Gamespot, Blizzard, and credibility
on
World of Queuecraft
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Gamespot spammed me repeatedly despite requests that they stop. They can't even manage a mailing list. Blizzard has provided a game which I have been playing for a couple of months with fairly small login queues except during the peak of prime-time. I've probably spent a TOTAL of two hours in queues, since mid-December 2005.
So, uhm. I think I am uninclined to believe that Gamespot's either competent or reliable, and I don't think I trust them to fairly evaluate the situation.
Yeah, the queues are bad. Simplistic analysis of how much money Blizzard ought to have doesn't tell us what resources they really have. Furthermore, it's not obvious which of the many proposed "solutions" would work. More servers? Lag is a question of bandwidth, so more servers might not help. Let more people log in? More overloads and crashes. There are many possible options, but I'm not sure they'd help a whole lot. Furthermore, if the database servers are shared, it's pretty hard to grow database servers effectively; you can't just throw more hardware at it.
I dunno. I'm okay with things pretty much as is; ongoing attempts to optimize the back-end database may matter more. So maybe we should let the people who built WoW run it, rather than some people at gamespot who haven't done anything of the sort?
Agreed. I have a DS, and I feel the system totally justified itself with Canvas Curse. I have sat next to 8Ghz of computers with 21" displays and mondo video cards, happily drawing little rainbow-colored lines.:)
The complaints about this are largely based on strawmen and misrepresentations. I love the EFF's work in other fields, but they have a long track record of showing no clue at all about spam and spam-related questions.
I've read the specs, I've talked to the people, and I do not believe the hype; this is not a "tax on email". It never was.
Buoy is your friend. It's built on top of Swing, but it's actually sanely usable. I recommend it on the grounds that it is the only Java GUI toolkit I have ever used that did not leave me longing for the sweet embrace of death. Developing an application using Buoy is substantially less painful then stabbing yourself in the eye with a fork. In the world of Java GUI development, this is high praise indeed.
Seriously, though. If you are doing GUI work in Java, but your actual goal is to get something else done, and you would like the GUI toolkit to take less than 80% of your development effort, use Buoy. It's not "dumbed down"; it's just SANE.
I suppose, next, you'll be saying that the real culprits in mugging are all the stores that accept cash? COME ON FOLKS! Providing an "incentive" for millions of behaviors, some of which are harmful, some of which are not, does not put you at fault.
We had one of those contracts. We were unable to get a server fixed, ever. It would fail during POST one time in three. It took a day to get someone out, three days to get him to try to replace a part, and we were never able to get them to come back and try to fix it.
And yes, we had one of the ludicrously expensive contracts.
The DS will play the GBA games, so it's more general. Downside, slightly shorter battery life. If you have a way to recharge (say, a USB charger and/or car charger), do that.
Games are not subject to copyright; see Allen v. Academic Games. The issue, though, is that certain large companies will initiate legal action anyway, because it's too expensive to defend. However, the current state of copyright law holds that a game is a process, and thus not subject to copyright, although the specific words used to describe it may be.
The amount of code reuse between versions is significant, but more importantly, the "thousands" of Linux developers are predominantly not full-time workers. Microsoft is putting more programmer time into their OS, and getting dramatically worse results.
It's not that we'd expect perfection, but basic competence would be a nice start.
The standard is not "perfect compatibility" but "at least as good as Microsoft Office".
I have a real live version of MS Office, current patches and all, and I have to use StarOffice to exchange files with one of my customers, because he also runs MS Office, and if we try to exchange files using MS Office on both sides, the files get mangled horribly. StarOffice does what we want.
There was an arcade game called Icebreaker (I only ever saw it for 3DO and Macintosh) of which there was a text adventure version. It was quite pretty, actually.
You stand between earth and sky, as every human stands balanced between ape and angel. Except that actually you're a pyramid.
ICEBREAKER An Interactive Thingie (First-time players should type "about".) Release 2 / Serial number 950912 / Inform v1405 Library 5/8
Grassland You are in a pleasant grassy meadow. To the north, south, east, northeast, southeast, and southwest is a meadow; to the west and northwest is seething lava. A red pyramid stands to the north. A green pyramid stands to the south. A blue pyramid stands to the east.
>shoot red pyramid Your bolt smashes into the red crystal. Threads of fire flare through the pyramid, and it burns quickly away into nothingness.
I have an Insight. It is the car I drive nearly everywhere to do nearly everything. I love it to pieces. Maybe only having to buy gas once a month isn't worth some theoretical premium that I may have paid, but in practice, the car's been paid off for ages and I very much appreciate a cheap vehicle for running errands.
It's not the PPE cores that are slow to emulate. It's the 8 additional vector-only processors.
This is a sim, not just an emulator. It's not just vaguely implementing the output; it is at least to some extent modeling the instruction pipelining, branch miss penalties, and so on.
The problem you face here is there are many things which aren't worth enough to any given user to pay for. We have no way to charge 92% of people 50 cents for your program, or otherwise "pay you what you're worth" -- but in fact, it's just fine to get paid a bit better than some other job, and the economic benefits just work out that way.
Do you honestly think the guy running that cement mixer gets paid anything close to his share of the society-wide economic value of the freeway? Not on your life.
A few gamers I know rejected the Dreamcast on the grounds that Sega played up the Microsoft involvement in the software, and the question is, why would you want a console based on Microsoft's famous reliability? That was what convinced me, anyway.
If you don't like the products, I suggest that you buy something else. There is still no need to sue Apple for not serving your personal needs. If you want them to be beholden to you, buy a majority of their stock and start issuing orders.
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Gamespot spammed me repeatedly despite requests that they stop. They can't even manage a mailing list. Blizzard has provided a game which I have been playing for a couple of months with fairly small login queues except during the peak of prime-time. I've probably spent a TOTAL of two hours in queues, since mid-December 2005.
