This is the smart way for the RIAA to go after the people who are (you can't really argue this one) engaging in copyright violations.
They can't just sit there and let you get their product for free, so they are trying to fight back.
This is better than them suing the P2P makers, suing the users. Nobody gets hurt here. Those of you looking to download legal material (underground bands, grateful dead concert bootlegs etc.) can still do so, but those who are looking for the latest Eminem smut may have to work a little harder to get their free music.
Everyone has been going on about how great the graphics are.
I disagree. I think they suck.
Due to the number of units on the screen at one time, each unit has to have a relatively low polygon count. This results in having units which don't look very impressive at all.
I like the lighting. Spell effects are pretty good. Environment looks cool. Units look like ass.
Here is one case where the move to 3D has really hurt the game. When you went from 2.5D in Doom / Duke Nukem to full 3D for Quake + clones, you incorporated the Z-axis, levels started to take it into account etc. In general, this was a good thing.
In WC3, its still essentially a 2D game. There are 3 levels of play, just like Starcraft, but the ramps are so large, that for the most part have no strategic value.
Next, you need a brutal system to play this well, and you have to turn down the details. It may be nice and smooth and pretty when you're starting out, but as soon as you have a battle (and remember that these battles are much smaller now... > 50 enemies is rare) your FPS drops like mad. Wouldn't be a problem, if you didn't need to click on your troops to tell them what to do. End result? Whoever's got the better system wins.
I love Blizzard. I own WC, WC2, WC2X, SC, Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo II:Lod, and I'm not going to buy WC3 (I played the beta, and it doesn't seem like its changed significantly since I have)
I could rant about this game for a while, but bottom line... multi play kindof sucks. It won't hold your attention.
If you are into the whole SP thing, then maybe it will be ok, but don't buy into the hype. Blizzard's games are critic proof, and for good reason... up till now they have made games that were either amazing (Starcraft) or seriously addictive (Diablo).
I'm waiting for their next personally.
Captain Frisk out... all this ranting makes me sleepy
not a bad idea... but it is trivial to just slap an IR filter over the thing, at which point you've just got a couple grand worth of equipment that is circumvented with about a $5 filter.
It would be a one time gag. Not to mention that every theater would need one of these "security" devices, where it only takes one guy to get it out on the internet.
or maybe haXor to newbie
What exactly would be nooB speak? How did you kill me? Where did you get that file? What is IRC? How can I hack my friends mom's aol account?
You're both wrong. While this is not to say dishonesty doesn't exist at all age levels, as any decent sociologist will tell you youth (particularly in the 15-24 year old age bracket) are more prone to criminal behavior. Crime rates drop off dramatically after that.
At the same time, most of the 15-24 year olds are more likely to have these minimum wage jobs. I think I phrased my reply poorly. I'd agree that younger people are more likely to steal, but its defintly not all about the younguns.
Admittedly, this comes from someone who has never worked in a grocery store, but don't most stores keep a pretty close eye on cash register draw balances? Seems to me it would be much easier to make off with store merchandise than cash out of your drawer. Which, if true, means this won't have a major impact on employee theft.
At least at the place where I worked, while the register was checked every day. However, once in a while (particularly if you were covering for someone else during their shift) an employee could lift a 20, and at the end of the day, the boss just shrugs his shoulders. A co-worker of mine did this on a semi-regular basis.
Once, the register was $10 over at lunchtime (the morning cashier was not very gifted), my co-worker lifted a 20, and at the end of the day it was 10 under. Just for kicks, I was talking with the manager when she counted the drawers, just to see what would happen, and she said... "Well, it was $10 over at lunch, and $10 under now... see, it all balances out!"
Also, another scam was on items that had a very defined cash value (newspapers, cigarrettes) where people would just come in, give you cash, and leave. They didn't want a receipt. So they hand you 2.25 for a pack of cigs, and walk out. Since inventory isn't checked often as registers, theres no way to correlate inventory theft to an individual employee, but the employee gets to take the cash home. A non-cash based system destroys this.
"They love it because it takes the cash out of the hands of 18-year-old clerks," Nickerson said.
You are right, dishonesty doesn't have a correlation to age. When you have a situation where the employee can steal an hour or two's wages easily, and unprovably, then its going to happen. I worked the register at a pharmacy back in the day. Everyone there was dishonest. Inventory, cash out of the register, accepting cash payments and never ringing the items up all occurred.
