When the new iPhone starts selling in the UK with its subsidised price and contract signed in the phone shop, you'll see how quickly Apple's application store becomes restricted for some customers. The developers say Apple has explicitly stated that VoIP is allowed, just not over Edge networks - ha ha. Once the networks start part-paying for the handsets, as I hear they are doing in the UK they get to say what works and what doesn't, and this application just won't be allowed.
No browser and font issues here - Steam installs and runs immediately with the version of wine shipped with Ubuntu/hardy, including rendering the normally IE browser panels with Gecko. Then Team Fortress 2 needed one "advanced property" adding to its command line (that's "-dxlevel 81") before that ran flawlessly too. I believe the same tweak will apply to Half Life 2, Portal and other titles using the same engine, and I'm sure lots of older or low-tech titles (which make up the bulk of the Steam catalogue) will run just fine as well.
Valve could become the daddies of Linux gaming in a few weeks with not much more than a Linux tester and a "wine compatible" flag adding to Steam.
You can call it whatever you want to, but that doesn't make it so. If I'm not labeling my product with your trademark, I'm not passing off my product as your trademark.
Well that's what Tesco etc. are sabre-rattling over - that a sponsored link on a trademark constitutes sufficiently misleading "labelling". I just happen to agree that as the sponsored links stand, it could be confusing - not to everybody, just enough for it to be a problem.
Your supermarket analogy is a bit flawed - instead think about when you go into a pub and ask for a Coke, there's a very good reason half of them will ask "is Pepsi OK?" before they serve you a Pepsi. If you happen to be a Coca Cola rep and they see you're in the habit of serving Pepsi to customers ordering Coke, the landlord could be in trouble, however interchangeable he thinks the products might be.
Well it's about presentation and money changing hands. I do not think my company "owns" any particular use of Google's database or search traffic that it generates. But if a potential customer is looking for my brand and is being directed by Google at one of my competitors, and money is changing hands for this to happen - well I call that passing off. You might not be misled but I think enough people might be.
My gripe is with my competitors who are paying for this to happen, not Google in the first instance. But Google had better tread carefully if they're intending to reverse their position on trademark-based advertisements- I think they may have to delineate sponsored links more clearly and with a certain amount of legal boilerplate if they get away with it at all.
Yes - trademarks are to identify the source of goods, and anyone misrepresenting their goods as yours may be guilty of passing off at least under UK law. In our very early days we had a competitor of ours place a ads on searches for our company name, with the text shouting about similar services without mention of ours or the competitor's name. We objected to Google, and they took the competitor's ads away.
Google offer a search service and presented adverts for a competitor when customers searched for our company name. I didn't feel that Google's presentation (i.e. the word "Sponsored links" in small print) made clear enough to potential searchers that the advert was unrelated to our company, and there was a risk of a consumer thinking that this competitor was in fact us. If it had said "These advertisements may be unrelated to the trademark XXX" in clearer text, I'm not sure I would have had the same objection. I think it was a mild attempt at passing off, so I'm glad Google had this policy in place.
In the UK (3x as many people as Australia) I got an email to say that Paypal *must* be offered as a payment option, not that it must be the only payment option. So I imagine they are testing different policies in different smaller markets. It makes sense to try to streamline it and get a few more % of each sale - eBay is still complicated compared to Amazon's sales process and Amazon seem to get away with taking almost 10%.
I imagine the back-end implementations of their proprietary database system are key to any kind of performance, so I would expect Google have a long head start on anyone else hosting App Engine stuff and it'll take a lot of work for any conventional ISP to match their level of reliability (maybe - let's see how it goes:) ). I'm not biased.
Stuff the agreement - in the UK we have the Data Protection Act which means if you want them to delete all of your personally-identifiable data, they are obliged to do it by law. Would be interested to know if anyone has actually tried this yet, as it could break their database quite a bit, and remove lots of *other people's* photographs (or at the very least, the tagging on those photos that identified the person who'd ask for the DPA deletion).
From what I saw of the OSD (though this was nearly a year agonow ) the interface just seemed plain unfinished, and was nowhere near as functional as their nearest competitor, XBMC on a hacked XBox which costs probably 1/3 of the price of the OSD. I did rather cynically think that the "open source friendly - new features coming soon! (we hope!)" marketing was a cheaper option than actually putting in the software engineering time on the firmware themselves. Possibly they've been proved right and 18 months later it's turned into a decent product thanks to free labour - anyone have one care to comment?
