I can fully understand throttling bandwidth on ports used by file-sharing programs and other bandwidth hogs. You simply can't have a few applications eating up the lion's share of your network's bandwidth... it degrades the performance of anything else requiring bandwidth. Additionally, I'm fully aware that ISP's need to grossly oversell bandwidth... the business doesn't make economic sense if everyone is maxxing out their bandwidth 24/7.
But blocking these ports entirely? At best, that's ridiculous and shortsighted. File-sharing is one of the few "killer apps" driving broadband adoption, can't you see that? Your profits are up short-term, but I think you're going to hurt your company in the long run by blocking it entirely. File-sharing aside, other legitimate peer-to-peer applications like video-conferencing will be crippled due to your "no incoming connection" policy (at least one end has to be able to accept an incoming connection). Again, you're killing one of the precious few killer apps your industry relies upon. You think people want broadband so they can download cookie recipes faster? *shakes head*
At worst, you're a shortsighted, ridiculous, and a thief... is your company openly advertising the fact that most of the selling points for going broadband simply won't work on your network? You remind me of a car manufacturer gloating that they've reduced costly warranty-related repairs by limiting the cars' top speed to 45mph and making it only work on odd-numbered days of the month (no Ford jokes please) without telling the customers. Long-term, you're really fucking the company over. That analogy is more drastic than what you're doing, but the difference is one of degree, not one of type. If you've clearly informed customers about your crippled service prior to taking their money, then the analogy doesn't apply, of course. Caveat emptor.
What you ought to do is offer a discount (like the 33% rate cut) to customers who don't want/need/feel like paying for things like file-sharing and incoming connections. Clearly spell out for them the limitations they'll be living with. Then, offer a plan at or close the old rate with all those other services enabled. If there's bandwidth-throttling on certain ports, clearly spell this out to the consumer before taking their money. Don't advertise the service as "150kbps" without mentioning than file-sharing apps will be throttled to XX kbps.
Boromir was too "evil" feeling. I never had the impression that he was more than just prideful and slightly arrogant. In the movie he feels deceitful and a little slim
I thought he was perfectly in line with his character in the novels. Even in the novels, though he was a good and berave man at heart, he always had his sights set on the Ring, wanting to use it to defeat Sauron.
Aragorn...and I didn't like the way he was portrayed as bearing a family "weakness"
I'm a little confused. Why did he/his ancestors abandon the throne to become a Ranger in the novels? Not refuting your point, I just can't remember.
Galadriel was too mystical
I agree. She was much warmer and human in the novels. In the movie, I missed the way the novels talks about she filled all those in the Fellowship with a sense of love, and how even Gimli sung her praises for forever afterwards after meeting her.
Jackson's take on what happens to the wearer when the ring is on is... a little out of place with what Bilbo goes through in The Hobbit
But it seems right in line with what Frodo goes through in the novels, though perhaps it's a little more dramatic than in the novels, I thought they nailed it. True, Frodo's experiences in with the ring in the novels weren't like Bilbo's in The Hobbit, but the ring was still sort of sleeping, and Sauron wasn't on the move again, so I guess the experience was les evil and dramatic.
First of all, it's a great movie. Secondly, they did a good job at choosing what to include from the novel. They couldn't have included everything- the movie would have been ten hours long (not that I would have minded). But having said that, here's things from the novel that I missed seeing in the movie.:(
Gimli's character was in the movie, but I wish he had more lines. He was one of my favorite characters in the books, but was just sort of a grunting axe-swinger in the movie
Gandalf's laughter after solving the "speak, friend, and enter" puzzle (or non-puzzle, hehe)
Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Wights
Leisurely pace that made the action seem more intense and gave a greater sense of the scope of their journey. The movie was all action, which was kind of desensitizing.
Gandalf wondering if the galloping horses in the water were stylistic overkill (the water that carried the black riders away)
EIther way, as we've gone from text files to graphics to audio to video, we've been using more and more space.
that's a good question. i'm not insightful enough to guess what the Next Big Thing will be, but i do think we'll see the PC (at least in the hands of power users) getting more and more use as a PVR unit.
also, if hard drives continue to grow, i think you'll see people ripping large amounts of their OWN dvd's to the hard drives, for convenient viewing, much as many people (like me) have ripped most of their CD collection to mp3 for convenience's sake.