So, uhm. I think I am uninclined to believe that Gamespot's either competent or reliable, and I don't think I trust them to fairly evaluate the situation.
Yeah, the queues are bad. Simplistic analysis of how much money Blizzard ought to have doesn't tell us what resources they really have. Furthermore, it's not obvious which of the many proposed "solutions" would work. More servers? Lag is a question of bandwidth, so more servers might not help. Let more people log in? More overloads and crashes. There are many possible options, but I'm not sure they'd help a whole lot. Furthermore, if the database servers are shared, it's pretty hard to grow database servers effectively; you can't just throw more hardware at it.
I dunno. I'm okay with things pretty much as is; ongoing attempts to optimize the back-end database may matter more. So maybe we should let the people who built WoW run it, rather than some people at gamespot who haven't done anything of the sort?
Weird, when I get disconnected, I generally seem to bypass the queue.
Agreed. I have a DS, and I feel the system totally justified itself with Canvas Curse. I have sat next to 8Ghz of computers with 21" displays and mondo video cards, happily drawing little rainbow-colored lines. :)
The complaints about this are largely based on strawmen and misrepresentations. I love the EFF's work in other fields, but they have a long track record of showing no clue at all about spam and spam-related questions.
I've read the specs, I've talked to the people, and I do not believe the hype; this is not a "tax on email". It never was.
Buoy is your friend. It's built on top of Swing, but it's actually sanely usable. I recommend it on the grounds that it is the only Java GUI toolkit I have ever used that did not leave me longing for the sweet embrace of death. Developing an application using Buoy is substantially less painful then stabbing yourself in the eye with a fork. In the world of Java GUI development, this is high praise indeed.
Seriously, though. If you are doing GUI work in Java, but your actual goal is to get something else done, and you would like the GUI toolkit to take less than 80% of your development effort, use Buoy. It's not "dumbed down"; it's just SANE.
The stupid burns us.
Blaming the adware companies?
I suppose, next, you'll be saying that the real culprits in mugging are all the stores that accept cash? COME ON FOLKS! Providing an "incentive" for millions of behaviors, some of which are harmful, some of which are not, does not put you at fault.
I tried one in the store. Mushy, gooey, keys that are hard to press and give no feedback. Absolutely hopeless for gaming.
I don't know why people insist on making keyboards that are physically painful to use.
We had one of those contracts. We were unable to get a server fixed, ever. It would fail during POST one time in three. It took a day to get someone out, three days to get him to try to replace a part, and we were never able to get them to come back and try to fix it.
And yes, we had one of the ludicrously expensive contracts.
The DS will play the GBA games, so it's more general. Downside, slightly shorter battery life. If you have a way to recharge (say, a USB charger and/or car charger), do that.
Think about the growth curve of the industry, and when programmers will have gotten started. "Most" programmers probably are under 40.
If anything, that establishes that there are many defective products; it's not just a design "feature".
Games are not subject to copyright; see Allen v. Academic Games. The issue, though, is that certain large companies will initiate legal action anyway, because it's too expensive to defend. However, the current state of copyright law holds that a game is a process, and thus not subject to copyright, although the specific words used to describe it may be.
The amount of code reuse between versions is significant, but more importantly, the "thousands" of Linux developers are predominantly not full-time workers. Microsoft is putting more programmer time into their OS, and getting dramatically worse results.
It's not that we'd expect perfection, but basic competence would be a nice start.
MS?
Uhm. MS is the one with the 3-core PPC. This is a 1-core (dual-threaded) PPC with 8 coprocessors.
And I want one.
Check out the google results for "rebate lawsuit".
As of this writing, they go to "some guy's blog", namely mine. No links to it that I know of, either, which is sorta weird.
The standard is not "perfect compatibility" but "at least as good as Microsoft Office".
I have a real live version of MS Office, current patches and all, and I have to use StarOffice to exchange files with one of my customers, because he also runs MS Office, and if we try to exchange files using MS Office on both sides, the files get mangled horribly. StarOffice does what we want.
I have an Insight. It is the car I drive nearly everywhere to do nearly everything. I love it to pieces. Maybe only having to buy gas once a month isn't worth some theoretical premium that I may have paid, but in practice, the car's been paid off for ages and I very much appreciate a cheap vehicle for running errands.
How am I supposed to justify buying an HDTV that makes all my current videos and movies look like crap?
Seriously, HD is neat, but it's not exactly a required feature for video games.
Blade servers have already been announced.
I would buy one of these, and no, I don't plan to get a PS3.
It's not the PPE cores that are slow to emulate. It's the 8 additional vector-only processors.
This is a sim, not just an emulator. It's not just vaguely implementing the output; it is at least to some extent modeling the instruction pipelining, branch miss penalties, and so on.
The problem you face here is there are many things which aren't worth enough to any given user to pay for. We have no way to charge 92% of people 50 cents for your program, or otherwise "pay you what you're worth" -- but in fact, it's just fine to get paid a bit better than some other job, and the economic benefits just work out that way.
Do you honestly think the guy running that cement mixer gets paid anything close to his share of the society-wide economic value of the freeway? Not on your life.
A few gamers I know rejected the Dreamcast on the grounds that Sega played up the Microsoft involvement in the software, and the question is, why would you want a console based on Microsoft's famous reliability? That was what convinced me, anyway.
Where do you get the idea that people would get laughed at for writing a complex modern application in C? There's a lot of pure C still being written.
Your post doesn't even make sense.
If you don't like the products, I suggest that you buy something else. There is still no need to sue Apple for not serving your personal needs. If you want them to be beholden to you, buy a majority of their stock and start issuing orders.