Re:The black market is the answer to the success
on
Cashless Society
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· Score: 1, Interesting
e-cash will never take off until people can be 100% sure they can use it in dubious (viewed more or less illegal by the state) activities
Since the card is 'anonymous' you could merely hand it over to someone you wanted to pay. At the moment the cards are too costly to make this practical, but once the price drops the more dubious members of society can merely shuffle their cards around to hide their transactions. Even with expensive cards, you could still trade them with anyone for a card with the same debit level on it, thus obfuscating the paper trail. I can see a new form of e-money laundering being created out of this.
I think Microsoft has to learn that they can't just make incremental additions to their hardware, or current customers will feel cheated.
They've been doing this for years with their software and their customers continue to shovel out more cash to 'upgrade' to the newest versions. Some customers, heck perhaps most of them will certainly feel cheated. And these disillusioned customers will still be standing in line to buy the Y and Z box, because their current system no longer supports the latest and greatest.
Although... they don't have a monopoly on game consoles... yet.
The Camarilla Princes are going to be really pissed....
The Princes are aware they could sustain a greater population level of Kindred, but seek to hide their presence by keeping their numbers few. The real trick in a Camarilla vampire/human ecology is for the vampires to keep the humans unaware of their presence.
The Sabbat believe they could live openly, and control their human herds through liberal application of Disciplines. The Camarilla know this would lead to another Dark Age of war and death, for if Buffy were to ever pierce the Masquerade, all Hellmouth would break lose.
if this actually takes off, I believe it will not set a good precedent
The entire theory behind copyright law is that without it, we wouldn't get quality projects like big movies and TV shows because they cost so much money to create. If a large group of fans can get together and finance it on their own, with a desire to create quality content rather than profits, that kinda defeats the purpose of copyright, doesn't it?
I agree that in this example the fans are collecting funds to continue a copyright that is privately owned. But in a sense the fans are attempting to take control of something they've never been able to impact directly before. If this does work, I think the precedent will be that fans are willing to pool together and pay a LOT of money to get the quality content they want. Groups could form to fund their own content, which they could release into the public domain. P2P could distribute them. No need to edit out commercials because there isn't any.
I'm not a major fan of Farscape, but I'm donating because I DO want to set this precedent.
Why do people keep cursing Orifice when they could get in there and turn off all that marketroid-driven auto-format crap.
Using Microsoft software is all about getting someone else to set it up correctly for you. If someone wanted to go to all the trouble to set up their software the way they want it, they'd use Linux.
Uh, who in the world buys deer, from what I have gathered (Grandfather hunted) deer meat is tough as hell and a bitch to cook.
Considering what we spend every year to go hunting versus the amount of meat we actually bring back, it would be a lot cheaper to stay home and buy the finest steak for diner once a week. See my previous post for more details.
My family hunts for more reasons that just the meat. But the meat is part of the culture too. Venison (deer meat) comes in different flavors and textures which depend mostly on if the deer is healthy and eating properly. We make most of our venison into jerky and sausage, but we save the steaks and tenderloins which we eat on special occasions.
Savages such as myself can still take a certain pride in knowing that we have brought food in from out of the wilderness. And that meat we're eating... well, some reason, the deer I shot, tracked, field dressed, dragged out of the woods, and brought home, my venison, tastes better than any steak I've ever had.
Deer hunting is a vital part of the economy of many states
I live in Wisconsin and while I do hunt, I don't hunt religiously every year. My family owns our own land to hunt from which provides local property taxes. We bought local supplies to build the cabin and tree stands. We eat out most every night and buy local groceries when we don't. We paid a local company to have a well dug and put in a septic system. We frequent a number of local taverns and spend too much on beer and even more on tips. We've been hunting in the area of a number of years now, and the locals know us all by name.
After a certain point, Moore's Law makes this feasible. Right now, you're right. 3D line of sight for every player on large servers requires some seriously big iron. The question is, should we stay in an encryption arms race against the hackers to try and make it too tedious to decrypt, or spend the extra money on severs that can handle the increased load.
