So they artificially bumped up the price to make AT&T and Verizon have to pay more? Haven't you figured out by now that corporations do not pay for things like that, their customers do?
If in fact their executive board paid for it out of their own pockets, off the books, that would be a most serious violation of accounting standards and the law.
Every time MS comes out with an OS that is completely backwards compatible and carries forward lots of legacy stuff, you guys bash MS for failing to innovate. Then, when they announce plans for something completely new, you bash MS for failing to be backwards compatible. All I can say is turn about is fair play. Quoting TFA:
However, Windows' lure has always been that applications from older versions of Windows are almost guaranteed to work post-upgrade; this is in contrast to older UNIX solutions where upgrading the system could render old applications useless without access to the source code. You can not have it both ways. Sorry.
Competitors complained that offering internet and media solutions with the operating system harmed competition in the marketplace (despite other operating systems such as Mac OS X and Linux apparently being immune from such criticism). Um, perhaps it could be because Mac OS X and Linux have interchangeable parts and the same solutions work on both, transparently?
3. It also adds a level of stress. Most people aren't made to be 100% public. That's a western-oriented and maybe just a US-oriented comment.
When I was living in Southern California and getting my first security clearance, scary men came around the neighborhood asking questions of the neighbors about me (as I was told later). None of them knew me, so much the better.
The situation is much different in the Asian countries I've lived in. Different lifestyle, different culture and it takes some getting used to. After a time, I came to expect that everything I did was watched by someone and gossiped about, getting very twisted by the time it got to my wife at the time which caused a lot of problems.
On a numeric basis, there are more people in the open glass communities in Asia than in the US (perhaps in Europe, I've never been there), where there is some expectation (and reality) of privacy in outdoor day to day activities.
Sure, it adds stress to me, I was born and raised in California, but it doesn't seem to matter to most everyone else.
It's not. People are not coins. And you deserve a +5 insightful.
All it takes is one stressful disagreement with one's spouse and there goes the concentration in the evening's game. You cannot simulate that with coin flips and I disagree with the conclusions in TFA.
It's a personal matter, but I'll bet just about anything, that Mr. and Mrs. Dimaggio were on unusually good terms during that period and he had little or no stress outside of his work plus a lot of luck for the duration of the streak.
Sports is about going beyond oneself and getting into a special "zone" where everything you do is correct. I did it once in my life when I bowled a sanctioned 3-game 800 series, including a perfect game - 32 strikes out of 36 balls I rolled. I saw Glenn Alison do it less than a week later (after he personally asked me if I was the guy who did 805 a few days previous in the same center, heck he's Mr. 900 and a robot in the consistency of his control of his body when he puts his mind to it no matter his age, and he bettered my score by a few pins to boot).
Maintaining the kind of consistency and luck Joe Dimaggio had over that time frame is something I regard as little short of miraculous. To reduce the accomplishment over a coin-flip type simulation strikes me as being irrelevant.
One thing that is important to point out, is that Cisco is treating Rick Frenkel extremely well. They aren't firing him, restricting him from blogging, or taking other knee jerk reactions. What they are doing is requiring that a Cisco employee put boiler plate on their sites. Hmmm. I guess I better see what this means for the rest of us.
I consider Cisco a pretty good place to work at and I'm most happy that they're sticking with this guy.
Disclaimer: I am not a Cisco employee, though I am under contract with them.
Would you still thing it good if they set a legal precedent where a corporation can shutdown the distribution of any software they don't like, even if it isn't illegal? That's a very broad statement that doesn't correspond to what I wrote in the slightest.
When it comes to gaming devices, handheld, console or whatever, it *is* a precedent that a company can decide what is allowed to run on them. All of the Japanese gaming companies forbid X rated games. In a way, I find that sad as that appears to buy in to the US moral philosophy that female breasts are bad, but a graphic depiction of a bullet piercing a head is O.K.
In this specific instance, I believe that the control they are attempting to exert is correct. They have certain terms and conditions by which one is allowed to play the game. All of the "action" occurs on their servers. The service they are selling is a fair playing experience with people all over the world. So yes, I believe they have every right to control how their servers are interfaced to.
The vast majority of us who play WoW don't like you botters. If you can't play by the rules, could you please find another game to abuse? Please?
As in how can Blizzard say that the bot uses too much resources In-game, they certainly can. I'll list two examples (sorry, basic WoW knowledge required). Felcloth, a necessary ingredient for making the biggest bags at the lowest level is only obtained as a rare drop in two small areas in the Felwood zone and the last time I tried to get any, there were two hordies farming the area. O.K. Fine. They were there first. I hacked on their leftovers for awhile and then went to bed. Made a quick check in the morning before work, they were still there. O.K. Fine, maybe they're across the Pacific. After work when I went back, the same two characters were still there.
