To actually answer him, you can basically just say "I agree", "Doesn't seem so here" or "I don't use Firefox". I think the point with the article is to discuss Firefox 1.0 stability, but I can't see much fun in that. It's extremely system dependant too so someone having it crash numerous times a day may just be spyware infected and have it conflict, a bad driver, or whatever.
I, like some others, suggest this: www.mozillazine.org.
Maybe you're a victim of some bug that's caused by something else in your system. It sounds strange otherwise, since under normal circumstances, I don't really think 1.0 shouldn't crash "often".:-/
I hear the treaty was too strict and costly to implement.
Compared to what? The costs to repair the damages from hurricanes and the ever increasing violent weather? The costs to keep your environment moderately clean? The costs in healthcare?
I'm personally very interested in Guild Wars. Not really a MMORPG except for some aspects, but very little grind, no monthly fees, a lot of content and even more to be released in expansions that *you* decide when to buy and not absolutely necessary to play with those who have the expansions, excellent graphics (see website), Player vs Environment areas, Guild vs Guild areas, Player vs Player arenas, and questing and a decent storyline. Overall a new kind of game genre and I have already pre-ordered the game.:-)
Steam has had this magical feature called "Offline Mode" for months now. You don't have to be online to play Half-Life 2. Just start up the game when you're not connected, and the game will ask you if you want to start up in Offline Mode.
So you have to unplug your connection to avoid any problems at their servers when you want to play single player?
That sounds like an even greater waste of money on MPAA's part than trying to stem piracy on the regular internet since there are so few users on it. But hey, it's their money to waste...
If you're stuck somwhere without a phone or 'net access and you need to install XP, you're up shit crick.
Nope, because MS has a grace period. You don't need to have a mobile phone or something nearby right at that time. And you have to be a pretty poor isolated fella if you can't contact the outer world for over a week / month or whatever it is.
I can't see why people have so hard time accepting this. It's basically just a replacement for a CD key verified by a server. Just more flexible. Since it's an important piece of software.
There's no real point to cracking it if you have a legal version.
Yeah, a big reason is to play single player (many people buy HL2 just for that reason) without having to be connected to the internet.
You'd risk running some hacker's code on your machine just to save -maybe- 10 or 15 seconds
Or being unable to connect at all if their authentication server happens to be down (it's not like it has never happened before), or being delayed as you say, or having to have your network connection ready which can be annoying if you play with a laptop and move around a bit more from your geek cellar.:-)
The worst part is that according to the linked forum, no one says Valve has released a warez version to fool pirates.
End of story, IMHO.
This is the official word:
"We're running a bit of an experiment. We're keeping track of the accounts that do this and will be shutting them off."
Then it's assumed the "experiment" was to release a warez version. The "experiment" can of course be anything, like leaking an invalid key to some IRC channel. But that would be nowhere near spreading a warez version. It could probably mean something else too as "keeping track" is quite ambiguous.
The FileFront guy goes on with
"Therefore, I strongly suggest that you DO NOT participate in these illegal activities as it would only lead to your own harm."
Why, the most common cracked version doesn't even connect to Steam. How would they be able to do anyhting? And if you loose your account, you're free to make a new one. Maybe they ban by IP ranges, but that's risky for dynamic IP's and nothing like that is even mentioned.
Meanwhile, Winamp can't rip and burn CDs unless you pay for the functionality, doesn't provide an easy way to share songs across a network
He wasn't saying it could do this for free, but that he'd like to use third party utilities. There's a lot of great utilities like Exact Audio Copy that I bet has even more features than iTunes' ripper, and comes for free too.
Let HL2 just bypass them. If they still so much want to stop piracy in this foolish way, they can always enable them whenever they wish, right? Like after the initial rush has died down a little. Actually if they had done that from the start, they would've pissed of a whole lot of pirates getting only a sneak peek.:)
"And the beast had returned, appearing as the already reborn great bird, this time throwing a million ads at the unbelievers. For now was the time of redundancy, now was the time of advertising. The followers of Mammon trembled in fear as they gazed upon this horrible clone and its machine of marketing that followed, leaving a trail of discs in its wake."
Recent research pointed out that the majority of domainkey users so far have been spammers, because it makes it more likely they pass the spam filters
However, I doubt this will hold true for long if enough mail providers start supporting it, companies starts registering them, and black lists with "bad domain keys" are created. Yes, it might take a while for all this to happen, but so would it do for many people to accept your suggestion.