This is going to be one of those business decisions which will have long term impact over the life of a business. It is my hope that as computers grow more powerful and available bandwidth increases that we will have increased choices in available clients for future multi-player games. If they choose to fight the hackers, it means they're going to try and maintain control of the client, which means we're going to be stuck with the one they provide. (Which doesn't have to be bad, but I still like having options.)
the servers have to be redesigned and beefed up. Not likely, I say.
For games that have already been around for awhile, you're right that they're not going to be making large changes to the server and client to hide those things they shouldn't have been sending to the client anyways.
I have great hope that the next generation of Massively Multi-player games will incorporate the idea of 'the client can not be trusted' into the game design early on. I agree that it requires a lot more work server side to process things it would be much easier to have the client work on. But the only real way to prevent people from accessing things you don't want them to see, is to NOT SEND IT.
I also think games like Everquest should keep the server closed, but open the client so third party groups can create them and add features. There only real way to allow this is to only send information to the client that you want them to have.
My first thought at any news into the video game industry is, "What does this have to do with Microsoft?" I've been attempting to advise my friends against buying DOA3 machines, pointing at recent gaming acquisition by Microsoft. I ask them, "How many game companies will Microsoft have to buy before you realize the problem in supporting them?" They just think I'm a Paranoid Linux Zealot. They're probably right.
However, I know Microsoft was talking to both Enix and Square about bringing games over to the Xbox. I also know that Sony owns a big chunk of Square. Is Sony circling the wagons to protect their assets from falling into the hands of the enemy? Do the big gaming companies have anything to do with this merger?
The delay "is a response to what our customers are asking for."
Dear Microsoft,
Could you please skip meaningless releases of your software? We'd only like to pay for your 'upgrades' if they contain features that are actually useful. Thanks.
What a pointless little feel good piece by someone who wants to launch us into the computing future by vaulting off the giant shoulders of Microsoft. "Cast off your shackles of the past and embrace the future!", he calls to us. Oh, except for Windows, we need to keep that. Why? Because:
Windows is the marketplace victor and has now won a decisive legal imprimatur. There is no technical reason for us to move to Linux; why should we switch? Why should our customers?
Oh, because Microsoft has a Monopoly and we should just accept that because:
Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced, nearly universal platform - and for the software future, "universal" is nonnegotiable. We need to run the system on as many computers as possible and manage the maximum range of electronic documents.
Ah, gotcha, they already have a monopoly, and we all kinda need one anyways because we all need to run the same software so we should all just stop this pointless flame war complaining about lack of choices because choices break apart our vision of a unified digital playground of knowledge. So everyone run Windows because our new visionary software only runs on Windows because:
Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced, nearly universal platform
Although we already said that, but we thought we should say it again because its really important. So is everyone ready to stop wanting choices and merely accept the new hand crafted future built just for us so we can stop working on our own visions because this one is the very bestest and is the one true software we all need because we all need the same software for this to work... blah, blah, blah.
Phew. Ok, breathe... and exhale. Good. We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
Have you ever actually tried to reverse engineer code with poor or no documentation and then add any features you might need? I have, many times. It's always time consuming (read expensive).
I am not trying to say merely having the source code makes it trivial for any coder to come in and make changes. This is why I said you need a 'good' coder. Reading raw source, especially poorly written, and making changes without breaking anything is non-trivial (and thus time consuming, and therefore expensive.) But it can be done and done well by those with the proper mindset, training, and/or experience. I'm sometimes quoted as saying it is just a matter of having the patience and mental acuity to absorb the information and then connecting the dots. Certinaly you will have an easier time just rewriting the bits that don't make sense, and when time is an issue it is, as you say, easier just to start over from scratch. In such a case the source does them just as much good as a compiled binary.
The proper counter argument is that a 'good' hacker could also just rip a compiled binary into a debugger, read and understand the assembler and make the desired changes to it. Which is also true although I believe it is even more non-trivial to work in such a low level computer generated language.
