got the damage repaired. I'm not saying this is a good system (I found it rather cumbersome and annoying) but at least they were trying something different.
I remember reading an interesting book called "The Science of Star Wars" that discussed the real life issues with the technology and situations in the original trilogy. This covered everything from the theoretical sciences behind the technologies like lightsabers, blasters, and lightspeed to the possibilities of existence of other life out there. I haven't read this book in a very long time and I don't have access to it at the moment, but I seem to remember it indicating that the odds of finding another planet with water, breathable air, and the exact distance from a sun necessary to help life flourish were so extremely low as to be laughable.
I remember thinking even then how short-sighted that was and how arrogant it seemed.
I realize these things are supposed to be scientific so they use only what they know to be fact, however, I think when dealing with complete unknowns such as the type of life out there or what their technology level may be at, you have to start thinking outside the box and be a bit more imaganitive.
Who is to say, for example, what form other life will take? Would we even recognize it as life if we were standing right next to it? What about their technology? Who is to say that they haven't gotten past the lightspeed issues with relativity and energy required? Perhaps they have stealth technologies... would we even be able to detect them? Just because we don't know how to do it now, and just because our current science says it probably isn't possible, doesn't mean it can't be done.
I seem to remember looking this up at some point and I think the semi-official explanation at this point is that there are two main Zelda timelines that split off from Ocarina of Time.
One timeline results from Link obtaining the Master Sword and traveling forward in time to adulthood. The second timeline apparently results from Link warning everyone about Ganondorf before obtaining the Master Sword was necessary (this occurs after he replaces the sword at the end and travels back to childhood time).
Supposedly, this mostly explains some of the differences in the other games, particularly about Ganondorf and his appearances in Hyrule or the golden realm or whatever. Windwaker is many many years along the adult Link timeline because they specifically mention the "Hero of Time" and how he didn't reappear when he was needed again. Twilight Princess apparently occurs in the other timeline as Ganondorf was sealed away in the twilight realm when his plans were revealed by Link at the end of Ocarina.
I do tend to be a stickler about consistency in stories but Zelda is normally good enough that I can just enjoy the game for what it is. I did find the above explanation interesting though, geeking out over the time travel and alternate reality explanations a bit.
I agree. Furthermore, I'd want to know how heavy it is (I doubt it is very heavy at all but it does look rather beefy) as I carry usb flash drives around with me all the time at work. Then again, I'd be extremely leery of taking this anywhere. Should it get stolen or dropped somewhere, thats a rather large chunk of change gone.
I can't imagine every buying one of these. If you need a mobile PC with that much hard drive space, why wouldn't you just get a normal laptop with some of the other nice features? I realize netbooks are ultra small and mobile but still...
Serious discussion on this aside for a second, who else is anxious to see people's reactions (visually or even just message board posts) the first time they see a driver in their favorite distro that says something to the effect of "Publisher: Microsoft"?
Basically, its a virtualization system that runs as a role on Server 2008. Parts of it work a lot like VirtualPC does (Microsoft's desktop virtualizaton system) but it also has some nice features such as automatic save-state when the host OS is shutting down which also can automatically restore when the host OS comes back up and starts the Hypver-V role.
If you don't use IE do not upgrade it and it won't change your default browser
Or you can update it and just be sure to uncheck the "default browser" option. I realize that not everyone knows how to do that but its not one of the harder things to change.
I do find it funny though that all of these companies are essentially fighting over the users ignorant of how to do such things. I suppose it makes sense in a way, if you can snag the majority of these people, you'll have them for ages AND you'll never have to give them new features because they won't understand how to use them anyways. They'll be endlessly happy with whatever you throw at them as long as it doesn't complicate things any more for them and still lets them access the internet.
With the lack of decent games (especially those that are playable under linux or wine) recently, I found myself digging out Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 to play.
Waiting on Diablo 3 and the new Monkey Island though
Yep, I dug out Diablo II again the other day and even bought the digital download for the LoD expansion since I can't seem to find my damn jewel case and key anywhere (even though I have several of the actual CDs.. Blizzard jewel cases are always the ones that disappear for some reason).
On a side note, I probably would not have bought that copy of LoD if the new battlenet account and purchasing system wasn't in place. Valve and Blizzard are my heroes right now for Steam and Battlenet, respectively, and for recognizing that purchasing the game once is enough and for allowing us to keep our game keys online and download the client whenever we wish.