Second example is the Dream Dust quest given out in Booty Bay. That can only be completed by killing monsters in 1 extremely small area in the Swamp of Sorrows and is easily griefed due to the fact that there are only a few of the required monsters to kill spawned at any one time and they also have an ultra-rare elite vanity pet drop *and* their skins are required for an extremely valuable middle level leatherworking item. The daily flying quest in the hills above Terokkar Forest are similarly overcrowded, with only a single nest at one time with eggs to bomb into obliteration (I do not think this one is botted, though I may be wrong).
O.K. Part of this is Blizzard's problem. They didn't build a world that scales up all that well once you get into the range of 10 million people banging on their servers. But there is no doubt that if you turn a dozen people running bots loose on any given server, you can grief the other 99.9+% trying to play the game normally.
Actually, I'm quite interested in starting up again (I stopped playing over the holidays due to an in-game guild self-destruction and the holidays themselves) as the 2.4.0 patch released this week seems to have addressed issues like the ones described above. (I need gold for an elite flying mount and the daily quests were very frustrating due to overcrowding).
As a professional programmer for the last two and a half decades, I am somewhat in awe of Blizzard as to how they pay such close attention to detail and get it mostly correct. Moreover, since they support playing their game on real Operating Systems, I'm going to support them even if they were bozos, but the numbers clearly show that my sentiments are a majority feeling. It's a great game, they deserve every penny of revenue they get. They're defending their territory and I can live with that.
And for the WoW-hating "Get a Lifers" out there, why are you reading Slashdot? How many hours a day do you spend watching television?
Can you imagine the outcry that would happen when people started getting lives? There, fixed it for you. Do you have any idea how dumb you look posting something like that to Slashdot? Just asking.
P.S. Most of the people I play WoW with are married, with children just like I am.
I assume Blizzard must have some sort of time limit each player can be in the game? This would surely help prevent addiction and such. Pretty cool of Blizzard to implement it that way. No, they don't do that.
Can you imagine the outcry that would cause when people start getting forcibly disconnected just prior to the end of a long raid run?
Presumably WoW has some sort of chat channel that the admins could use to communicate with players? They use the same/whisper "channel" that players use to chat privately. Presumably they can break DnD, I've never set that and certainly not when I've made a request for administrative assistance.
If they roughly identify bots through their behaviour - e.g. the number of hours played, confinement to one location, repetitive actions or whatever gives the game away, could they not quickly confirm it by sending a message saying "Hey, enjoying the game? Could you just confirm your not a bot by answering this question, please..." The Blizzard gods make a more flowery appearance than that (and it's *always* "May I have a moment of your time?"), but that sounds similar to Capcha. That would raise the bar, but isn't Capcha being slowly broken?
They could turn off all access to scripting (which is a major nice feature of the game - I use an addon that stores statistics keeping track of which monsters drop which items by percentage), but even that wouldn't be 100% effective. The techniques used by Rogomatic (which is implemented in Expect[1]) could be used bypassing WoW LUA scripting entirely.
Since they already limit certain access to their scripting API, I'm sure they've already explored the option of restricting the specific calls this Glide bot is using and found it undesirable.
[1] Besides providing scripted access to programs which expect to be run interactively, Expect contains logic to simulate the uncertainty of actual typed human input.
Agreed. It's sad that that's the charge they had to apply. Unfortunately they cannot just give someone the Sword of a Thousand Truths to slay the beast.
it may violate other things like their TOS, but this seems to be merely and intimidation act to make him shut down. It does and it is. They will lose many of their 10 million current players (including me) if botting takes over the game.
I'm with Blizzard on this one. I enjoy playing in the universe they created and I think all of the things they've done to maintain balance have been good. It's certainly been successful.
Oops! Sorry.
Also, while I'm not that much of an old-timer myself, I know there are those who would take issue with the claim of Fortran and Cobol being "forgotten". FORTRAN is a puzzling case. In The Beginning, True Programmers believed that no high level language compiler could ever make code that would run as fast as hand coded assembly language.
The geniuses at IBM who were doing the initial FORTRAN compiler came up with some extremely clever tricks to make fast code easy to do. The (well-deserved) much maligned 3-way IF statement, compiled into a single machine language instruction. The (most confusing) rules on expressions inside of array index operations were due to restrictions on the extremely optimized (for its time) algorithm for computing array indices.