So I'm not trying to say that source code is the holy grail and with it you will have eternal life. For time sensative projects (and what isn't, right?) you need to make changes quickly so it may not be practical to grab OSS and beat on it until it works. However once you've got one in house along with a coder or three that understands it, it becomes a lot faster to make changes to. Add on to that the added benefit of having others working on it who aren't even on the payroll. The only real drawback might be that they also get to draw benefit from the software, but that's not always bad.
In nearly all cases, if you have competent admins, you don't need support. Tech support staff are by and large not good at troubleshooting and are don't know the products they support very well.
On the other hand, most trouble can be solved by groups.google.com, good investigation and troubleshooting, and sometimes an upgrade.
Honestly -- who really uses support?
When you use OSS you don't need to wonder how the software works. Everything it does is spelled out in the source for you. Even with poor or no documentation a good coder can still review the code and understand how it works. That same good coder can then add any features you might need.
So, as you say, you shouldn't need support when you have the source available if you have someone on staff who can read and understand the code. However, like any good coder, you can get stuck, even with the source code on hand. It helps to have someone else to bounce ideas off and I find it really helps when designing new features. I tend to think of lots of different ways to implement new ideas and but have trouble deciding on which is the most 'correct' route to take.
And during those times I call on support. Be they other programmers on staff with me, programmers I used to work with but still keep in contact with, those weird coders I 'met' online, or even that kid who delivers our pizza. Just like your tech support hotline staff they may not know the product I'm working on very well. But their experience in coding or even their common sense might be all I need to get back on course.
So, I tend to use support all the time. Even if I did find some of that support via google groups with some good investigation and troubleshooting skills. It's just not commercial support, which is probably your point anyways.
>But I get the feeling, only MS can take itself out. The government can't.
How about customers?
Those aren't customers, they're hostages and extortion victims. But we still need to convince them that this open source life raft thingy won't sink before they'll jump ship.
Actually it's probably more apt to say they're slaves and we're trying to incite them to overthrow their software overlords. Bolts of lightning from our arse, they can never take our freedom, et cetera.
>If this is any indication how how we're going to be treated when seeing films in the future, then count me out.
>Metal detectors in airports I can understand. It's going too far in cinemas.
But... but... we have to treat you like criminals to protect our property! You can't just *not* buy it! How are we suppose to make any money?!?!
*grumble*
If this keeps up we'll have to come up with something that people are actually willing to pay money for.
As a big fan of the dark fantasy genre I really enjoyed Hellsing and the non-edited Vampire Hunter. Along those same lines I'd strongly suggest checking out Bastard! which was a hell of a lot of fun. I also really enjoyed Vampire Princess Miyu and Berserk. Unfortunately all of them suffer from Incomplete Ending Syndrome in my opinion, but that might be just because I was sad to see them end.
And in an attempt to stay on topic, I must say I never really got my anime fix from cable. I was hooked early on Macross (not Robotech) and City Hunter and I have just become used to trading/creating fan subs and buying those DVDs that get released with proper subtitles.
Keep in mind there are good reasons for the region coding. The games do have to be programmed differently if they are going to be run on NTSC or PAL. The European GameCube has different video out formats than the US/Japan one does.
Another reason Nintendo releases at different times in different regions is they have a policy of only releasing a game after translating it to the local language, which takes time (some companies release English language games all over Europe).
Nani? And this prevents... uh... what? A misinformed gamer from buying an out of region game and going, "Ah crap! This one's in french! How am I suppose to play it?!" Cuz now when he pops that french disc in his console it just won't boot? "Ah crap! This one is busted! And trying to return broken software sucks cuz the store treats me like some kind of pirate!"
What it prevents is a gamer who knows Japanese from directly buying Japanese games, especially those games that are never released in his region. And preventing sales is good... uh... why? I need to mod my console to play legally purchased games... uh... why?