You definetly don't want your money handled by people who make minimum wage, but you can't afford to pay for trustworthy employees.
Privacy issues asside, cutting down on the amount of money that is handled cuts down on theft, which "theoretically" cuts down on store prices.
Note the theoretical, as the costs of pressing CDs has falled to almost nothing, but you don't see the costs of CDs falling with it.
The most popular multiplayer game is not Counterstrike, but Starcraft. If you trust the Battle.net statistics, there are hundreds of thousands of starcraft players online on the weekends. Very impressive for a 4-5 year old game.
Counterstrike by comparison has about 40K users at any given time.
it being open source... there is a version of bnetD that has War 3 support. I played the game myself last night. I'm not stealing from Blizzard, as I have full intentions of buying the game. This is more or less a sneak preview for me.
Heaven forbid that they be forced to design a new business model.
The problem here is what is the new business model going to be? Soem assumptions:
People won't pay for shows. I don't mind paying a little extra for HBO, but I don't think I could swallow paying $10 / month for each channel that I would like to watch.
Advertisements become less affective as less people watch them, and hence don't pay networks as well
Networks expirment with new formats... Possibilities Include:
No commercial breaks. Instead, advertisers will pay for their products to appear in the show. Is this an improvement??
Smaller, more annoying commercial breaks. Instead of 2 minutes breaks, there will be 5-30 second breaks, too fast to make it even worth it to fast forward. These would occur extremely frequently to compensate for the fact that they don't air for very long.
Open Source Philosophy... let anyone watch it whenever... who cares. Regardless of how people on this board think, this isn't goign to work.
Interactive Programming... programming that adds value by watching it live, rather than time shifted. Possibly by allowing the users to vote to see a different ending etc?? But its not going to happen because noone wants to use the internet and watch tv at the same time. Cue Microsofts upcoming HomewreckerStation.
Sue the pants off anyone who threatens the current model.
Like it or not, the industry is going to change, and PVRs are not necessarily going to make it better. It may be nice for you and I, but eventually the networks are going to come back (and why not... we really are getting something for nothing from them) and pull something...
So instead of bitching and complaining, why don't we try to come up with a better, less irritating, but still financially rewarding business model that would allow them to produce the content that we enjoy, without the advertisements that we despise.
If you're single. Now your wife will know that you are in the pub, because she was emailed when you entered.:-)
Or you could just tell your wife that you're going to the bar. She's your wife, she has the right to know these things.... you'd want to know if she was out at a bar right?
Maybe I just assume that slashdot is posting Anti - MS stuff, but when I read the title "Microsoft Stops New Work to Fix Bugs", I assumed that they had cancelled some kindof bug fixing project, as opposed to cancelling development to fix bugs.
And if you've never touched a computer before, you can probably write that document faster on a piece of paper. Same old story about people not wanting a new learning curve, just written with different words...
This is true, but writing said document with a computer offers substantial benefits over writing it on a piece of paper. You get a permanent copy, you can print it multiple times, you can change it if you don't like it as many times as you want, etc. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here.
The difference in this situation is that Linux does not offer the end user substantially more in the way of functionality, and in many times, offers less to the average user, those who don't like the command line interface.
I read someone here who wrote "Linux is only free if you don't value your time." Linux's benefit is that there is no cost. You can download it for free, and get a stable, reliable system. However, its very difficult to get it to do what you want, especially if you haven't done it before.
Microsoft costs money, and now with XP, is fairly stable. For the most part, when you want to do something, you can find it easily and straight forward.
What reasons would a secretary who uses her computer for email and internet at home have for using linux instead of Windows? Personal growth isn't going to cut it for the average user who doesn't like his / her computer. For these users, paying for the MS license is worth it. With the extra time, they can go outside and go for a walk.
I've noticed alot of comments here about realistic physics in games.
I remember reading an article with a game developer a while back, who pointed out that the key for physics in a game wasn't realism, but consistancy.
He was developing a racing game, and says in order to make the game more fun, he had to sink the center of gravity for all of the cars several feet below the pavement, so that the cars wouldn't tip over when making hi speed turns.
As long as all the cars behaved the same way, it didn't matter that you were "cheating".
When playing your game, the user is entering your world, and learns a new set of rules. As long as you present your set of rules as consitant, it doesn't matter if they don't correspond with how things behave in "real" life.