Those constructions arguably cost much money in extra development time for FORTRAN programs in the future, but were absolutely *vital* for proving that FORTRAN could replace hand coded assembly. I can accept that. That's an acceptable engineering solution.
As compilers became "smarter", the compiler writers forgot scientific and engineering mathematics. Order of evaluation matters, especially to avoid round off and/or truncation error.[1] So FORTRAN remained long "after its time" simply due to the way that the compiler respected the way the programmer wrote expressions in the source language.
So you see, there's the contradiction. FORTRAN is the most important historical language because it proved the high level languages and compilers were viable in an optimization sense. It continued to be viable because language design and compiler optimization took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.
Anyway, I'm not surprised you know people who still respect FORTRAN. It's important historically and more recently due to the fact that computer language designers (and computer hardware designers) still don't have a clue about what kind of computations are important in the real world. I don't see it being used on new projects, hence the "forgotten".
COBOL was a disaster from the start, but it's way off topic to talk about here and not particularly interesting, IMO.
[1] I'll never forget the A or F problem I got in sophomore electronics at Cal Tech. It was specifically designed to catch students using programmable calculators and had to be rearranged algebraically to avoid truncation errors when computed.
When SmallTalk arrived decades ago, we thought it was lovely. Speak for yourself.
SmallTalk and object oriented programming has basically always been crap. Popular crap, but still crap.
The windowing system they built on top of it was fairly nice though.
Functional languages are the true winners. They've been around for over half a decade. In another half decade people will still be writing code in some variant of Emacs Lisp and Java, etc. will be as forgotten as Fortran IV and Cobol is today.
I don't see any particular reason to hate (or love) Apple computers or Google. I use their products when convenient and ignore them when they're not. It's not like they're doing business like Microsoft where I'm forced to buy Microsoft Windows licenses for computers that will never run Microsoft Windows. It wasn't always that way.
It sounds like how AT&T broke Unix two and a half decades ago. So once again, they are reinventing the past. Of course, it's their own fault for cramming so many things into what they've called an O/S.
Does Microsoft management know any history whatsoever?
On the other hand, will this mean I will be able to walk into a US store selling computers, buy a computer with either no O/S or the O/S of my choice on it and end up not paying Microsoft a dime if I do not wish to subscribe to any of this Microsoft Windows 7?
You Microsoft guys who love XP really should get behind the ReactOS guys. Open Source is the future. Help those guys who are trying to redo your system from scratch. Then you'll always be able to have it and it won't matter if Microsoft is trying to end-of-life it or not.
We BSD/Unix guys did that when AT&T got really stupid, so learn from history for a change instead of trying to reinvent it! Be real men and women and take the future into your own hands.
Is there something I'm missing here, besides obvious cases of Stockholm Syndrome?
You Microsoft Windows XP guys have a choice other than Microsoft, keep your system by supporting ReactOS.
True, he also had Baguio[1] built because he couldn't stand the Manila heat when he was governor of the Philippines. I don't care much for Manila heat myself no matter what my body weight. And your point is?
[1] Probably the most profitable (for Filipinos) infrastructure project ever for the Philippines.
Coffee, Cigarettes, and Alcohol are all imbibed by white-collar workers chiefly for the effect they have on the psyche. Heh. Coffee and cigarettes is the Breakfast of Champions. Beer is for the soul. Or something like that, I think. Oh dang it! I just spilled my beer. Hold onto this while I wipe up my keybbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
Dumped by his handlers when he refused to be a typical President and was replaced by Woody Wilson who blessed us with the Federal Income Tax, the Federal Reserve and after running as "The President who kept us out of war", gave us World War I.
It's very sad that we have to go back a hundred years to find an honest President and I guess that proves your point.
Kind of sad in a way. We used to do this sort of thing for fun.
I used to have a web page with a link that read "click on this to see the picture of a hot naked 10 year old female", which of course led to a digital photo of the female family dog.
Bruce talks about how, after buying one of Uncle Milton's Ant Farms, he was enamored with the idea that they would mail a tube of live ants to anyone you asked them to. I had the board game when I was very young. I also remember the spanking I got when I brought a container of ants into the house. Dad, they can't get out! Ouch!
Slashdot Mirror
If in fact their executive board paid for it out of their own pockets, off the books, that would be a most serious violation of accounting standards and the law.
When I was living in Southern California and getting my first security clearance, scary men came around the neighborhood asking questions of the neighbors about me (as I was told later). None of them knew me, so much the better.
The situation is much different in the Asian countries I've lived in. Different lifestyle, different culture and it takes some getting used to. After a time, I came to expect that everything I did was watched by someone and gossiped about, getting very twisted by the time it got to my wife at the time which caused a lot of problems.
