You don't even know what they've actually done yet. When the game comes out, if it lacks a feature that you crave, I don't blame you for getting upset and refusing to buy it. But why not wait until you actually know what it is they've done before you crucify them?
I'll be as annoyed as anyone else if SC2 really truly doesn't allow multiplayer without an internet connection. But I'm not sure that's even exactly what they have said will be required. I think the relevant quote was in the D3 section:
"Hopefully our track record will speak for itself and our fans can take us at our word that we are doing this not because of any business model or corporate mandate. We believe that we can give the best multiplayer experience by going in this direction. Just in terms of philosophy, we're all about making choices for the gameplay and then worry about the monetization later, which is great because there are many companies out there that go the opposite direction."
This is, after all, Blizzard. Have you no loyalty? No trust? If your friend of twenty years hints at something that you don't like, but doesn't give you all of the details, do you really start frothing at the mouth and calling for his lynching? Or do you register your concern and wait until you have more facts?
Wha? Sorry, dude, but I don't buy it. The data center is near the dam, and is getting its power from there. So if you consider hydroelectric power clean (most people do) then their power is clean. Electricity takes money and effort to move around; it's not as if Yahoo is somehow causing people in West Virginia to burn more coal than they otherwise would have.
Of course, the reason data centers are near hydro power is because it's cheap and reliable, and because it doesn't matter too much exactly where a data center is. Being clean is a nice benefit though.
Yes. Yes, you're right. Let me pull my foot out of my mouth to clarify that when I said "which is what Kazaa does" I meant "which is what Kazaa does when run by the user". And when I said "putting up copyrighted files" I meant "putting up copyrighted files without the owner's permission".
Thanks for insisting I clear that up. Funny how nobody else got confused though. Guess they all must have an IQ above 30.
Putting up copyrighted files for anyone to download (which is what Kazaa does) is willful copyright infringement. Does anyone actually think that's not what the defendant actually did? Why do we need a ten-sentence story about what the judge did or didn't exclude? It sounds to me like a pretty fair trial so far.
Wishing that it wasn't illegal to willfully and blatantly violate copyright doesn't make it so.
Yes, a good dev team will "release when ready", but they'll also only schedule a release for a time when they're pretty sure it will be ready. A setback like this, so close to the scheduled release, points to a poor development process where a lot of issues weren't found until the (too-short) beta stage. It's a common situation for MMOs unfortunately.
The problem is usually that a lot of features aren't well-tested until beta, and so a lot of bugs crop up all at once. Notice how they say "almost feature complete"-- an MMO isn't going to be ready to launch until many months after being really-and-truly feature complete. This sort of self (or at least public) delusion is usually a sign that the game is far behind schedule and will be massively delayed, buggy, imbalanced, and/or not fun.
MMOs need a different development mindset than other games, because of their huge complexity and the fact that they will be continually updated post-launch. The way to develop them is to focus on a small set of core features and get them polished and (reasonably) bug-free. At that point, you can at least launch a good, simple, well-executed game if you absolutely need to. Then you just keep adding features and content, and you're able to release pretty much whenever you want to.
Isn't it possible to be opposed to part of something, and yet still find the whole valuable enough to warrant keeping? Have you, for example, ever been married?
Yes, but after building them according to the instructions, who actually played with them for more than a minute before disassembling them and rebuilding them using parts from various kits? I had quite a few of the "space patrol" lego kits, so I ended up with a lot of wings, cockpits, engines, etc., and used them to make cool spaceships, rovers, and stations of my own design.
I found that building things with rectangular pieces was very boring unless you wanted to build nothing other than houses, or were building things at a massive scale so that the bricks became something more like voxels than pieces.
Absolutely. I was very hesitant to install Vista but once I did, I loved it, at least once I switched it back to using the Windows Classic theme (which I also used in XP). It has a few useful improvements, but by far the best is that it's 64-bit which means I can install (and use) as much RAM as I can fit in my machine, and it still runs 32-bit apps just fine. I'm sure there's a lot of hardware which doesn't have good 64-bit drivers, but I haven't run into any problems myself yet.
I'm sure that if only the engineers at Microsoft who wrote and maintain the NT kernel could only benefit from your expert advice and throw it away for a Unix variant, that Microsoft would surely benefit. If only they would listen to the millions of customers clamoring to have support for all of their applications thrown out in favor of Unix! Why on earth have they not hired you to oversee their operating system division?
Are you saying people should use Perl as an interactive shell? Or are you saying people should never use bash non-interactively?
The entire concept behind 'shell scripting' is to make it easy to tie together the same commands you type into the interactive shell. When I get used to doing 'rm' and 'cp' I can write an easy shell script which does the two together.
Of course, once you get to large shell scripts, then it becomes much more sane to use a real language rather than a shell script.