Yesterday you bashed MS for not going public about anything, and now you bash them for patching the program. Short of open sourcing everything, is there anything they could do that would appease this croud?
They might not get it right on the first try, but they do fix their bugs, and i think this was fairly timely, especially given the size / scope of IE.
...but consumers / end users are not. Think about it.
true... but most of the "end users" who are seriously opposed to this technology aren't paying for MS software anyway, so MS doesn't care.
I hate the idea of not owning my content as much as the next guy, but I'm not going to bitch and whine because MS isn't going to help me fight. Why on earth should they? If they get DRM to work properly, they can stop everyone from pirating their SW.
Winamp3 (currently in open beta) has this functionality (sortof)
You can have your standard playlist manager, but theres another way of managing your music, which allows you to query by artist, album, year, genre. Double click on an album, and boom, its in your playlist. Really slick. Nullsoft rules.
I agree with you. It is definetly wrong to steal music, movies, etc.
The issue is that these things get enforced improperly. Rather than punishing individual infringements (ie arrest me for having bootleg music), companies are putting protections into their works that prevent us from doing things with them that we would want to do. (I like to rip cds, make compilations, put things on my mp3 player etc)
These anti copy protections, which prevent privacy, remove value from the products, because we can't do what we want to with them.
Rather than punishing Napster for allowing users to share files, really the users should be punished, as they are the ones breaking the law, so that I can have the freedom to do legal things with my CDs. Unfortunatly, it doesn't pay to prosecute individual users, so the RIAA is going after the things that allow piracy.
Its a shame really. I think if they just busted a few guys sharing music on Napster, gnutella, etc, illegal uses of said technology would drop immediatly, and the rest of us can retain the ability to do the things we want with the product we paid for.
Instead, since corporations are in the business instead of providing value to the consumer, this just won't happen. Ever wonder why, when CDs are cheaper to produce, they cost more than cassettes?
The biggest problem here is refresh rate. Otherwise your idea is pretty cool. Probably want to use it to run doom instead, because mouselook in your car might be tough.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the smart way for the RIAA to go after the people who are (you can't really argue this one) engaging in copyright violations.
They can't just sit there and let you get their product for free, so they are trying to fight back.
This is better than them suing the P2P makers, suing the users. Nobody gets hurt here. Those of you looking to download legal material (underground bands, grateful dead concert bootlegs etc.) can still do so, but those who are looking for the latest Eminem smut may have to work a little harder to get their free music.
Exactly how is this a bad thing?
Captain_Frisk
Even if I did have a system man enough to handle it... (and my system isn't bad btw...) the game just wasn't very fun for me.
Everyone has been going on about how great the graphics are.
I disagree. I think they suck.
Due to the number of units on the screen at one time, each unit has to have a relatively low polygon count. This results in having units which don't look very impressive at all.
I like the lighting. Spell effects are pretty good. Environment looks cool. Units look like ass.
Here is one case where the move to 3D has really hurt the game. When you went from 2.5D in Doom / Duke Nukem to full 3D for Quake + clones, you incorporated the Z-axis, levels started to take it into account etc. In general, this was a good thing.
In WC3, its still essentially a 2D game. There are 3 levels of play, just like Starcraft, but the ramps are so large, that for the most part have no strategic value.
Next, you need a brutal system to play this well, and you have to turn down the details. It may be nice and smooth and pretty when you're starting out, but as soon as you have a battle (and remember that these battles are much smaller now... > 50 enemies is rare) your FPS drops like mad. Wouldn't be a problem, if you didn't need to click on your troops to tell them what to do. End result? Whoever's got the better system wins.
I love Blizzard. I own WC, WC2, WC2X, SC, Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo II:Lod, and I'm not going to buy WC3 (I played the beta, and it doesn't seem like its changed significantly since I have)
I could rant about this game for a while, but bottom line... multi play kindof sucks. It won't hold your attention.
If you are into the whole SP thing, then maybe it will be ok, but don't buy into the hype. Blizzard's games are critic proof, and for good reason... up till now they have made games that were either amazing (Starcraft) or seriously addictive (Diablo).
I'm waiting for their next personally.
Captain Frisk out... all this ranting makes me sleepy
It would be a one time gag. Not to mention that every theater would need one of these "security" devices, where it only takes one guy to get it out on the internet.
or maybe haXor to newbie What exactly would be nooB speak? How did you kill me? Where did you get that file? What is IRC? How can I hack my friends mom's aol account?