And who the fuck are you to bitch at someone for giving his opinion? He didn't give a commandment that "all shall not play this game", he suggested something.
You must not understand what either of us said. He said (paraphrase) "this game is too desensitizing for most people" and I took issue with him taking upon himself what is and isn't okay for others. I didn't say he shouldn't have an opinion as you are stupidly implying, displaying a complete lack of reading comprehension.
There's a difference between criticizing someone's opinion (which I did) and trying to judge what is appropriate for other people (which he did).
There's a big difference between criticizing someone else's opinion (which I certainly did) and trying to say they shouldn't be allowed to express their opinion (which I certainly did not do). People such as yourself don't understand the distinction. You've got the right to express your opinion, and I've got the right to think you opinion is idiotic.
As the famous quote goes, paraphrased loosely... "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Sure, there's some swearing and violence, but it's not really any worse than a lot of other games that are already readily available
Violence-wise and sex-wise, there's nothing really new. I think the main thing about the game is the completely open-ended world the game provides... there's literally no limit to the mayhem. If you want to do nothing but slaughter whores all day, the game will let you do that. It's completely amoral and will basically let you play whatever kind of character you like.
After playing this game for a few weeks, I can tell you that it's a) one of the best games Iv'e ever played and b) it definitely taes depravity to a new level.:)
Even Microsoft offers pretty good support plans if you pay for it. I've opened a few Microsoft developer support incidents in the past couple of years, and yeah, it takes a phone call or two before you get escalated to an actual engineer, but once you do, the support is nice. They'll actually look at your code and send YOU code, and the incident stays open until it's resolved or you get your money back. '
Now, I don't know how expensive this is, because my company was paying for it (probably expensive, yet cheap compared to the cost of a team of our developers spinning their wheels while stuck on a problem for a week). As much as I like to bash Microsoft, I was pretty satisfied after the incident.
You see, companies that use software aren't truly interested in the quality of the support they get. Rather, what they're really interested in is the appearance of support. That is, all they really care about is that they know that there is someone they theoretically could call for help if they need it.
This is SO insightful (hint hint, moderators). Why don't people understand this? When people diss OSS because of support issues, I ask them to recall for me the last time they got good support (particularly good, FREE support) from a commercial closed-source software vendor. Their answer is usually "never".
You can get good support for commercial products, but you usually need to pay through the nose for it.
Word is complex, but I've looked at the Microsoft Word 97 Binary File Format [redbrick.dcu.ie] spec (and spent a good week starting to write my own parser) and I don't see the big deal
I'll admit that I haven't seen or worked with the spec, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. But from what I've read aout it... yes, the spec isn't too complex, but there's a lot of little gray areas in it and the actual implementation of the spec in Word itself is quirky, making it a bitch to emulate exactly.
In other words, supporting the Word spec isn't too hard, but getting a complex Word doc to render the same way in your app as it does in Word is hard.
It's amazing what people can create for fun, as opposed to what they create because some marketing group said so. I'm a firm believer that when people are having fun creating something, it shows through in the end product, in nearly-always positive ways!
Remember how Linux got started and Linus' continuing philosophy- he continually says that he's doing Linux for fun and to scratch his personal itches, and not to fuck Microsoft over or because he wants to save the world or something.
What if DVD players had fully programmable CPUs, as well as a few megs of RAM usable by the DVD? Then each CD could contain its own codecs and playback software. This would be great for studios because they could painlessly introduce new copy protection features (even if the new copy protection wasn'ttougher than CSS, just the myriad of different schemes would foil pirates to some extent). Also, they could continually improve video quality as well, which would be appealing to customers who aren't aware of/concerned about copy protection and Microsoft domination (aka, 99% of all consumers).
Probably the only thing preventing this would be the fact that DVD video quality is more than good enough for consumers, so there's consumer appeal to slightly-increasing video quality due to upgraded codecs. Also, if you think there's DVD/DVD player compatibility problems now... it would probably be even more insane if things went this way.
They pirate it. Seriously. Blender is nice and all but the 3D artists (and wanna-be's) I've known generally would rather find ways to pirate the high-end stuff than use freeware.
Studios generally use big-name software packages. They want you to have experience in the software they use, such as 3DS, Maya, etc.
Be so narrowminded and shortsighted to fail to see any future developments. And call everybody ridiculous who does.