Customer's ISP here - just loaning this chap's virtual machine some more memory to deal with the hoardes. Ah there, it's back up again and using no swap, hooray. Apache might be hitting its MaxClients limit as well, I'll keep an eye on it:)
A fast blip of text? What was my gaming PC doing wrong then? Athlon 3800 X2, 2GB RAM, XP Home, ATI X1950 512MB graphics card, 2x80GB drives in a RAID1- every single HL2 level load took 30s at least, and sometimes as long as 60s.
Well the term might be outdated, but those 30-60s of Loading screens mark "levels" off as far as I'm concerned, and the maps have painfully clear delineations - you know to put the kettle on when you turn down an S-shaped corridor, or an "airlock" style door closes behind you, or your car speeds towards a white light in a tunnel. For me, the loading screens were the biggest problem with enjoying the Half-Life story because there is literally *nothing* to hold my attention while the game loads, it's time to put the kettle on, visit the bathroom etc. In some bits of the HL2, that's a *lot* of caffeine.
And for short story arcs like the HL2 episodes, especially when there's a fast-moving chase / escape narrative, 60s of loading is as bad as a commercial break in a film. You stop caring as much and the game stops feeling like a whole, and starts feeling like a play with disjointed segments and all the actors disappearing to change costumes.
I appreciate there are technical limitations, but the key is just to hold the player's attention, don't give them a reason to switch off. e.g. Episode 2 has a segment (several like this actually) where you get into a tall elevator and your companion has about a minute-long speech where you're doing nothing, and there is very little to watch... AND THEN there's a frigging loading pause after that, time for tea, where was I? Plenty of better-engineered games (and usually much worse-scripted than HL2) use long, scripted or trivially interactive sequences as an interlude while the engine furiously loads the next level, I just don't understand why the Valve engineers can work on the same game for the best part of 10 years and still they hobble their excellent story with those damn pauses.
Someone else mentioned Metroid Prime, that does a good job hiding its loads behind clunking doors, Jak & Daxter on the PS2, Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast has a couple of long tunnels... it's been done, and if there have to be pauses, I'd much rather be twiddling my controller and *me* driving the action forward rather than stare at a frozen screen.
I was recommending using a charge back *if* a vendor locks you out of your paid-for software, not for any other reason. I full understand Valve's reasons for keeping this policy, as a charge-back will (for the most part) indicate that an account has been paid for with a stolen card.
As for the other guy who said "this is exactly what Valve wants, to make you pay more", well suck it up:) If Valve don't let you buy something one way, buy it another way, or don't buy from them at all if you don't like the price. Just don't let any vendor take your money and then deny you what you've paid for.
Like I said, I think Valve sell some brilliant games for cheap, but I won't let them (or any other software vendor) take away what I've paid for without a fight.
If you didn't get what you believe you paid for, ask the vendor for a refund. If the vendor refuses or ignores you, ask your credit card company to charge it back to them, and they can pick up the tab for their DRM silliness. I happen to love Steam, but not more than my rights as a consumer. Steam is working very nicely for me now, but I know my rights and if Valve take away my games (which they can certainly do if they feel like it), I am within my rights to charge back everything I've paid them in the last two years, and there's nothing they can do about it. This is the only way to tell companies that their DRM isn't working - be on your guard and don't let vendors forget their responsibilities to play fair.
My Windows PC (which is only turned on for gaming) needed an upgrade from 1GB -> 2GB to run Bioshock smoothly. The box claims it'll run with 1GB but that is simply not true - it jerks and judders all over the place, and the lack or RAM will wreck it for you. Maybe I'm just behind the curve:)
If it's going to be Vista-only I'll be waiting for the inevitable "unofficial" XP patch before I buy it. Whether they'll have the balls to scupper sales for a potentially big PC hit is another matter - any bets? I might consider it but I've heard that lots of my existing games *won't* work on Vista - as a gamer, why would I want to spend money on that?
Heh, well, of course you can write what you want. But in the context of having information out there which you'd rather people didn't see, but which they *will* see, I was suggesting a potentially honest way of countering it. It's the way Google will *help* an individual counter bad information that it might return about them.