Back in the day we used to buy Super Famicom games for our SNES. We were told we needed to buy a $20 'converter' which plugged into the SNES and would allow you to play the Famicom games by plugging them into the 'converter'. I was shocked and outraged when it was explained to me that a SNES had the same hardware as a Super Famicom and that the 'converter' didn't actually do anything. The reason you 'needed' the converter was because you couldn't directly plug a Famicom cartridge into a SNES because Nintendo had added a pair of little plastic tabs which prevented you from inserting it completely into the console. After using some pliers to snap off the plastic tabs the cartridge inserted and played just fine.
I can sort of understand why the toy stores won't stock it, but i'm assuming walmart/bestbuy are department stores. If they sell DVD titles (movies) that are R18+ rated, why the double standard for a video game? Did these stores also refuse GTA3 and the forthcoming GTA3:vice-city for their sexual content? It seems a little contradictory to me.
I would guess that many people have the perception that games are 'for kids' not realizing (or possibly even caring) that many gamers have grown up. As the game attempts to use nudity as a selling point many conservative retailers easily adopt the stance that they will not carry the filthy smut. Tomb Raider games feature an extremely busty main character which is prominently displayed on much of their advertisements but the word nudity or XXX isn't featured anywhere so it slips in under their good taste threshold. These same conservative retailers 'know' that R Rated movies are targeted at adults rather than children, and are therefore safe for sale regardless of content.
This is very similar to the controversy around the first Heavy Metal movie. As an animated film parents first assume it's for kids and are shocked and disgusted to find R rated content, again not realizing (or caring) what the target audience is.
I don't know how related, if at all, programmed cell death is to free radicals and antioxidants, but as you suggested, once you figure out an effect, you can try to figure out a way to prevent or reverse the effect.
Just don't tell the Vorlons what you're up to. "You are not ready for immortality." - Kosh
Seriously - I am very curious where you expect those paying you to get the money from in the first place?
You don't understand how a company that sells something other than software might require a programmer? Then I sugest you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond.
I... uh... can't. I understand the concept of trying to sell software to make a living, but I don't support it. I sell my services as a programmer to make a living and give away the code. This is not to say people who sell code are 'bad guys' but I fail to understand how they hope to compete with those commie open source hackers. Sure your start out with an edge and a superior product, but how long are you going to stay that way?
Which, of course, you sum up nicely: The open source community will produce a better alternative under the GPL without using their software. That being said, do they really think they stand to make more money by pushing away the Subversion team? In the short term, maybe, but I think in the long run they just killed themselves. I think the wineX crew handles their PR much better.
Permitting Win98 and denying Win2k? For all it's faults, it's not as bad as the 9x series of exploits. Plus with Win2k up to SP3, it's likely more secure than XP.
Methinks someone wants to make some money...
For the most part the trouble is not 'as of yet undiscovered security flaws' but known problems that go unpatched. Microsoft or otherwise no OS is 100% secure, so what does UCSB hope to gain by 'encouraging' their students to switch? From the article it sounds like they got burned by holes in win2k in the past so now they're afraid of it?
"While we understand that it is possible to run a secure Windows 2000 environment, past history has shown that this rarely happens on ResNet."
So, uh, why not? Sounds like that's going to be your real problem regardless of what OS you enforce. Unless the problem is the school bookstore has more of a markup on 9x and XP than win2k?
I'd like to point out that the fundamental base part of your argument is based on incorrect knowledge. Square is not Sony....
*blink* Wow. Thank you for kindly pointing out my complete and utter lack of a clue. I must have missed a fnord or two in the article.
You are certainly correct that Square is not Sony, so I'm not sure why I ignored that very obvious fact while I was crafting my rant. I humbly withdraw my unfounded complaint.
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Since the card is 'anonymous' you could merely hand it over to someone you wanted to pay. At the moment the cards are too costly to make this practical, but once the price drops the more dubious members of society can merely shuffle their cards around to hide their transactions. Even with expensive cards, you could still trade them with anyone for a card with the same debit level on it, thus obfuscating the paper trail. I can see a new form of e-money laundering being created out of this.