On a numeric basis, there are more people in the open glass communities in Asia than in the US (perhaps in Europe, I've never been there), where there is some expectation (and reality) of privacy in outdoor day to day activities.
Sure, it adds stress to me, I was born and raised in California, but it doesn't seem to matter to most everyone else.
Good one, but remember that's a funny once, not a funny always.
Hey Man! Would you like to hear a joke?
It's not. People are not coins. And you deserve a +5 insightful.
All it takes is one stressful disagreement with one's spouse and there goes the concentration in the evening's game. You cannot simulate that with coin flips and I disagree with the conclusions in TFA.
It's a personal matter, but I'll bet just about anything, that Mr. and Mrs. Dimaggio were on unusually good terms during that period and he had little or no stress outside of his work plus a lot of luck for the duration of the streak.
Sports is about going beyond oneself and getting into a special "zone" where everything you do is correct. I did it once in my life when I bowled a sanctioned 3-game 800 series, including a perfect game - 32 strikes out of 36 balls I rolled. I saw Glenn Alison do it less than a week later (after he personally asked me if I was the guy who did 805 a few days previous in the same center, heck he's Mr. 900 and a robot in the consistency of his control of his body when he puts his mind to it no matter his age, and he bettered my score by a few pins to boot).
Maintaining the kind of consistency and luck Joe Dimaggio had over that time frame is something I regard as little short of miraculous. To reduce the accomplishment over a coin-flip type simulation strikes me as being irrelevant.
I consider Cisco a pretty good place to work at and I'm most happy that they're sticking with this guy.
Disclaimer: I am not a Cisco employee, though I am under contract with them.
When it comes to gaming devices, handheld, console or whatever, it *is* a precedent that a company can decide what is allowed to run on them. All of the Japanese gaming companies forbid X rated games. In a way, I find that sad as that appears to buy in to the US moral philosophy that female breasts are bad, but a graphic depiction of a bullet piercing a head is O.K.
In this specific instance, I believe that the control they are attempting to exert is correct. They have certain terms and conditions by which one is allowed to play the game. All of the "action" occurs on their servers. The service they are selling is a fair playing experience with people all over the world. So yes, I believe they have every right to control how their servers are interfaced to.
The vast majority of us who play WoW don't like you botters. If you can't play by the rules, could you please find another game to abuse? Please?
Second example is the Dream Dust quest given out in Booty Bay. That can only be completed by killing monsters in 1 extremely small area in the Swamp of Sorrows and is easily griefed due to the fact that there are only a few of the required monsters to kill spawned at any one time and they also have an ultra-rare elite vanity pet drop *and* their skins are required for an extremely valuable middle level leatherworking item. The daily flying quest in the hills above Terokkar Forest are similarly overcrowded, with only a single nest at one time with eggs to bomb into obliteration (I do not think this one is botted, though I may be wrong).
O.K. Part of this is Blizzard's problem. They didn't build a world that scales up all that well once you get into the range of 10 million people banging on their servers. But there is no doubt that if you turn a dozen people running bots loose on any given server, you can grief the other 99.9+% trying to play the game normally.
Actually, I'm quite interested in starting up again (I stopped playing over the holidays due to an in-game guild self-destruction and the holidays themselves) as the 2.4.0 patch released this week seems to have addressed issues like the ones described above. (I need gold for an elite flying mount and the daily quests were very frustrating due to overcrowding).
As a professional programmer for the last two and a half decades, I am somewhat in awe of Blizzard as to how they pay such close attention to detail and get it mostly correct. Moreover, since they support playing their game on real Operating Systems, I'm going to support them even if they were bozos, but the numbers clearly show that my sentiments are a majority feeling. It's a great game, they deserve every penny of revenue they get. They're defending their territory and I can live with that.
And for the WoW-hating "Get a Lifers" out there, why are you reading Slashdot? How many hours a day do you spend watching television?
P.S.
Most of the people I play WoW with are married, with children just like I am.
Oh, so it's Rogomatic for Windows. Yup. No way is Blizzard going to be able to detect and defeat that in the long run.
Can you imagine the outcry that would cause when people start getting forcibly disconnected just prior to the end of a long raid run?
It's a non-starter.
They could turn off all access to scripting (which is a major nice feature of the game - I use an addon that stores statistics keeping track of which monsters drop which items by percentage), but even that wouldn't be 100% effective. The techniques used by Rogomatic (which is implemented in Expect[1]) could be used bypassing WoW LUA scripting entirely.
Since they already limit certain access to their scripting API, I'm sure they've already explored the option of restricting the specific calls this Glide bot is using and found it undesirable.