Why not just register a personal site with "your side" of whatever else people will find on the net? If you have got a personal site registered with your name at the top, you can guarantee that Google will ensure that's on the first page of their results, and you can explain yourself to anyone who might be interested in your past. That method is honest, permament, almost free and covers any kind of public indiscretion, heinous USENET posts, or just mistaken identity. I agree trying to "bury" information that Google already have on you is likely to end up looking even worse.
I agree. There was ongoing crime on your network. You should have responded immediately. Running the abuse desk at a sizeable ISP is not a 9-5 job.
In broadcast radio, the FCC has a regulation: the owner of a transmitter is legally required to maintain control of that transmitter. If something goes wrong (power fluctuations, frequency drift, someone shouting obscenities into the mic), you're required to rectify the situation immediately, not sometime the next day during business hours. If you can't get the transmitter back under control within a reasonably short time, you must shut it down.
I think this is a good policy and should apply to the internet. Once notified that there was an ongoing crime on your network, your obligation was to make it stop or pull the plug. If you can't get in touch with the owner of that server, then walk to the racks and yank a cable. If you can't be bothered to do that, then don't complain if someone else takes emergency action.
I'll just call the internet police and let them know your views, I'm sure they'll do a fine job of telling every ISP in the world how to run their business:) I assume you don't run an ISP and pay for support staff otherwise you'd know what a reasonable response time is, and what isn't. With most abuse desks you'll be lucky to get an automatic acknowledgement - we actually respond to ours with a human response, and fast action. We take abuse seriously and respond to it.
My complaint wasn't so much that spamhaus didn't wait very long, or that they used the wrong channel to talk to us (our regular support address, rather than our urgent fix-now email address, or phone, both of which would have got an instant response), it's that they are now using their blacklist for something completely unrelated to helping their users block spam, and in a pretty casual manner. More incidents like this will dilute their credibility in the long run, and the career spammers will benefit from it as MTA admins begin trust spamhaus less.
Not true any more, sadly. A/24 of Bytemark's network was put on spamhaus' main blacklist in August because we didn't respond to a phishing take-down notification within 12 hours, i.e. where one of our customers' servers had been compromised and was hosting a phishing site. I was told sharply that 12 hours was "more than enough time" to respond to such an abuse complaint - this was a complaint delivered at around 7pm which I responded to by noon the next day. And of course because spamhaus is widely trusted as a hand-edited list of career spammers, it caused hell for us for about a day. This seems to be a new and unadvertised policy - they are using their list as a blunt stick to fight network crime in general, and not just to warn you about spammers.
John Reid at spamhaus told me: When we see an exploited server on an unknown hosting company range, we fear that much off their network may be exploited as well. We err on the side of caution, especially when we see the site has been up for a longer-than-normal period
Make of that what you will! I think it's lazy policy-on-the-hoof that will make their list less trustworthy for mail filtering - the bottom line is that they blocked a host which was sending no email. Therefore none of their users would have seen any less spam as a result.
One of our staff has written a custom spam filter based on dspam and the best addition we made in the last week was to add Optical Character Recognition support -- all image attachments are run through gocr and dspam fed with the output from this, not the original images. That way even though the spammers paste in chunks of text from god-knows-where, dspam still sees CIALIS and STOCKS and other trigger words.
I wanted to just drop anything with a.gif attachment but plenty of our valued customers like to send us a corporate logo with each individual message:-)
Here in the UK, for an ISP to buy a 622Mb pipe into BT's network (our beloved monopoly telco) costs £1.5m per year. That's a wholesale price of £200 per Mb, which is over 10-20x more than the external bandwidth is going to cost. So even if your traffic is only going from your local cache direct to your customers, it still costs WAY more to send it that one last hop than it would to get the same amount of traffic from anywhere else on the internet.
Net result, those crappy bandwidth quotas / "bad boy" pipes / (un)fair use policies are staying.
I'm not sure how broadband economics work out in other countries, but here any high-bandwidth applications are still prohibitively expensive and it'll stay that way until Ofcom (our telecoms regulator) can finish their tortuous process of opening BT's network up to competition.