You're right - it's a scary thought that one day XP could become unusuable when Microsoft decides to stop supporting it and handing out registration codes. That's a great reason to avoid using a version of XP that requires registration.
However, we're talking about Win95 here... i don't believe that making Win95 unsupported foreces anybody into WinXP, because your copy of Win95 will work perfectly fine. I'm not defending Microsoft's practices, which are designed to screw customers- I'm disputing the people who are ranting as though older versions of Windows can't be used any more now that they're unsupported.
why would something work on one win32 distro and not on another?
You hit the nail on the head, actually. The base API is the basically the same across versions. So something like, say, a word processor should run on any win32. But it's the "bells, whistles, and included driver support" that prove to be the sticking points... a lot of the fun stuff (games and other multimedia) uses these bells and whistles, as does anything that accesses the hardware directly (drivers, cd burning, etc etc).
Just to clarify, I wasn't taking issue with your statement that open-source software is superior- because I'd agree with that. It would be nice if they could at least release the source to their products at the end of their supported life, if not completely open-source it from the get-go.
I was disagreeing with your assertion that because they're not supporting the OS any more, it's suddenly become unusable.
Well, similarly, there are a whole lot of people out there who have a Win9x OS installed, and a bunch of apps that work reasonably well with it, and they'd be quite happy to keep using it. But M$ has decided to discontinue support for Win9x, so in effect, they've decided for the user what they should use.
I'm sorry, but this is totally ridiculous. How are they deciding what the user can't use? It's not like Win95 is not going to work anymore (well, whether it worked or not in the first place is debatable, but that's another post) once it's unsupported, it just means they're not going to patch it anymore. You can use Win95 for the next 50 years if you like, they're just not making new stuff for it.
Sega hasn't "supported" the Genesis/Megadrive in six or seven years, but I can fscking well still play it! Or should they be obligated to keep making new stuff for it, as you seem to be insinuating Microsoft ought to be doing for Win95? Considering how outdated Win95 is at this point, I'm suprised they supported it this long.
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I'm assuming that the aveerage programmer can manage to type that fast.
Typing isn't programming. Just so you know.
I can fully understand throttling bandwidth on ports used by file-sharing programs and other bandwidth hogs. You simply can't have a few applications eating up the lion's share of your network's bandwidth... it degrades the performance of anything else requiring bandwidth. Additionally, I'm fully aware that ISP's need to grossly oversell bandwidth... the business doesn't make economic sense if everyone is maxxing out their bandwidth 24/7.
But blocking these ports entirely? At best, that's ridiculous and shortsighted. File-sharing is one of the few "killer apps" driving broadband adoption, can't you see that? Your profits are up short-term, but I think you're going to hurt your company in the long run by blocking it entirely. File-sharing aside, other legitimate peer-to-peer applications like video-conferencing will be crippled due to your "no incoming connection" policy (at least one end has to be able to accept an incoming connection). Again, you're killing one of the precious few killer apps your industry relies upon. You think people want broadband so they can download cookie recipes faster? *shakes head*
At worst, you're a shortsighted, ridiculous, and a thief... is your company openly advertising the fact that most of the selling points for going broadband simply won't work on your network? You remind me of a car manufacturer gloating that they've reduced costly warranty-related repairs by limiting the cars' top speed to 45mph and making it only work on odd-numbered days of the month (no Ford jokes please) without telling the customers. Long-term, you're really fucking the company over. That analogy is more drastic than what you're doing, but the difference is one of degree, not one of type. If you've clearly informed customers about your crippled service prior to taking their money, then the analogy doesn't apply, of course. Caveat emptor.
What you ought to do is offer a discount (like the 33% rate cut) to customers who don't want/need/feel like paying for things like file-sharing and incoming connections. Clearly spell out for them the limitations they'll be living with. Then, offer a plan at or close the old rate with all those other services enabled. If there's bandwidth-throttling on certain ports, clearly spell this out to the consumer before taking their money. Don't advertise the service as "150kbps" without mentioning than file-sharing apps will be throttled to XX kbps.
Thank you for clearing this up, much appreciated. :)
Boromir was too "evil" feeling. I never had the impression that he was more than just prideful and slightly arrogant. In the movie he feels deceitful and a little slim
I thought he was perfectly in line with his character in the novels. Even in the novels, though he was a good and berave man at heart, he always had his sights set on the Ring, wanting to use it to defeat Sauron.