I thought silverlight was supposed to be microsoft's answer to flash but I guess it will never be more than a curiosity/minor annoyance if they can't even be bothered to support firefox. Oh well, as someone above pointed out, torrents are undoubtedly on the way so I'll just have to wait a bit more.
-Buck
I'm running the latest release version of Firefox with Silverlight 3 installed and it seems to be loading fine. I did, however, get that message with Chrome (I'm not too surprised, Silverlight 2 kinda worked and kinda didn't when Chrome released and it took them a while to get it going.. I'm not sure if it was ever as seamless as it was on IE or Firefox).
Make sure Silverlight and Firefox are both up-to-date. I haven't gotten into the video lectures yet but I must say, they're making improvements on their video player designs and the overall site feels responsive and sharp.
Could it have been done in Flash? I'm sure it could. Then again, it could probably have been done in HTML 5 too...
...would give the ISPs a financial incentive to speed your music and video downloads along. But you'd never support such an outrage, would you? Because then you'd actually have to *pay* for downloading all your "tunes" and movies, watching Youtube, browsing webpages, playing online games, and downloading free software.
There, fixed that for ya. Not everyone who uses gigs a month are downloading music and movies. Some of us just use a lot of bandwidth for normal internet activities and even some work related activities that involve downloading large ISO files.
This solution is a win for the cable TV companies, a win for Hollywood, and a win for some of the ISP companies, but would be a big lose for a lot of internet users, and I'd bet its way more than the 5% number that they like to throw around.
The ISP companies had a chance to increase capacity in preparation for this internet boom years ago, with government breaks no less, and they chose to ignore the issue and take the money anyways. This became even more apparent to me recently when someone described some of the newer optical networking technology is out now and just how much data can really be sent over a single strand of fiber when using it for multiple channels... its an insane amount and much more than I had been led to believe by the information the ISPs have been putting out about the evils of Youtube/Hulu and file sharing (legal or not but, of course, it serves their purpose and Hollywood's to "educate" the masses with the idea that ALL file sharing is wrong) and how they're at "max capacity" and must consider other billing methods or risk the meltdown of the intertubes.
The two items you're thinking of in my original post were just some rather bad assumptions on my part due mostly to being in a hurry when I was thinking about this and looking the info up.
When I looked up Gecko today I saw that it was developed by Mozilla and I assumed it was proprietary for their browser. I completed missed the following which is a few paragraphs down:
Its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation. Licensed by a tri-license of the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Gecko is free and open source software.
My bad assumption on Webkit was due to forgetting that there are already other companies contributing back to it and that, therefore, SOMEONE will always be developing on it. Secondly, I also assumed Microsoft wouldn't just continue to work on the code themselves if the project fell into neglect, which of course they would. They generally absorb other company's code by purchasing it, relabeling it, and then continuing development so there is no reason they wouldn't continue development on an open source solution.
What can I say, I had like 10 minutes to get my Slashdot fix in and posted 3 or 4 messages across multiple articles. I guess at least one post had to suffer (maybe all:P ).
It's largely a.NET application that uses Internet Explorer's "Trident" rendering engine.
Granted, it has made significant improvements but I still haven't been that impressed by the Trident engine. Sometimes I wish they'd use someone else's engine so that they'd be kept up-to-date on standards AND you'd have the same browsing experience on multiple browsers.
I guess I can understand why they don't though... they'd be up a creek without a paddle if they used Webkit and people stopped developing for it or licensed Gecko from Firefox and they went under or yanked Microsoft's license.
Where are my mod points when I need them? Someone please mod this up informative.
I really do hope they eventually add some sort of official 3D support (seems like I've seen someone implement a 3D engine into Silverlight somehow). Then again, perhaps we should wait and try to get rid of DirectX and OpenGL and try to get the card makers to create a full common API on the GPU first.
Unfortunately, I don't have a citation for this handy, but if I remember correctly, Adobe actually started making a lot of changes to Flex after Expression Blend hit the market for Silverlight and got a lot of positive feedback. So Microsoft isn't the only one who copies features AND Microsoft can be innovative on occasion.