Honestly? The chances that anyone will ever be interested in even implementing your protocol, much less copying it in a way which your patent would protect, is close to zero.
The only reason you have for patenting it is an over-inflated sense of its worth. So no, I wouldn't spend $10k on a patent.
There's a small button on the top left of the screen, below your character's picture IIRC, which lists all open parties that are nearby (even in other zones).
Uh, I don't believe you get DVD playback included in Windows, at least not in XP. You do get MP3 support included, but then, that's not the same thing as free, is it? Presumably you paid for your copy of Windows, either off-the-shelf or as part of a new computer purchase.
The problem is that these codecs have to be licensed by Canonical (for money) to be distributed, which makes it pretty impractical to distribute them in a free product. Look at it this way: for $40 you get a version of Ubuntu which can handle the same set of codecs (and probably more) that XP can. Whether that's something you want to pay is another question.
Now that you point it out, it does seem obvious that the makers of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and WoW will be unable to apply rudimentary game balance to their new mechanic. I'm sure they'll just take all of the monsters from Diablo 2 and make you fight them with these newfangled orbs. Really, when has Blizzard ever released a well-balanced game?
Please let me know when your next game is coming out, I'm sure it will be lots of fun.
"Mr. Deeb's home lab likely violated the regulations of many state and local departments, although officials have not yet announced any penalties."
If they discovered that you were keeping 200 cats in your home under extremely unsanitary conditions, they would do the same thing: move all of the cats to a shelter somewhere, and charge you with violating local health regulations once they had assessed the entire situation. I think it's a little bit of a kneejerk reaction to say that they're "ignorantly and irrationally afraid of chemicals" and "abus[ing] power to steal his property".
Would you rather they just ask him "hey, is any of this dangerous?" and leave when he says "no"? There are reasons why we regulate stuff like chemicals (you have to have a permit just to own / use some professional beauty products), and if he wasn't following whatever the local regulations were, then it's his fault.
Now, if it turns out he was indeed following all local / state laws, then the authorities certainly owe him an apology at least.
Is that really true? Can you use a single contract with Canonical or Red Hat to support any number of machines? That seems odd to say the least. I'm pretty sure that with Red Hat, if you don't have a support contract for the particular machine, you can't even get updates through RHN.
The best solution is for developers to use their own private branches. Then they can commit as much as they want, and integrate into the main branch when they're ready. Unfortunately subversion has crappy support for integration (even with version 1.5 AFAICT) compared to something like perforce.
The fact that most Debian users recommend running something other than stable is exactly why Debian is becoming more and more irrelevant as a distro (as opposed to a repository for other distros). If you can't have a stable release which is frequent enough to actually be USEFUL to people, you've failed.
And moreover, to your point about how the grandparent's comment is "elitist, and damnright wrong": the problem with Debian unstable and testing isn't the stability of the individual apps (which is generally excellent), but the rate and unpredictability of change. Many people do not want to run a distro where packages will suddenly upgrade to versions with new features (as opposed to bugfixes), since that frequently requires at least configuration changes to keep existing functionality.
That said, if you're happy running Sid, more power to you.
Uh, last time I checked, Python had a single interpreter lock per process which made it unsuitable for heavily multithreaded programs. Java would be a better example of a scalable and multithread-aware language.
I think that's probably a true statement, as long as you include the equally true converse, "Ubuntu is what OpenSolaris wants to be when it grows down."
And "up" isn't where the action is these days, so I'd place my bets on Ubuntu.
Well, you could type a massive amount of random letters into a text document, with your password buried somewhere in the middle. Then copy and paste the password into the password field of the form. If the OS doesn't let you paste into password fields, then you could just have the text doc and web page open side-by-side, type in random stuff, switch to the web page (via the mouse) and type your password, switch back to the text doc, and type more random stuff.
Depending on how much random stuff you're willing to type in, how long your passwords are, and how many times the site lets an attacker try a password, this is at least an annoyance to keyloggers. If you're being specifically targetted I'm sure they could get your password, but it would be enough to prevent 'casual' keyloggers from getting your password, and presumably that's the sort that would install a keylogger on a public terminal.
Postgres, and especially EnterpriseDB, are basically open-source clones of Oracle. They're designed along the same lines and support very similar features as Oracle. EnterpriseDB for example has added support for Oracle's PL/SQL language, which means that many apps written for Oracle can be ported to EnterpriseDB without too much effort.
There are a lot of people out there using Oracle because that was one of the only real options five years ago, but don't really need it's high-end features, and certainly don't want its high-end price. EnterpriseDB is a very good choice for them.
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You don't even know what they've actually done yet. When the game comes out, if it lacks a feature that you crave, I don't blame you for getting upset and refusing to buy it. But why not wait until you actually know what it is they've done before you crucify them?