[1] Besides providing scripted access to programs which expect to be run interactively, Expect contains logic to simulate the uncertainty of actual typed human input.
I'm with Blizzard on this one. I enjoy playing in the universe they created and I think all of the things they've done to maintain balance have been good. It's certainly been successful.
Oops! Sorry. Also, while I'm not that much of an old-timer myself, I know there are those who would take issue with the claim of Fortran and Cobol being "forgotten". FORTRAN is a puzzling case. In The Beginning, True Programmers believed that no high level language compiler could ever make code that would run as fast as hand coded assembly language.
The geniuses at IBM who were doing the initial FORTRAN compiler came up with some extremely clever tricks to make fast code easy to do. The (well-deserved) much maligned 3-way IF statement, compiled into a single machine language instruction. The (most confusing) rules on expressions inside of array index operations were due to restrictions on the extremely optimized (for its time) algorithm for computing array indices.
Those constructions arguably cost much money in extra development time for FORTRAN programs in the future, but were absolutely *vital* for proving that FORTRAN could replace hand coded assembly. I can accept that. That's an acceptable engineering solution.
As compilers became "smarter", the compiler writers forgot scientific and engineering mathematics. Order of evaluation matters, especially to avoid round off and/or truncation error.[1] So FORTRAN remained long "after its time" simply due to the way that the compiler respected the way the programmer wrote expressions in the source language.
So you see, there's the contradiction. FORTRAN is the most important historical language because it proved the high level languages and compilers were viable in an optimization sense. It continued to be viable because language design and compiler optimization took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.
Anyway, I'm not surprised you know people who still respect FORTRAN. It's important historically and more recently due to the fact that computer language designers (and computer hardware designers) still don't have a clue about what kind of computations are important in the real world. I don't see it being used on new projects, hence the "forgotten".
COBOL was a disaster from the start, but it's way off topic to talk about here and not particularly interesting, IMO.
[1] I'll never forget the A or F problem I got in sophomore electronics at Cal Tech. It was specifically designed to catch students using programmable calculators and had to be rearranged algebraically to avoid truncation errors when computed.
SmallTalk and object oriented programming has basically always been crap. Popular crap, but still crap.
The windowing system they built on top of it was fairly nice though.
Functional languages are the true winners. They've been around for over half a decade. In another half decade people will still be writing code in some variant of Emacs Lisp and Java, etc. will be as forgotten as Fortran IV and Cobol is today.
I don't see any particular reason to hate (or love) Apple computers or Google. I use their products when convenient and ignore them when they're not. It's not like they're doing business like Microsoft where I'm forced to buy Microsoft Windows licenses for computers that will never run Microsoft Windows. It wasn't always that way.
It sounds like how AT&T broke Unix two and a half decades ago. So once again, they are reinventing the past. Of course, it's their own fault for cramming so many things into what they've called an O/S.
Does Microsoft management know any history whatsoever?
On the other hand, will this mean I will be able to walk into a US store selling computers, buy a computer with either no O/S or the O/S of my choice on it and end up not paying Microsoft a dime if I do not wish to subscribe to any of this Microsoft Windows 7?
You Microsoft guys who love XP really should get behind the ReactOS guys. Open Source is the future. Help those guys who are trying to redo your system from scratch. Then you'll always be able to have it and it won't matter if Microsoft is trying to end-of-life it or not.
We BSD/Unix guys did that when AT&T got really stupid, so learn from history for a change instead of trying to reinvent it! Be real men and women and take the future into your own hands.
Is there something I'm missing here, besides obvious cases of Stockholm Syndrome?
You Microsoft Windows XP guys have a choice other than Microsoft, keep your system by supporting ReactOS.
True, he also had Baguio[1] built because he couldn't stand the Manila heat when he was governor of the Philippines. I don't care much for Manila heat myself no matter what my body weight. And your point is?
[1] Probably the most profitable (for Filipinos) infrastructure project ever for the Philippines.
It beats the daily Microsoft Windows Vista article(s). Those don't get interesting no matter how many beers you drink before reading them.
Dumped by his handlers when he refused to be a typical President and was replaced by Woody Wilson who blessed us with the Federal Income Tax, the Federal Reserve and after running as "The President who kept us out of war", gave us World War I.
It's very sad that we have to go back a hundred years to find an honest President and I guess that proves your point.
Kind of sad in a way. We used to do this sort of thing for fun.
I used to have a web page with a link that read "click on this to see the picture of a hot naked 10 year old female", which of course led to a digital photo of the female family dog.
Sigh. Gone are the days.