Really, it doesn't matter who copies from whom here, this is ALL good for consumers. Adobe finally has some competition (they're of course still winning on cross platform capability) and when someone copies features from another tool they normally copy useful features. That means each version of the respective companies development tools should get better and better.
Why can't people realise that movie companies aren't running a charity? Companies release films to make money! How many of those people who are complaining about the encryption here even pay for their DVDs these days? I'd love to place a wager on that!
I don't think most people here are arguing against them making money. This is much more about fair use AFTER the physical media has been bought. Given the ability, these companies would charge you for the physical media, the hardware it plays on, AND another fee for each time you watch the movie. Hell, if they could figure out a way to detect how many people were watching it, I'm sure they'd want to charge a "movie watching fee" to each person too (as it is, I'm not even sure you can legally have a "movie night" at a university campus anymore without a license to show it, even though you've already purchased the DVD).
Sure, the companies want to make money, and I don't begrudge them that AS LONG AS they actually continue making something worth buying and don't resort to trying to destroy fair use rights to get people to buy multiple copies of the same movie or multiple movie players just to watch something they already own or trying to charge for use of the media after its already been purchased.
Slashdot Mirror
but has no plans to change it at the risk of angering shareholders â" and even customers who benefit from the confusion
Somehow, when I read that, it came out all different in my head... something more like:
"but has no plans to change it as the risk of angering the company's customers -- oh yeah, and you little people who buy their software might benefit from it too"
Remember when a company's customers were actually the people buying from them, and not their shareholders... or at least they pretended that was the case?
Yes, he really does. It was rap music before it was video games, but he honestly believes they are destroying our moral framework.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(attorney)
The truly ironic part is that people like him do far more damage to this country than any cultural phenomena they point their fingers at.
Just imagine if he got his way.. how many of our rights would be trampled and how many would feel oppressed due to someone else's morality being forced upon them?
In the Slashdot world, following the laws lobbied by the corporations that are ultimately extremely unpopular and seem to be attacking the rights of citizens is a "hack".
And yet they can't figure out why companies view FOSS as a vehicle for technological advancement that circumvents their control and threatens their outdated business models.
There, fixed that for ya, at least from my point of view. I consider myself a law abiding citizen but I'm also realizing that many laws these days are not benefiting or protecting the citizens at all and are very unpopular. When you have such laws being passed that seem contrary to public desires, you start to wonder what is going on and who your government is really working for.
Furthermore, I've seen plenty of startups and even some actors and such that have embraced newer business models that don't necessarily depend on charging for content. I think the companies are terrified of this concept because this generally requires the content to actually be good to get the public to consume it. If the public isn't consuming it, you don't get advertisers and such. Most (not all) products and services out there have required the public to pay first. This was fine back in the day when good customer relations was key to keeping up sales. However, we've moved into an era where people are generally apathetic when they receive lackluster products and services and just shrug their shoulders.. the company doesn't care though because it still has their money. Even worse, we have situations where people are actually turning away from the product/services and the companies just find another way of getting the money, either through government intervention or litigation against their one time customers.
Just my two cents.
For the record, the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 already boots in 5 seconds using a SSD.
Just imagine, combined with the technology from the article, Ubuntu 9.10 could conceivably boot before your finger even makes it to the power button!
All I heard in my head while reading this comment was "Americuh! F*ck yeah! Freedom is the only way, yeah!"
I don't believe the parent's post was really meant in that way. The parent was speaking more of inalienable rights that belong to humanity as a whole, rights that each of us would have with or without governments as they are completely separate and independent of government. You may argue that it is not on anyone to decide others have these rights, but I really believe living, breathing, eating, enjoying something, communicating with your fellow human beings, love, hope, etc are all rights every living person has. Individual governments can try to convince people otherwise and even say you can't do some of these things, but a government telling people they can't live, love, communicate, etc can't possibly be right can it?
I'm certainly not saying freedom is the only way. The USA isn't even completely free as we're not an anarchy. Heck, there are plenty of people in this country who are practically begging for a dictator to take away all of that very hard and nasty decision making they have to do on a daily basis, and one day one will find them. Different things work for different people but obviously it isn't working for some over there or else there wouldn't be protests and the government wouldn't feel the need to cut off their people from communication.