Your computer isn't worth all that much, neither is the software on it.
AOL didnt't really harm them.
While their practices may be disgusting, how much in damages are you looking to exact?
The only thing that this does is put a bunch of AOL employees in the unemployment category.
At the same time, most of the 15-24 year olds are more likely to have these minimum wage jobs. I think I phrased my reply poorly. I'd agree that younger people are more likely to steal, but its defintly not all about the younguns.
Admittedly, this comes from someone who has never worked in a grocery store, but don't most stores keep a pretty close eye on cash register draw balances? Seems to me it would be much easier to make off with store merchandise than cash out of your drawer. Which, if true, means this won't have a major impact on employee theft.
At least at the place where I worked, while the register was checked every day. However, once in a while (particularly if you were covering for someone else during their shift) an employee could lift a 20, and at the end of the day, the boss just shrugs his shoulders. A co-worker of mine did this on a semi-regular basis.
Once, the register was $10 over at lunchtime (the morning cashier was not very gifted), my co-worker lifted a 20, and at the end of the day it was 10 under. Just for kicks, I was talking with the manager when she counted the drawers, just to see what would happen, and she said... "Well, it was $10 over at lunch, and $10 under now... see, it all balances out!"
Also, another scam was on items that had a very defined cash value (newspapers, cigarrettes) where people would just come in, give you cash, and leave. They didn't want a receipt. So they hand you 2.25 for a pack of cigs, and walk out. Since inventory isn't checked often as registers, theres no way to correlate inventory theft to an individual employee, but the employee gets to take the cash home. A non-cash based system destroys this.
Captain_Frisk out
You are right, dishonesty doesn't have a correlation to age. When you have a situation where the employee can steal an hour or two's wages easily, and unprovably, then its going to happen. I worked the register at a pharmacy back in the day. Everyone there was dishonest. Inventory, cash out of the register, accepting cash payments and never ringing the items up all occurred.
You definetly don't want your money handled by people who make minimum wage, but you can't afford to pay for trustworthy employees.
Privacy issues asside, cutting down on the amount of money that is handled cuts down on theft, which "theoretically" cuts down on store prices.
Note the theoretical, as the costs of pressing CDs has falled to almost nothing, but you don't see the costs of CDs falling with it.
Captain_Frisk out.
The most popular multiplayer game is not Counterstrike, but Starcraft. If you trust the Battle.net statistics, there are hundreds of thousands of starcraft players online on the weekends. Very impressive for a 4-5 year old game. Counterstrike by comparison has about 40K users at any given time.
Actually, it was (gasp) MICROSOFT (gasp). Think about that before you flame!
Here are googles top 2 links with more information.
and the google search itself
How does that break down storage wise?
it being open source... there is a version of bnetD that has War 3 support. I played the game myself last night. I'm not stealing from Blizzard, as I have full intentions of buying the game. This is more or less a sneak preview for me.
rather than picking apart minor quibbles in the article, and thus trying to disclaim it entirely, we should look at the big picture and learn from it.
just my 2 cents.
The problem here is what is the new business model going to be? Soem assumptions:
- People won't pay for shows. I don't mind paying a little extra for HBO, but I don't think I could swallow paying $10 / month for each channel that I would like to watch.
- Advertisements become less affective as less people watch them, and hence don't pay networks as well
- Networks expirment with new formats... Possibilities Include:
- No commercial breaks. Instead, advertisers will pay for their products to appear in the show. Is this an improvement??
- Smaller, more annoying commercial breaks. Instead of 2 minutes breaks, there will be 5-30 second breaks, too fast to make it even worth it to fast forward. These would occur extremely frequently to compensate for the fact that they don't air for very long.
- Open Source Philosophy... let anyone watch it whenever... who cares. Regardless of how people on this board think, this isn't goign to work.
- Interactive Programming... programming that adds value by watching it live, rather than time shifted. Possibly by allowing the users to vote to see a different ending etc?? But its not going to happen because noone wants to use the internet and watch tv at the same time. Cue Microsofts upcoming HomewreckerStation.
- Sue the pants off anyone who threatens the current model.