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When the new iPhone starts selling in the UK with its subsidised price and contract signed in the phone shop, you'll see how quickly Apple's application store becomes restricted for some customers. The developers say Apple has explicitly stated that VoIP is allowed, just not over Edge networks - ha ha. Once the networks start part-paying for the handsets, as I hear they are doing in the UK they get to say what works and what doesn't, and this application just won't be allowed.
No browser and font issues here - Steam installs and runs immediately with the version of wine shipped with Ubuntu/hardy, including rendering the normally IE browser panels with Gecko. Then Team Fortress 2 needed one "advanced property" adding to its command line (that's "-dxlevel 81") before that ran flawlessly too. I believe the same tweak will apply to Half Life 2, Portal and other titles using the same engine, and I'm sure lots of older or low-tech titles (which make up the bulk of the Steam catalogue) will run just fine as well.
Valve could become the daddies of Linux gaming in a few weeks with not much more than a Linux tester and a "wine compatible" flag adding to Steam.
Radical Castle! Bring on the vorpal bunny.
You can call it whatever you want to, but that doesn't make it so. If I'm not labeling my product with your trademark, I'm not passing off my product as your trademark.
Well that's what Tesco etc. are sabre-rattling over - that a sponsored link on a trademark constitutes sufficiently misleading "labelling". I just happen to agree that as the sponsored links stand, it could be confusing - not to everybody, just enough for it to be a problem.
Your supermarket analogy is a bit flawed - instead think about when you go into a pub and ask for a Coke, there's a very good reason half of them will ask "is Pepsi OK?" before they serve you a Pepsi. If you happen to be a Coca Cola rep and they see you're in the habit of serving Pepsi to customers ordering Coke, the landlord could be in trouble, however interchangeable he thinks the products might be.
Well it's about presentation and money changing hands. I do not think my company "owns" any particular use of Google's database or search traffic that it generates. But if a potential customer is looking for my brand and is being directed by Google at one of my competitors, and money is changing hands for this to happen - well I call that passing off. You might not be misled but I think enough people might be.
My gripe is with my competitors who are paying for this to happen, not Google in the first instance. But Google had better tread carefully if they're intending to reverse their position on trademark-based advertisements- I think they may have to delineate sponsored links more clearly and with a certain amount of legal boilerplate if they get away with it at all.
Yes - trademarks are to identify the source of goods, and anyone misrepresenting their goods as yours may be guilty of passing off at least under UK law. In our very early days we had a competitor of ours place a ads on searches for our company name, with the text shouting about similar services without mention of ours or the competitor's name. We objected to Google, and they took the competitor's ads away.
Google offer a search service and presented adverts for a competitor when customers searched for our company name. I didn't feel that Google's presentation (i.e. the word "Sponsored links" in small print) made clear enough to potential searchers that the advert was unrelated to our company, and there was a risk of a consumer thinking that this competitor was in fact us. If it had said "These advertisements may be unrelated to the trademark XXX" in clearer text, I'm not sure I would have had the same objection. I think it was a mild attempt at passing off, so I'm glad Google had this policy in place.
In the UK (3x as many people as Australia) I got an email to say that Paypal *must* be offered as a payment option, not that it must be the only payment option. So I imagine they are testing different policies in different smaller markets. It makes sense to try to streamline it and get a few more % of each sale - eBay is still complicated compared to Amazon's sales process and Amazon seem to get away with taking almost 10%.
I imagine the back-end implementations of their proprietary database system are key to any kind of performance, so I would expect Google have a long head start on anyone else hosting App Engine stuff and it'll take a lot of work for any conventional ISP to match their level of reliability (maybe - let's see how it goes :) ). I'm not biased.
Apparently it's not cut & dried but it doesn't seem like anyone has pushed them on it.
Stuff the agreement - in the UK we have the Data Protection Act which means if you want them to delete all of your personally-identifiable data, they are obliged to do it by law. Would be interested to know if anyone has actually tried this yet, as it could break their database quite a bit, and remove lots of *other people's* photographs (or at the very least, the tagging on those photos that identified the person who'd ask for the DPA deletion).
From what I saw of the OSD (though this was nearly a year agonow ) the interface just seemed plain unfinished, and was nowhere near as functional as their nearest competitor, XBMC on a hacked XBox which costs probably 1/3 of the price of the OSD. I did rather cynically think that the "open source friendly - new features coming soon! (we hope!)" marketing was a cheaper option than actually putting in the software engineering time on the firmware themselves. Possibly they've been proved right and 18 months later it's turned into a decent product thanks to free labour - anyone have one care to comment?