The Middle East is not your playground. You are not the world's moral compass. We do not see you as something to aspire too, but simply another way of doing things. You're doing such a bang up job in Iraq and Afghanistan; Please, beseech your leader to enforce the indomitable will and unwavering ideology of Western Society on another Middle Eastern territory. They're completely ready to move away from the current political system they have, and won't descend into exactly the same situation in no time at all as the people are still living in a society where religion and law are still very closely knitted together. It took Yeomanry and the Renaissance in Europe to get us out of a heavily feudal system, with separation of church and state. Leave them to it and they will get there.
No, it's not our playground and imposing morality on others, ironically, can often interfere with other people's inalienable rights we were just discussing. I don't really believe morality has anything to do with why we're in the Middle East anyways. I suspect it's far more political and, unfortunately, the politicians and the corporations that sponsor them probably do feel like the Middle East is their playground.
Ultimately I do agree with your philosophy on letting them be. You can't really "give" someone freedom of any kind or any amount (I'm not talking about USA freedoms or anything... more of just the general concept) as they'll not appreciate it and, eventually, they'll just slide back into the system that was running them and owning them before. People have to WANT it and then they have to want it enough to fight for it through politics, protests, and maybe even the battlefield. Developing countries need to develop naturally and not dragged along. The USA has plenty of developing left to do itself and I wouldn't really want our current state of affairs spreading anywhere as I'm starting to feel that we, as a people, have very little say in anything anymore and that the corporations are quickly becoming the true citizens of this country.
I'm actually very curious.. as an IP lawyer, how do you view the current state of copyright law?
I've begun to read up on copyright, in general, in the last few years and it amazes me at how much we, as a civilization, stand to lose and what we've already lost. The more I read about it, the more I realize that the original idea of copyright was an amazing thing... provide protection for a work so that the creator can profit from it for a reasonable amount of time and then release the work into public domain so that the work is never lost and everyone can freely be enriched by it. Since the work moves into public domain, the creator is encouraged to create another work if he/she wishes to continue making money in this way.
Now, instead, we seem to have a system where the creator can create a single work and then he/she and their children can profit off of that work for several human lifespans. Or, potentially worse, the creator creates a work which is then immediately owned by a corporation that then profits and locks the work for several human lifespans, assuming they don't find more ways to extend it even past that time-frame. When does the work pass into public domain in this model?
I would love to find a way to get students (and I don't mean just k-12 students... college and university students as well) as interested and involved in this as many of them even were during this last presidential election. Ultimately, if we don't find a way to get things under control, it will be they who will have to do it or suffer even worse consequences than we are now (imagine having to pay for a song every time you listen to it or, indeed, think about the lyrics in your head... we hope such a thing is a long way off but, when it's possible, we all know they won't hesitate to do it).
Since they only play for about 20 minutes per session and aren't focused on the mechanics of the game, SOE can get away with changes that are unfair to some players, as shown by a recent, oddly-handled item nerf in Free Realms."
So not only is Sony encouraging the ADD-like behavior that a lot of people are showing these days (anyone remember back when a movie could be 2 or 3 hours long and didn't require explosions every few seconds to keep an audience interested.. LotR and Titanic are the only ones I can think of) but they're also going to get used the idea of screwing players over without any real negative feedback?
Granted, I realize Sony screwing players over is no new thing (I played SWG back when it was good), but at least when they do it in most of their games there is some sort of lashback.
Am I the only one amused at people thinking they're putting in effort and hard work by sitting at a keyboard playing one of the easiest games ever created, and only getting ahead of everyone else because they don't have anything else to do?
Ah but it can be a lot of effort and hard work and I don't think its wrong to like to be possibly rewarded for putting in the extra time, at least more so than someone who decides not too. I raided though most of the original game and up to Illidan in TBC. Some of those encounters were laughably easy, the trash mostly boring, but some of the encounters were really damn hard and took the majority of those 40 people (at the time) to be performing at their best. I say majority because most of the fights could still be won with a few slackers although there were other fights that weren't as forgiving. I never got to kill C'Thun, for instance, because the guild I was in never quite got the fight down as a whole.
Back then I raided 3 or 4 nights a week and had a blast. It was more about the teamwork and the first kills (that excitement over voice chat after than the loot, but the loot was great fun too. I did this while having a full time job and hanging out with friends. I wasn't in a relationship, nor did I have kids or anything like that so I did have some free time. Back then we're talking like maybe 4 or 5 hours a night for some of the longer instances.