I'll be as annoyed as anyone else if SC2 really truly doesn't allow multiplayer without an internet connection. But I'm not sure that's even exactly what they have said will be required. I think the relevant quote was in the D3 section:
"Hopefully our track record will speak for itself and our fans can take us at our word that we are doing this not because of any business model or corporate mandate. We believe that we can give the best multiplayer experience by going in this direction. Just in terms of philosophy, we're all about making choices for the gameplay and then worry about the monetization later, which is great because there are many companies out there that go the opposite direction."
This is, after all, Blizzard. Have you no loyalty? No trust? If your friend of twenty years hints at something that you don't like, but doesn't give you all of the details, do you really start frothing at the mouth and calling for his lynching? Or do you register your concern and wait until you have more facts?
Wha? Sorry, dude, but I don't buy it. The data center is near the dam, and is getting its power from there. So if you consider hydroelectric power clean (most people do) then their power is clean. Electricity takes money and effort to move around; it's not as if Yahoo is somehow causing people in West Virginia to burn more coal than they otherwise would have.
Of course, the reason data centers are near hydro power is because it's cheap and reliable, and because it doesn't matter too much exactly where a data center is. Being clean is a nice benefit though.
Yes. Yes, you're right. Let me pull my foot out of my mouth to clarify that when I said "which is what Kazaa does" I meant "which is what Kazaa does when run by the user". And when I said "putting up copyrighted files" I meant "putting up copyrighted files without the owner's permission".
Thanks for insisting I clear that up. Funny how nobody else got confused though. Guess they all must have an IQ above 30.
Putting up copyrighted files for anyone to download (which is what Kazaa does) is willful copyright infringement. Does anyone actually think that's not what the defendant actually did? Why do we need a ten-sentence story about what the judge did or didn't exclude? It sounds to me like a pretty fair trial so far.
Wishing that it wasn't illegal to willfully and blatantly violate copyright doesn't make it so.
Yes, a good dev team will "release when ready", but they'll also only schedule a release for a time when they're pretty sure it will be ready. A setback like this, so close to the scheduled release, points to a poor development process where a lot of issues weren't found until the (too-short) beta stage. It's a common situation for MMOs unfortunately.
The problem is usually that a lot of features aren't well-tested until beta, and so a lot of bugs crop up all at once. Notice how they say "almost feature complete"-- an MMO isn't going to be ready to launch until many months after being really-and-truly feature complete. This sort of self (or at least public) delusion is usually a sign that the game is far behind schedule and will be massively delayed, buggy, imbalanced, and/or not fun.
MMOs need a different development mindset than other games, because of their huge complexity and the fact that they will be continually updated post-launch. The way to develop them is to focus on a small set of core features and get them polished and (reasonably) bug-free. At that point, you can at least launch a good, simple, well-executed game if you absolutely need to. Then you just keep adding features and content, and you're able to release pretty much whenever you want to.
Isn't it possible to be opposed to part of something, and yet still find the whole valuable enough to warrant keeping? Have you, for example, ever been married?
Yes, but after building them according to the instructions, who actually played with them for more than a minute before disassembling them and rebuilding them using parts from various kits? I had quite a few of the "space patrol" lego kits, so I ended up with a lot of wings, cockpits, engines, etc., and used them to make cool spaceships, rovers, and stations of my own design.
I found that building things with rectangular pieces was very boring unless you wanted to build nothing other than houses, or were building things at a massive scale so that the bricks became something more like voxels than pieces.
Absolutely. I was very hesitant to install Vista but once I did, I loved it, at least once I switched it back to using the Windows Classic theme (which I also used in XP). It has a few useful improvements, but by far the best is that it's 64-bit which means I can install (and use) as much RAM as I can fit in my machine, and it still runs 32-bit apps just fine. I'm sure there's a lot of hardware which doesn't have good 64-bit drivers, but I haven't run into any problems myself yet.
I'm sure that if only the engineers at Microsoft who wrote and maintain the NT kernel could only benefit from your expert advice and throw it away for a Unix variant, that Microsoft would surely benefit. If only they would listen to the millions of customers clamoring to have support for all of their applications thrown out in favor of Unix! Why on earth have they not hired you to oversee their operating system division?
Are you saying people should use Perl as an interactive shell? Or are you saying people should never use bash non-interactively?
The entire concept behind 'shell scripting' is to make it easy to tie together the same commands you type into the interactive shell. When I get used to doing 'rm' and 'cp' I can write an easy shell script which does the two together.
Of course, once you get to large shell scripts, then it becomes much more sane to use a real language rather than a shell script.
Honestly? The chances that anyone will ever be interested in even implementing your protocol, much less copying it in a way which your patent would protect, is close to zero.