Aragorn...and I didn't like the way he was portrayed as bearing a family "weakness"
I'm a little confused. Why did he/his ancestors abandon the throne to become a Ranger in the novels? Not refuting your point, I just can't remember.
Galadriel was too mystical I agree. She was much warmer and human in the novels. In the movie, I missed the way the novels talks about she filled all those in the Fellowship with a sense of love, and how even Gimli sung her praises for forever afterwards after meeting her.
Jackson's take on what happens to the wearer when the ring is on is... a little out of place with what Bilbo goes through in The Hobbit
But it seems right in line with what Frodo goes through in the novels, though perhaps it's a little more dramatic than in the novels, I thought they nailed it. True, Frodo's experiences in with the ring in the novels weren't like Bilbo's in The Hobbit, but the ring was still sort of sleeping, and Sauron wasn't on the move again, so I guess the experience was les evil and dramatic.
Our theater had the exact same audio problem (in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania)
EIther way, as we've gone from text files to graphics to audio to video, we've been using more and more space.
that's a good question. i'm not insightful enough to guess what the Next Big Thing will be, but i do think we'll see the PC (at least in the hands of power users) getting more and more use as a PVR unit.
also, if hard drives continue to grow, i think you'll see people ripping large amounts of their OWN dvd's to the hard drives, for convenient viewing, much as many people (like me) have ripped most of their CD collection to mp3 for convenience's sake.
Stop agreeing! We're trying to have an argument here! :)
And who the fuck are you to bitch at someone for giving his opinion? He didn't give a commandment that "all shall not play this game", he suggested something.
You must not understand what either of us said. He said (paraphrase) "this game is too desensitizing for most people" and I took issue with him taking upon himself what is and isn't okay for others. I didn't say he shouldn't have an opinion as you are stupidly implying, displaying a complete lack of reading comprehension.
There's a difference between criticizing someone's opinion (which I did) and trying to judge what is appropriate for other people (which he did).
There's a big difference between criticizing someone else's opinion (which I certainly did) and trying to say they shouldn't be allowed to express their opinion (which I certainly did not do). People such as yourself don't understand the distinction. You've got the right to express your opinion, and I've got the right to think you opinion is idiotic.
As the famous quote goes, paraphrased loosely... "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Sure, there's some swearing and violence, but it's not really any worse than a lot of other games that are already readily available
:)
Violence-wise and sex-wise, there's nothing really new. I think the main thing about the game is the completely open-ended world the game provides... there's literally no limit to the mayhem. If you want to do nothing but slaughter whores all day, the game will let you do that. It's completely amoral and will basically let you play whatever kind of character you like.
After playing this game for a few weeks, I can tell you that it's a) one of the best games Iv'e ever played and b) it definitely taes depravity to a new level.
Are you sure of that?
Even Microsoft offers pretty good support plans if you pay for it. I've opened a few Microsoft developer support incidents in the past couple of years, and yeah, it takes a phone call or two before you get escalated to an actual engineer, but once you do, the support is nice. They'll actually look at your code and send YOU code, and the incident stays open until it's resolved or you get your money back. '
Now, I don't know how expensive this is, because my company was paying for it (probably expensive, yet cheap compared to the cost of a team of our developers spinning their wheels while stuck on a problem for a week). As much as I like to bash Microsoft, I was pretty satisfied after the incident.
but just too desensitizing for most people to handle.
Oh, for most people it's desensitizing, but not you? Seriously, fuck you for telling people what they can't handle. Who the hell do you think you are?
Are you kidding? I've found 7.0 like five times as usuable and stable as 6.5... I've never used 2000.
You see, companies that use software aren't truly interested in the quality of the support they get. Rather, what they're really interested in is the appearance of support. That is, all they really care about is that they know that there is someone they theoretically could call for help if they need it.
This is SO insightful (hint hint, moderators). Why don't people understand this? When people diss OSS because of support issues, I ask them to recall for me the last time they got good support (particularly good, FREE support) from a commercial closed-source software vendor. Their answer is usually "never".
You can get good support for commercial products, but you usually need to pay through the nose for it.
Word is complex, but I've looked at the Microsoft Word 97 Binary File Format [redbrick.dcu.ie] spec (and spent a good week starting to write my own parser) and I don't see the big deal
:)
I'll admit that I haven't seen or worked with the spec, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. But from what I've read aout it... yes, the spec isn't too complex, but there's a lot of little gray areas in it and the actual implementation of the spec in Word itself is quirky, making it a bitch to emulate exactly.