These days I've mostly backed off raiding although I try to do some with my guild one day a week on the weekends. It's MUCH easier to get a 10-man going these days and doing an entire raid instance in a rather short amount of time (Naxx may be an exception but that instances was originally designed to be long back for the 40-man days). Heck, some of these instances are pretty much entirely boss fights.. you walk in, kill something for 5 minutes, and walk out with epic gear.
The whole point of WoW's success is that everyone can get to the top levels, do all the raids and get all the gear. Five years and twenty million sales later, poopsockers are still telling us how Blizzard got it all wrong.
I don't think that they got it wrong. I may have had a semi-elitist mentality back in the 40-man days but honestly I still think that a good number of the people who didn't even make a small effort to get the gear just didn't want to put the effort out and some of them indeed wanted it handed to them. I mean, with even a few hours a night spread out over a week, a guild could have cleared MC. Sure, I'm sure there were plenty that tried and failed, and that sucks, especially since back then PvP hadn't fully developed yet. I don't think I ever thought myself better than anyone else simply because I had T2.. I was just excited to do the content and thought it was cool that succeeding in it allowed me to get some stuff not everyone had. At first I was a bit disappointed at the change to 25-man raids but not because I thought that just anyone would be able to do it and walk out with free epics but that it wasn't going to be as fun without 39 of my guildies in the raid with me.
In fact, I think Blizzard has recently hit upon the jackpot. This split of instances into 10-man and 25-man and then a further split into normal and hard modes opens up the content to pretty much everyone and you don't have to be uber-geared to hop into a 10-man normal mode raid. Heck, they've done it with normal instances too, with the heroic versions becoming available at 80. Furthermore, you get badges for completing these heroics and doing daily quests surrounding them.. badges which, when you have enough, you can use to buy loot that rivals the very latest hard-mode raid instance gear. In all of these, the gear is more powerful in the hard modes than normal, and more powerful in the 25 mans over the 10 mans.
The only unfortunate part that I see is that the gear pretty much all looks the same. This expansion has suffered from that since day one when even the quest rewards all looked the same. It would be cool if the 25-man heroic loot maybe looked a bit cooler in some way than the 10-man stuff but they probably don't have the man power for that.
So essentially you had health, mana and endurance? Gee, now that's new. Or at least was, around 1990 before MUDs came into existance.
Lets face it, what else is there?
Even if someone comes out with a game that calls them something completely different (indeed, as SWG did) we're still going to associate them with what we already know. Besides, these are easily identifiable and understood by most game players now.. why confuse things?
Even to knew players, anyone who understands the concept of the words "health" and "endurance" and pretty quickly figure out how they relate to their character.
SWG at least did something slightly different with them in that you could get "scars" or permanent damage to those bars that lowered your possible max until you got the damage repaired. I'm not saying this is a good system (I found it rather cumbersome and annoying) but at least they were trying something different.
I remember reading an interesting book called "The Science of Star Wars" that discussed the real life issues with the technology and situations in the original trilogy. This covered everything from the theoretical sciences behind the technologies like lightsabers, blasters, and lightspeed to the possibilities of existence of other life out there. I haven't read this book in a very long time and I don't have access to it at the moment, but I seem to remember it indicating that the odds of finding another planet with water, breathable air, and the exact distance from a sun necessary to help life flourish were so extremely low as to be laughable.
I remember thinking even then how short-sighted that was and how arrogant it seemed.
I realize these things are supposed to be scientific so they use only what they know to be fact, however, I think when dealing with complete unknowns such as the type of life out there or what their technology level may be at, you have to start thinking outside the box and be a bit more imaganitive.
Who is to say, for example, what form other life will take? Would we even recognize it as life if we were standing right next to it? What about their technology? Who is to say that they haven't gotten past the lightspeed issues with relativity and energy required? Perhaps they have stealth technologies... would we even be able to detect them? Just because we don't know how to do it now, and just because our current science says it probably isn't possible, doesn't mean it can't be done.
I seem to remember looking this up at some point and I think the semi-official explanation at this point is that there are two main Zelda timelines that split off from Ocarina of Time.
One timeline results from Link obtaining the Master Sword and traveling forward in time to adulthood. The second timeline apparently results from Link warning everyone about Ganondorf before obtaining the Master Sword was necessary (this occurs after he replaces the sword at the end and travels back to childhood time).