Customer's ISP here - just loaning this chap's virtual machine some more memory to deal with the hoardes. Ah there, it's back up again and using no swap, hooray. Apache might be hitting its MaxClients limit as well, I'll keep an eye on it :)
A fast blip of text? What was my gaming PC doing wrong then? Athlon 3800 X2, 2GB RAM, XP Home, ATI X1950 512MB graphics card, 2x80GB drives in a RAID1- every single HL2 level load took 30s at least, and sometimes as long as 60s.
Well the term might be outdated, but those 30-60s of Loading screens mark "levels" off as far as I'm concerned, and the maps have painfully clear delineations - you know to put the kettle on when you turn down an S-shaped corridor, or an "airlock" style door closes behind you, or your car speeds towards a white light in a tunnel. For me, the loading screens were the biggest problem with enjoying the Half-Life story because there is literally *nothing* to hold my attention while the game loads, it's time to put the kettle on, visit the bathroom etc. In some bits of the HL2, that's a *lot* of caffeine.
... AND THEN there's a frigging loading pause after that, time for tea, where was I? Plenty of better-engineered games (and usually much worse-scripted than HL2) use long, scripted or trivially interactive sequences as an interlude while the engine furiously loads the next level, I just don't understand why the Valve engineers can work on the same game for the best part of 10 years and still they hobble their excellent story with those damn pauses.
... it's been done, and if there have to be pauses, I'd much rather be twiddling my controller and *me* driving the action forward rather than stare at a frozen screen.
And for short story arcs like the HL2 episodes, especially when there's a fast-moving chase / escape narrative, 60s of loading is as bad as a commercial break in a film. You stop caring as much and the game stops feeling like a whole, and starts feeling like a play with disjointed segments and all the actors disappearing to change costumes.
I appreciate there are technical limitations, but the key is just to hold the player's attention, don't give them a reason to switch off. e.g. Episode 2 has a segment (several like this actually) where you get into a tall elevator and your companion has about a minute-long speech where you're doing nothing, and there is very little to watch
Someone else mentioned Metroid Prime, that does a good job hiding its loads behind clunking doors, Jak & Daxter on the PS2, Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast has a couple of long tunnels
I was recommending using a charge back *if* a vendor locks you out of your paid-for software, not for any other reason. I full understand Valve's reasons for keeping this policy, as a charge-back will (for the most part) indicate that an account has been paid for with a stolen card.
:) If Valve don't let you buy something one way, buy it another way, or don't buy from them at all if you don't like the price. Just don't let any vendor take your money and then deny you what you've paid for.
As for the other guy who said "this is exactly what Valve wants, to make you pay more", well suck it up
Like I said, I think Valve sell some brilliant games for cheap, but I won't let them (or any other software vendor) take away what I've paid for without a fight.
If you didn't get what you believe you paid for, ask the vendor for a refund. If the vendor refuses or ignores you, ask your credit card company to charge it back to them, and they can pick up the tab for their DRM silliness. I happen to love Steam, but not more than my rights as a consumer. Steam is working very nicely for me now, but I know my rights and if Valve take away my games (which they can certainly do if they feel like it), I am within my rights to charge back everything I've paid them in the last two years, and there's nothing they can do about it. This is the only way to tell companies that their DRM isn't working - be on your guard and don't let vendors forget their responsibilities to play fair.
My Windows PC (which is only turned on for gaming) needed an upgrade from 1GB -> 2GB to run Bioshock smoothly. The box claims it'll run with 1GB but that is simply not true - it jerks and judders all over the place, and the lack or RAM will wreck it for you. Maybe I'm just behind the curve :)
Goodo - no I only read the Gamespot summary which didn't mention it. Knee retracted ;)
If it's going to be Vista-only I'll be waiting for the inevitable "unofficial" XP patch before I buy it. Whether they'll have the balls to scupper sales for a potentially big PC hit is another matter - any bets? I might consider it but I've heard that lots of my existing games *won't* work on Vista - as a gamer, why would I want to spend money on that?