In other words, supporting the Word spec isn't too hard, but getting a complex Word doc to render the same way in your app as it does in Word is hard.
Could someone qualified comment on this please?
It's amazing what people can create for fun, as opposed to what they create because some marketing group said so. I'm a firm believer that when people are having fun creating something, it shows through in the end product, in nearly-always positive ways!
Remember how Linux got started and Linus' continuing philosophy- he continually says that he's doing Linux for fun and to scratch his personal itches, and not to fuck Microsoft over or because he wants to save the world or something.
What if DVD players had fully programmable CPUs, as well as a few megs of RAM usable by the DVD? Then each CD could contain its own codecs and playback software. This would be great for studios because they could painlessly introduce new copy protection features (even if the new copy protection wasn'ttougher than CSS, just the myriad of different schemes would foil pirates to some extent). Also, they could continually improve video quality as well, which would be appealing to customers who aren't aware of/concerned about copy protection and Microsoft domination (aka, 99% of all consumers).
Probably the only thing preventing this would be the fact that DVD video quality is more than good enough for consumers, so there's consumer appeal to slightly-increasing video quality due to upgraded codecs. Also, if you think there's DVD/DVD player compatibility problems now... it would probably be even more insane if things went this way.
That's cool, but it's sort of a kludge, isn't it? I'm not sure if an OGG converted to an MP3 would sound that great.
Then again, all my OGGs are pretty high bitrate anyway, they shouldn't sound too badly when recompressed....
What about cheap software for 3D artists?
They pirate it. Seriously. Blender is nice and all but the 3D artists (and wanna-be's) I've known generally would rather find ways to pirate the high-end stuff than use freeware.
Studios generally use big-name software packages. They want you to have experience in the software they use, such as 3DS, Maya, etc.
The only problem is the US (plus France, Belgium, Israel & a number of other countries) hve a bad habit of enforcing their laws extraterritorily
funny, when I first read this I thought it said "extraterrestially", not "extraterritorily". although, the former wouldn't suprise me either.
Be so narrowminded and shortsighted to fail to see any future developments. And call everybody ridiculous who does.
You're right - it's a scary thought that one day XP could become unusuable when Microsoft decides to stop supporting it and handing out registration codes. That's a great reason to avoid using a version of XP that requires registration.
However, we're talking about Win95 here... i don't believe that making Win95 unsupported foreces anybody into WinXP, because your copy of Win95 will work perfectly fine. I'm not defending Microsoft's practices, which are designed to screw customers- I'm disputing the people who are ranting as though older versions of Windows can't be used any more now that they're unsupported.
why would something work on one win32 distro and not on another?
You hit the nail on the head, actually. The base API is the basically the same across versions. So something like, say, a word processor should run on any win32. But it's the "bells, whistles, and included driver support" that prove to be the sticking points... a lot of the fun stuff (games and other multimedia) uses these bells and whistles, as does anything that accesses the hardware directly (drivers, cd burning, etc etc).
I'm sorry, but this is totally ridiculous
Just to clarify, I wasn't taking issue with your statement that open-source software is superior- because I'd agree with that. It would be nice if they could at least release the source to their products at the end of their supported life, if not completely open-source it from the get-go.
I was disagreeing with your assertion that because they're not supporting the OS any more, it's suddenly become unusable.
Well, similarly, there are a whole lot of people out there who have a Win9x OS installed, and a bunch of apps that work reasonably well with it, and they'd be quite happy to keep using it. But M$ has decided to discontinue support for Win9x, so in effect, they've decided for the user what they should use.
I'm sorry, but this is totally ridiculous. How are they deciding what the user can't use? It's not like Win95 is not going to work anymore (well, whether it worked or not in the first place is debatable, but that's another post) once it's unsupported, it just means they're not going to patch it anymore. You can use Win95 for the next 50 years if you like, they're just not making new stuff for it.
Sega hasn't "supported" the Genesis/Megadrive in six or seven years, but I can fscking well still play it! Or should they be obligated to keep making new stuff for it, as you seem to be insinuating Microsoft ought to be doing for Win95? Considering how outdated Win95 is at this point, I'm suprised they supported it this long.