They've been doing this for years with their software and their customers continue to shovel out more cash to 'upgrade' to the newest versions. Some customers, heck perhaps most of them will certainly feel cheated. And these disillusioned customers will still be standing in line to buy the Y and Z box, because their current system no longer supports the latest and greatest.
Although... they don't have a monopoly on game consoles... yet.
The Princes are aware they could sustain a greater population level of Kindred, but seek to hide their presence by keeping their numbers few. The real trick in a Camarilla vampire/human ecology is for the vampires to keep the humans unaware of their presence.
The Sabbat believe they could live openly, and control their human herds through liberal application of Disciplines. The Camarilla know this would lead to another Dark Age of war and death, for if Buffy were to ever pierce the Masquerade, all Hellmouth would break lose.
The entire theory behind copyright law is that without it, we wouldn't get quality projects like big movies and TV shows because they cost so much money to create. If a large group of fans can get together and finance it on their own, with a desire to create quality content rather than profits, that kinda defeats the purpose of copyright, doesn't it?
I agree that in this example the fans are collecting funds to continue a copyright that is privately owned. But in a sense the fans are attempting to take control of something they've never been able to impact directly before. If this does work, I think the precedent will be that fans are willing to pool together and pay a LOT of money to get the quality content they want. Groups could form to fund their own content, which they could release into the public domain. P2P could distribute them. No need to edit out commercials because there isn't any.
I'm not a major fan of Farscape, but I'm donating because I DO want to set this precedent.
Using Microsoft software is all about getting someone else to set it up correctly for you. If someone wanted to go to all the trouble to set up their software the way they want it, they'd use Linux.
Considering what we spend every year to go hunting versus the amount of meat we actually bring back, it would be a lot cheaper to stay home and buy the finest steak for diner once a week. See my previous post for more details.
My family hunts for more reasons that just the meat. But the meat is part of the culture too. Venison (deer meat) comes in different flavors and textures which depend mostly on if the deer is healthy and eating properly. We make most of our venison into jerky and sausage, but we save the steaks and tenderloins which we eat on special occasions.
Savages such as myself can still take a certain pride in knowing that we have brought food in from out of the wilderness. And that meat we're eating... well, some reason, the deer I shot, tracked, field dressed, dragged out of the woods, and brought home, my venison, tastes better than any steak I've ever had.
I live in Wisconsin and while I do hunt, I don't hunt religiously every year. My family owns our own land to hunt from which provides local property taxes. We bought local supplies to build the cabin and tree stands. We eat out most every night and buy local groceries when we don't. We paid a local company to have a well dug and put in a septic system. We frequent a number of local taverns and spend too much on beer and even more on tips. We've been hunting in the area of a number of years now, and the locals know us all by name.
I didn't go hunting this year.
After a certain point, Moore's Law makes this feasible. Right now, you're right. 3D line of sight for every player on large servers requires some seriously big iron. The question is, should we stay in an encryption arms race against the hackers to try and make it too tedious to decrypt, or spend the extra money on severs that can handle the increased load.
This is going to be one of those business decisions which will have long term impact over the life of a business. It is my hope that as computers grow more powerful and available bandwidth increases that we will have increased choices in available clients for future multi-player games. If they choose to fight the hackers, it means they're going to try and maintain control of the client, which means we're going to be stuck with the one they provide. (Which doesn't have to be bad, but I still like having options.)
For games that have already been around for awhile, you're right that they're not going to be making large changes to the server and client to hide those things they shouldn't have been sending to the client anyways.
I have great hope that the next generation of Massively Multi-player games will incorporate the idea of 'the client can not be trusted' into the game design early on. I agree that it requires a lot more work server side to process things it would be much easier to have the client work on. But the only real way to prevent people from accessing things you don't want them to see, is to NOT SEND IT.
I also think games like Everquest should keep the server closed, but open the client so third party groups can create them and add features. There only real way to allow this is to only send information to the client that you want them to have.
However, I know Microsoft was talking to both Enix and Square about bringing games over to the Xbox. I also know that Sony owns a big chunk of Square. Is Sony circling the wagons to protect their assets from falling into the hands of the enemy? Do the big gaming companies have anything to do with this merger?