Supposedly, this mostly explains some of the differences in the other games, particularly about Ganondorf and his appearances in Hyrule or the golden realm or whatever. Windwaker is many many years along the adult Link timeline because they specifically mention the "Hero of Time" and how he didn't reappear when he was needed again. Twilight Princess apparently occurs in the other timeline as Ganondorf was sealed away in the twilight realm when his plans were revealed by Link at the end of Ocarina.
I do tend to be a stickler about consistency in stories but Zelda is normally good enough that I can just enjoy the game for what it is. I did find the above explanation interesting though, geeking out over the time travel and alternate reality explanations a bit.
I agree. Furthermore, I'd want to know how heavy it is (I doubt it is very heavy at all but it does look rather beefy) as I carry usb flash drives around with me all the time at work. Then again, I'd be extremely leery of taking this anywhere. Should it get stolen or dropped somewhere, thats a rather large chunk of change gone.
I can't imagine every buying one of these. If you need a mobile PC with that much hard drive space, why wouldn't you just get a normal laptop with some of the other nice features? I realize netbooks are ultra small and mobile but still...
Serious discussion on this aside for a second, who else is anxious to see people's reactions (visually or even just message board posts) the first time they see a driver in their favorite distro that says something to the effect of "Publisher: Microsoft"?
Hyper-V
Basically, its a virtualization system that runs as a role on Server 2008. Parts of it work a lot like VirtualPC does (Microsoft's desktop virtualizaton system) but it also has some nice features such as automatic save-state when the host OS is shutting down which also can automatically restore when the host OS comes back up and starts the Hypver-V role.
If you don't use IE do not upgrade it and it won't change your default browser
Or you can update it and just be sure to uncheck the "default browser" option. I realize that not everyone knows how to do that but its not one of the harder things to change.
I do find it funny though that all of these companies are essentially fighting over the users ignorant of how to do such things. I suppose it makes sense in a way, if you can snag the majority of these people, you'll have them for ages AND you'll never have to give them new features because they won't understand how to use them anyways. They'll be endlessly happy with whatever you throw at them as long as it doesn't complicate things any more for them and still lets them access the internet.
With the lack of decent games (especially those that are playable under linux or wine) recently, I found myself digging out Diablo 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 to play.
Waiting on Diablo 3 and the new Monkey Island though
Yep, I dug out Diablo II again the other day and even bought the digital download for the LoD expansion since I can't seem to find my damn jewel case and key anywhere (even though I have several of the actual CDs.. Blizzard jewel cases are always the ones that disappear for some reason).
On a side note, I probably would not have bought that copy of LoD if the new battlenet account and purchasing system wasn't in place. Valve and Blizzard are my heroes right now for Steam and Battlenet, respectively, and for recognizing that purchasing the game once is enough and for allowing us to keep our game keys online and download the client whenever we wish.
I thought silverlight was supposed to be microsoft's answer to flash but I guess it will never be more than a curiosity/minor annoyance if they can't even be bothered to support firefox. Oh well, as someone above pointed out, torrents are undoubtedly on the way so I'll just have to wait a bit more.
-Buck
I'm running the latest release version of Firefox with Silverlight 3 installed and it seems to be loading fine. I did, however, get that message with Chrome (I'm not too surprised, Silverlight 2 kinda worked and kinda didn't when Chrome released and it took them a while to get it going.. I'm not sure if it was ever as seamless as it was on IE or Firefox).
Make sure Silverlight and Firefox are both up-to-date. I haven't gotten into the video lectures yet but I must say, they're making improvements on their video player designs and the overall site feels responsive and sharp.
Could it have been done in Flash? I'm sure it could. Then again, it could probably have been done in HTML 5 too...
...would give the ISPs a financial incentive to speed your music and video downloads along. But you'd never support such an outrage, would you? Because then you'd actually have to *pay* for downloading all your "tunes" and movies, watching Youtube, browsing webpages, playing online games, and downloading free software.
There, fixed that for ya. Not everyone who uses gigs a month are downloading music and movies. Some of us just use a lot of bandwidth for normal internet activities and even some work related activities that involve downloading large ISO files.