Like it or not, the industry is going to change, and PVRs are not necessarily going to make it better. It may be nice for you and I, but eventually the networks are going to come back (and why not... we really are getting something for nothing from them) and pull something...So instead of bitching and complaining, why don't we try to come up with a better, less irritating, but still financially rewarding business model that would allow them to produce the content that we enjoy, without the advertisements that we despise.
Thoughts?
Captain_Frisk
Or you could just tell your wife that you're going to the bar. She's your wife, she has the right to know these things.... you'd want to know if she was out at a bar right?
Maybe I just assume that slashdot is posting Anti - MS stuff, but when I read the title "Microsoft Stops New Work to Fix Bugs", I assumed that they had cancelled some kindof bug fixing project, as opposed to cancelling development to fix bugs.
www.joystick101.org it runs the SW that K5 does, and the community isn't quite there yet, but its what you're looking for.
This is true, but writing said document with a computer offers substantial benefits over writing it on a piece of paper. You get a permanent copy, you can print it multiple times, you can change it if you don't like it as many times as you want, etc. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here.
The difference in this situation is that Linux does not offer the end user substantially more in the way of functionality, and in many times, offers less to the average user, those who don't like the command line interface.
I read someone here who wrote "Linux is only free if you don't value your time." Linux's benefit is that there is no cost. You can download it for free, and get a stable, reliable system. However, its very difficult to get it to do what you want, especially if you haven't done it before.
Microsoft costs money, and now with XP, is fairly stable. For the most part, when you want to do something, you can find it easily and straight forward.
What reasons would a secretary who uses her computer for email and internet at home have for using linux instead of Windows? Personal growth isn't going to cut it for the average user who doesn't like his / her computer. For these users, paying for the MS license is worth it. With the extra time, they can go outside and go for a walk.
Captain_Frisk
I remember reading an article with a game developer a while back, who pointed out that the key for physics in a game wasn't realism, but consistancy.
He was developing a racing game, and says in order to make the game more fun, he had to sink the center of gravity for all of the cars several feet below the pavement, so that the cars wouldn't tip over when making hi speed turns.
As long as all the cars behaved the same way, it didn't matter that you were "cheating".
When playing your game, the user is entering your world, and learns a new set of rules. As long as you present your set of rules as consitant, it doesn't matter if they don't correspond with how things behave in "real" life.
Captain_Frisk - wannabe game designer.
Yesterday you bashed MS for not going public about anything, and now you bash them for patching the program. Short of open sourcing everything, is there anything they could do that would appease this croud?
They might not get it right on the first try, but they do fix their bugs, and i think this was fairly timely, especially given the size / scope of IE.
true... but most of the "end users" who are seriously opposed to this technology aren't paying for MS software anyway, so MS doesn't care.
I hate the idea of not owning my content as much as the next guy, but I'm not going to bitch and whine because MS isn't going to help me fight. Why on earth should they? If they get DRM to work properly, they can stop everyone from pirating their SW.
I don't think its possible, but we'll see.
Captain_Frisk out.
Granted, I don't have 6500 songs, but the "Media Library" function is supposed to provide this functionality, and has worked like a charm for me.
You can have your standard playlist manager, but theres another way of managing your music, which allows you to query by artist, album, year, genre. Double click on an album, and boom, its in your playlist. Really slick. Nullsoft rules.
Captain_Frisk
The issue is that these things get enforced improperly. Rather than punishing individual infringements (ie arrest me for having bootleg music), companies are putting protections into their works that prevent us from doing things with them that we would want to do. (I like to rip cds, make compilations, put things on my mp3 player etc)
These anti copy protections, which prevent privacy, remove value from the products, because we can't do what we want to with them.
Rather than punishing Napster for allowing users to share files, really the users should be punished, as they are the ones breaking the law, so that I can have the freedom to do legal things with my CDs. Unfortunatly, it doesn't pay to prosecute individual users, so the RIAA is going after the things that allow piracy.
Its a shame really. I think if they just busted a few guys sharing music on Napster, gnutella, etc, illegal uses of said technology would drop immediatly, and the rest of us can retain the ability to do the things we want with the product we paid for.
Instead, since corporations are in the business instead of providing value to the consumer, this just won't happen. Ever wonder why, when CDs are cheaper to produce, they cost more than cassettes?
Captain_Frisk
The biggest problem here is refresh rate. Otherwise your idea is pretty cool. Probably want to use it to run doom instead, because mouselook in your car might be tough.