Dear Microsoft,
Could you please skip meaningless releases of your software? We'd only like to pay for your 'upgrades' if they contain features that are actually useful. Thanks.
Their time is coming. Are you ready?
Windows is the marketplace victor and has now won a decisive legal imprimatur. There is no technical reason for us to move to Linux; why should we switch? Why should our customers?
Oh, because Microsoft has a Monopoly and we should just accept that because:
Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced, nearly universal platform - and for the software future, "universal" is nonnegotiable. We need to run the system on as many computers as possible and manage the maximum range of electronic documents.
Ah, gotcha, they already have a monopoly, and we all kinda need one anyways because we all need to run the same software so we should all just stop this pointless flame war complaining about lack of choices because choices break apart our vision of a unified digital playground of knowledge. So everyone run Windows because our new visionary software only runs on Windows because:
Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced, nearly universal platform
Although we already said that, but we thought we should say it again because its really important. So is everyone ready to stop wanting choices and merely accept the new hand crafted future built just for us so we can stop working on our own visions because this one is the very bestest and is the one true software we all need because we all need the same software for this to work... blah, blah, blah.
Phew. Ok, breathe... and exhale. Good. We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
I am not trying to say merely having the source code makes it trivial for any coder to come in and make changes. This is why I said you need a 'good' coder. Reading raw source, especially poorly written, and making changes without breaking anything is non-trivial (and thus time consuming, and therefore expensive.) But it can be done and done well by those with the proper mindset, training, and/or experience. I'm sometimes quoted as saying it is just a matter of having the patience and mental acuity to absorb the information and then connecting the dots. Certinaly you will have an easier time just rewriting the bits that don't make sense, and when time is an issue it is, as you say, easier just to start over from scratch. In such a case the source does them just as much good as a compiled binary.
The proper counter argument is that a 'good' hacker could also just rip a compiled binary into a debugger, read and understand the assembler and make the desired changes to it. Which is also true although I believe it is even more non-trivial to work in such a low level computer generated language.
So I'm not trying to say that source code is the holy grail and with it you will have eternal life. For time sensative projects (and what isn't, right?) you need to make changes quickly so it may not be practical to grab OSS and beat on it until it works. However once you've got one in house along with a coder or three that understands it, it becomes a lot faster to make changes to. Add on to that the added benefit of having others working on it who aren't even on the payroll. The only real drawback might be that they also get to draw benefit from the software, but that's not always bad.
On the other hand, most trouble can be solved by groups.google.com, good investigation and troubleshooting, and sometimes an upgrade.
Honestly -- who really uses support?
When you use OSS you don't need to wonder how the software works. Everything it does is spelled out in the source for you. Even with poor or no documentation a good coder can still review the code and understand how it works. That same good coder can then add any features you might need.
So, as you say, you shouldn't need support when you have the source available if you have someone on staff who can read and understand the code. However, like any good coder, you can get stuck, even with the source code on hand. It helps to have someone else to bounce ideas off and I find it really helps when designing new features. I tend to think of lots of different ways to implement new ideas and but have trouble deciding on which is the most 'correct' route to take.
And during those times I call on support. Be they other programmers on staff with me, programmers I used to work with but still keep in contact with, those weird coders I 'met' online, or even that kid who delivers our pizza. Just like your tech support hotline staff they may not know the product I'm working on very well. But their experience in coding or even their common sense might be all I need to get back on course.
So, I tend to use support all the time. Even if I did find some of that support via google groups with some good investigation and troubleshooting skills. It's just not commercial support, which is probably your point anyways.
How about customers?
Those aren't customers, they're hostages and extortion victims. But we still need to convince them that this open source life raft thingy won't sink before they'll jump ship.
Actually it's probably more apt to say they're slaves and we're trying to incite them to overthrow their software overlords. Bolts of lightning from our arse, they can never take our freedom, et cetera.
>Metal detectors in airports I can understand. It's going too far in cinemas.