The only reason you have for patenting it is an over-inflated sense of its worth. So no, I wouldn't spend $10k on a patent.
I've got BLISTERS on me fingers!
There's a small button on the top left of the screen, below your character's picture IIRC, which lists all open parties that are nearby (even in other zones).
Uh, I don't believe you get DVD playback included in Windows, at least not in XP. You do get MP3 support included, but then, that's not the same thing as free, is it? Presumably you paid for your copy of Windows, either off-the-shelf or as part of a new computer purchase.
The problem is that these codecs have to be licensed by Canonical (for money) to be distributed, which makes it pretty impractical to distribute them in a free product. Look at it this way: for $40 you get a version of Ubuntu which can handle the same set of codecs (and probably more) that XP can. Whether that's something you want to pay is another question.
Now that you point it out, it does seem obvious that the makers of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and WoW will be unable to apply rudimentary game balance to their new mechanic. I'm sure they'll just take all of the monsters from Diablo 2 and make you fight them with these newfangled orbs. Really, when has Blizzard ever released a well-balanced game?
Please let me know when your next game is coming out, I'm sure it will be lots of fun.
From TFA:
"Mr. Deeb's home lab likely violated the regulations of many state and local departments, although officials have not yet announced any penalties."
If they discovered that you were keeping 200 cats in your home under extremely unsanitary conditions, they would do the same thing: move all of the cats to a shelter somewhere, and charge you with violating local health regulations once they had assessed the entire situation. I think it's a little bit of a kneejerk reaction to say that they're "ignorantly and irrationally afraid of chemicals" and "abus[ing] power to steal his property".
Would you rather they just ask him "hey, is any of this dangerous?" and leave when he says "no"? There are reasons why we regulate stuff like chemicals (you have to have a permit just to own / use some professional beauty products), and if he wasn't following whatever the local regulations were, then it's his fault.
Now, if it turns out he was indeed following all local / state laws, then the authorities certainly owe him an apology at least.
Is that really true? Can you use a single contract with Canonical or Red Hat to support any number of machines? That seems odd to say the least. I'm pretty sure that with Red Hat, if you don't have a support contract for the particular machine, you can't even get updates through RHN.
The best solution is for developers to use their own private branches. Then they can commit as much as they want, and integrate into the main branch when they're ready. Unfortunately subversion has crappy support for integration (even with version 1.5 AFAICT) compared to something like perforce.
The fact that most Debian users recommend running something other than stable is exactly why Debian is becoming more and more irrelevant as a distro (as opposed to a repository for other distros). If you can't have a stable release which is frequent enough to actually be USEFUL to people, you've failed.
And moreover, to your point about how the grandparent's comment is "elitist, and damnright wrong": the problem with Debian unstable and testing isn't the stability of the individual apps (which is generally excellent), but the rate and unpredictability of change. Many people do not want to run a distro where packages will suddenly upgrade to versions with new features (as opposed to bugfixes), since that frequently requires at least configuration changes to keep existing functionality.
That said, if you're happy running Sid, more power to you.
It's worse than that. He's the guy on blogspot. I imagine he also has a perpetual motion machine to sell.
To the grandparent: if you want people to start taking your ideas seriously, I recommend you stop talking about them like you're crackpot.
Uh, last time I checked, Python had a single interpreter lock per process which made it unsuitable for heavily multithreaded programs. Java would be a better example of a scalable and multithread-aware language.
I think that's probably a true statement, as long as you include the equally true converse, "Ubuntu is what OpenSolaris wants to be when it grows down."
And "up" isn't where the action is these days, so I'd place my bets on Ubuntu.
Well, you could type a massive amount of random letters into a text document, with your password buried somewhere in the middle. Then copy and paste the password into the password field of the form. If the OS doesn't let you paste into password fields, then you could just have the text doc and web page open side-by-side, type in random stuff, switch to the web page (via the mouse) and type your password, switch back to the text doc, and type more random stuff.
Depending on how much random stuff you're willing to type in, how long your passwords are, and how many times the site lets an attacker try a password, this is at least an annoyance to keyloggers. If you're being specifically targetted I'm sure they could get your password, but it would be enough to prevent 'casual' keyloggers from getting your password, and presumably that's the sort that would install a keylogger on a public terminal.
Postgres, and especially EnterpriseDB, are basically open-source clones of Oracle. They're designed along the same lines and support very similar features as Oracle. EnterpriseDB for example has added support for Oracle's PL/SQL language, which means that many apps written for Oracle can be ported to EnterpriseDB without too much effort.
There are a lot of people out there using Oracle because that was one of the only real options five years ago, but don't really need it's high-end features, and certainly don't want its high-end price. EnterpriseDB is a very good choice for them.