Heh, well, of course you can write what you want. But in the context of having information out there which you'd rather people didn't see, but which they *will* see, I was suggesting a potentially honest way of countering it. It's the way Google will *help* an individual counter bad information that it might return about them.
Why not just register a personal site with "your side" of whatever else people will find on the net? If you have got a personal site registered with your name at the top, you can guarantee that Google will ensure that's on the first page of their results, and you can explain yourself to anyone who might be interested in your past. That method is honest, permament, almost free and covers any kind of public indiscretion, heinous USENET posts, or just mistaken identity. I agree trying to "bury" information that Google already have on you is likely to end up looking even worse.
I agree. There was ongoing crime on your network. You should have responded immediately. Running the abuse desk at a sizeable ISP is not a 9-5 job.
:) I assume you don't run an ISP and pay for support staff otherwise you'd know what a reasonable response time is, and what isn't. With most abuse desks you'll be lucky to get an automatic acknowledgement - we actually respond to ours with a human response, and fast action. We take abuse seriously and respond to it.
In broadcast radio, the FCC has a regulation: the owner of a transmitter is legally required to maintain control of that transmitter. If something goes wrong (power fluctuations, frequency drift, someone shouting obscenities into the mic), you're required to rectify the situation immediately, not sometime the next day during business hours. If you can't get the transmitter back under control within a reasonably short time, you must shut it down.
I think this is a good policy and should apply to the internet. Once notified that there was an ongoing crime on your network, your obligation was to make it stop or pull the plug. If you can't get in touch with the owner of that server, then walk to the racks and yank a cable. If you can't be bothered to do that, then don't complain if someone else takes emergency action.
I'll just call the internet police and let them know your views, I'm sure they'll do a fine job of telling every ISP in the world how to run their business
My complaint wasn't so much that spamhaus didn't wait very long, or that they used the wrong channel to talk to us (our regular support address, rather than our urgent fix-now email address, or phone, both of which would have got an instant response), it's that they are now using their blacklist for something completely unrelated to helping their users block spam, and in a pretty casual manner. More incidents like this will dilute their credibility in the long run, and the career spammers will benefit from it as MTA admins begin trust spamhaus less.
Not true any more, sadly. A /24 of Bytemark's network was put on spamhaus' main blacklist in August because we didn't respond to a phishing take-down notification within 12 hours, i.e. where one of our customers' servers had been compromised and was hosting a phishing site. I was told sharply that 12 hours was "more than enough time" to respond to such an abuse complaint - this was a complaint delivered at around 7pm which I responded to by noon the next day. And of course because spamhaus is widely trusted as a hand-edited list of career spammers, it caused hell for us for about a day. This seems to be a new and unadvertised policy - they are using their list as a blunt stick to fight network crime in general, and not just to warn you about spammers.
John Reid at spamhaus told me: When we see an exploited server on an unknown hosting company range, we fear that much off their network may be exploited as well. We err on the side of caution, especially when we see the site has been up for a longer-than-normal period
Make of that what you will! I think it's lazy policy-on-the-hoof that will make their list less trustworthy for mail filtering - the bottom line is that they blocked a host which was sending no email. Therefore none of their users would have seen any less spam as a result.
One of our staff has written a custom spam filter based on dspam and the best addition we made in the last week was to add Optical Character Recognition support -- all image attachments are run through gocr and dspam fed with the output from this, not the original images. That way even though the spammers paste in chunks of text from god-knows-where, dspam still sees CIALIS and STOCKS and other trigger words.
.gif attachment but plenty of our valued customers like to send us a corporate logo with each individual message :-)
I wanted to just drop anything with a
Here in the UK, for an ISP to buy a 622Mb pipe into BT's network (our beloved monopoly telco) costs £1.5m per year. That's a wholesale price of £200 per Mb, which is over 10-20x more than the external bandwidth is going to cost. So even if your traffic is only going from your local cache direct to your customers, it still costs WAY more to send it that one last hop than it would to get the same amount of traffic from anywhere else on the internet.
Net result, those crappy bandwidth quotas / "bad boy" pipes / (un)fair use policies are staying.
I'm not sure how broadband economics work out in other countries, but here any high-bandwidth applications are still prohibitively expensive and it'll stay that way until Ofcom (our telecoms regulator) can finish their tortuous process of opening BT's network up to competition.