This solution is a win for the cable TV companies, a win for Hollywood, and a win for some of the ISP companies, but would be a big lose for a lot of internet users, and I'd bet its way more than the 5% number that they like to throw around.
The ISP companies had a chance to increase capacity in preparation for this internet boom years ago, with government breaks no less, and they chose to ignore the issue and take the money anyways. This became even more apparent to me recently when someone described some of the newer optical networking technology is out now and just how much data can really be sent over a single strand of fiber when using it for multiple channels... its an insane amount and much more than I had been led to believe by the information the ISPs have been putting out about the evils of Youtube/Hulu and file sharing (legal or not but, of course, it serves their purpose and Hollywood's to "educate" the masses with the idea that ALL file sharing is wrong) and how they're at "max capacity" and must consider other billing methods or risk the meltdown of the intertubes.
Wow, WTF do you think open source is for?
The two items you're thinking of in my original post were just some rather bad assumptions on my part due mostly to being in a hurry when I was thinking about this and looking the info up.
When I looked up Gecko today I saw that it was developed by Mozilla and I assumed it was proprietary for their browser. I completed missed the following which is a few paragraphs down:
Its development is now overseen by the Mozilla Foundation. Licensed by a tri-license of the Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Gecko is free and open source software.
My bad assumption on Webkit was due to forgetting that there are already other companies contributing back to it and that, therefore, SOMEONE will always be developing on it. Secondly, I also assumed Microsoft wouldn't just continue to work on the code themselves if the project fell into neglect, which of course they would. They generally absorb other company's code by purchasing it, relabeling it, and then continuing development so there is no reason they wouldn't continue development on an open source solution.
What can I say, I had like 10 minutes to get my Slashdot fix in and posted 3 or 4 messages across multiple articles. I guess at least one post had to suffer (maybe all :P ).
It's largely a .NET application that uses Internet Explorer's "Trident" rendering engine.
Granted, it has made significant improvements but I still haven't been that impressed by the Trident engine. Sometimes I wish they'd use someone else's engine so that they'd be kept up-to-date on standards AND you'd have the same browsing experience on multiple browsers.
I guess I can understand why they don't though... they'd be up a creek without a paddle if they used Webkit and people stopped developing for it or licensed Gecko from Firefox and they went under or yanked Microsoft's license.
> the ability to run apps outside of the browser.
What could Possibly go wrong with that?!?
At least it still runs in a sandbox.
and the ability to run apps outside of the browser.
Silverlight running apps outside of the sandbox? Yeah, I'm downloading this right away.
Out of browser != out of sandbox
Locally installed Silverlight applications still run in a sandbox. - Microsoft Silverlight
Where are my mod points when I need them? Someone please mod this up informative.
I really do hope they eventually add some sort of official 3D support (seems like I've seen someone implement a 3D engine into Silverlight somehow). Then again, perhaps we should wait and try to get rid of DirectX and OpenGL and try to get the card makers to create a full common API on the GPU first.
Unfortunately, I don't have a citation for this handy, but if I remember correctly, Adobe actually started making a lot of changes to Flex after Expression Blend hit the market for Silverlight and got a lot of positive feedback. So Microsoft isn't the only one who copies features AND Microsoft can be innovative on occasion.
Really, it doesn't matter who copies from whom here, this is ALL good for consumers. Adobe finally has some competition (they're of course still winning on cross platform capability) and when someone copies features from another tool they normally copy useful features. That means each version of the respective companies development tools should get better and better.
Why can't people realise that movie companies aren't running a charity? Companies release films to make money! How many of those people who are complaining about the encryption here even pay for their DVDs these days? I'd love to place a wager on that!
I don't think most people here are arguing against them making money. This is much more about fair use AFTER the physical media has been bought. Given the ability, these companies would charge you for the physical media, the hardware it plays on, AND another fee for each time you watch the movie. Hell, if they could figure out a way to detect how many people were watching it, I'm sure they'd want to charge a "movie watching fee" to each person too (as it is, I'm not even sure you can legally have a "movie night" at a university campus anymore without a license to show it, even though you've already purchased the DVD).
Sure, the companies want to make money, and I don't begrudge them that AS LONG AS they actually continue making something worth buying and don't resort to trying to destroy fair use rights to get people to buy multiple copies of the same movie or multiple movie players just to watch something they already own or trying to charge for use of the media after its already been purchased.