But... but... we have to treat you like criminals to protect our property! You can't just *not* buy it! How are we suppose to make any money?!?!
*grumble*
If this keeps up we'll have to come up with something that people are actually willing to pay money for.
And in an attempt to stay on topic, I must say I never really got my anime fix from cable. I was hooked early on Macross (not Robotech) and City Hunter and I have just become used to trading/creating fan subs and buying those DVDs that get released with proper subtitles.
Another reason Nintendo releases at different times in different regions is they have a policy of only releasing a game after translating it to the local language, which takes time (some companies release English language games all over Europe).
Nani? And this prevents... uh... what? A misinformed gamer from buying an out of region game and going, "Ah crap! This one's in french! How am I suppose to play it?!" Cuz now when he pops that french disc in his console it just won't boot? "Ah crap! This one is busted! And trying to return broken software sucks cuz the store treats me like some kind of pirate!"
What it prevents is a gamer who knows Japanese from directly buying Japanese games, especially those games that are never released in his region. And preventing sales is good... uh... why? I need to mod my console to play legally purchased games... uh... why?
Back in the day we used to buy Super Famicom games for our SNES. We were told we needed to buy a $20 'converter' which plugged into the SNES and would allow you to play the Famicom games by plugging them into the 'converter'. I was shocked and outraged when it was explained to me that a SNES had the same hardware as a Super Famicom and that the 'converter' didn't actually do anything. The reason you 'needed' the converter was because you couldn't directly plug a Famicom cartridge into a SNES because Nintendo had added a pair of little plastic tabs which prevented you from inserting it completely into the console. After using some pliers to snap off the plastic tabs the cartridge inserted and played just fine.
I would guess that many people have the perception that games are 'for kids' not realizing (or possibly even caring) that many gamers have grown up. As the game attempts to use nudity as a selling point many conservative retailers easily adopt the stance that they will not carry the filthy smut. Tomb Raider games feature an extremely busty main character which is prominently displayed on much of their advertisements but the word nudity or XXX isn't featured anywhere so it slips in under their good taste threshold. These same conservative retailers 'know' that R Rated movies are targeted at adults rather than children, and are therefore safe for sale regardless of content.
This is very similar to the controversy around the first Heavy Metal movie. As an animated film parents first assume it's for kids and are shocked and disgusted to find R rated content, again not realizing (or caring) what the target audience is.
Just don't tell the Vorlons what you're up to. "You are not ready for immortality." - Kosh
You don't understand how a company that sells something other than software might require a programmer? Then I sugest you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond.
I... uh... can't. I understand the concept of trying to sell software to make a living, but I don't support it. I sell my services as a programmer to make a living and give away the code. This is not to say people who sell code are 'bad guys' but I fail to understand how they hope to compete with those commie open source hackers. Sure your start out with an edge and a superior product, but how long are you going to stay that way?
Which, of course, you sum up nicely: The open source community will produce a better alternative under the GPL without using their software. That being said, do they really think they stand to make more money by pushing away the Subversion team? In the short term, maybe, but I think in the long run they just killed themselves. I think the wineX crew handles their PR much better.
Methinks someone wants to make some money...
For the most part the trouble is not 'as of yet undiscovered security flaws' but known problems that go unpatched. Microsoft or otherwise no OS is 100% secure, so what does UCSB hope to gain by 'encouraging' their students to switch? From the article it sounds like they got burned by holes in win2k in the past so now they're afraid of it?
"While we understand that it is possible to run a secure Windows 2000 environment, past history has shown that this rarely happens on ResNet."
So, uh, why not? Sounds like that's going to be your real problem regardless of what OS you enforce. Unless the problem is the school bookstore has more of a markup on 9x and XP than win2k?
*blink* Wow. Thank you for kindly pointing out my complete and utter lack of a clue. I must have missed a fnord or two in the article.
You are certainly correct that Square is not Sony, so I'm not sure why I ignored that very obvious fact while I was crafting my rant. I humbly withdraw my unfounded complaint.