If you're unlucky and have a notebook from Acer before October, it's at risk of crashing horribly, for example. Acer said they didn't support SP2 before that date and refuse to give support for any problems caused by their conflicting drivers they didn't fix before SP2 went RTM, by testing with the numerous public SP2 betas.
It also shows MS took some good precationary steps with it, as some recent vulnerbalities that have surfaced doesn't apply to Windows XP SP2. Can't really say much else about it, no crashes, no bugs, no annoyances besides a bit more agressive Windows Update, but I suppose that's necessary when stupid users don't get it.:-P
I use Kerio's firewall instead of Microsoft's (which should really have controls for outgoing traffic) and Firefox instead of IE so these are unused and can't really comment about them.
That's actually a comparison that matches better how I think. Good replayability => fun a longer time => more value in the game since... well, you have fun a longer time. I'd be much more easily convinced of buying a game if I knew it would last for at least a few months rather than a weekend or two of hardcore gaming. But of course, I can have fun with short games too, and it's not the only deciding factor (and why I don't play Tetris all day long).
I'm sure many game developers know this too, otherwise we wouldn't have all these games where the story have different endings depending on how you play the game. RTS games usually have different races you can choose for this reason too, with multiple strategies, and so on. I just think these steps should be taken to FPS games as well, if they haven't already (which was why I asked, I didn't know how HL1 and HL2 played here -- I have only played Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena, and UT2004 in the past, since their replayability comes from the multiplayer factor).
Complex missions, side quests, large open world, as much elements of randomness as possible, multiple character classes playing vastly differently compared to each other, yet fast-paced action with glorious graphics, and so on. Morrowind was kinda cool, but that wasn't really an FPS but an RPG. Too slow and boring for my tastes.:P
Why, I could've been missing out on something great.
Do you only watch movies wich you can watch over and over again?
No, but I think games are different.:-)
I won't bother with making comparisons, but I think games with good replayability last longer so you have fun a longer time with it. Does that make sense to you?
But of course the answer is simple. No half-life 2 is not a endless replay game. It is heavily story based and once you know the story you can only improve your "score" except it doesn't keep a score.
Yeah, I was mostly wondering if that had added elements to the game so it would be able to be completed in several different ways, with several different characters, and so on. Even if it's story based, there's a lot of things you can do to it to increase it's longevity, you know.
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Without virtual desktops GIMP can be... dificult
Yes, that's the problem with GIMP's design when you run it on Windows.
Jeez people, if a story doesn't interest you, DON'T READ IT. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure that out.
Read his post carefully -- he has more to say than that this article doesn't interest him.
I agree, this is a strange article.
To actually answer him, you can basically just say "I agree", "Doesn't seem so here" or "I don't use Firefox". I think the point with the article is to discuss Firefox 1.0 stability, but I can't see much fun in that. It's extremely system dependant too so someone having it crash numerous times a day may just be spyware infected and have it conflict, a bad driver, or whatever.
I, like some others, suggest this:
www.mozillazine.org.
Which is -- no crashes here. :-P
:-/
Maybe you're a victim of some bug that's caused by something else in your system. It sounds strange otherwise, since under normal circumstances, I don't really think 1.0 shouldn't crash "often".
Let's rush into this Kyoto treaty, which will do NOTHING to stop global warming
Huh? Are you saying cutting greenhouse gases doesn't help? Why do you believe this? IMHO, even if it's not a big difference, it's at least a start.
I hear the treaty was too strict and costly to implement.
Compared to what? The costs to repair the damages from hurricanes and the ever increasing violent weather? The costs to keep your environment moderately clean? The costs in healthcare?
I'm personally very interested in Guild Wars. Not really a MMORPG except for some aspects, but very little grind, no monthly fees, a lot of content and even more to be released in expansions that *you* decide when to buy and not absolutely necessary to play with those who have the expansions, excellent graphics (see website), Player vs Environment areas, Guild vs Guild areas, Player vs Player arenas, and questing and a decent storyline. Overall a new kind of game genre and I have already pre-ordered the game. :-)
Steam has had this magical feature called "Offline Mode" for months now. You don't have to be online to play Half-Life 2. Just start up the game when you're not connected, and the game will ask you if you want to start up in Offline Mode.
So you have to unplug your connection to avoid any problems at their servers when you want to play single player?
That sounds like an even greater waste of money on MPAA's part than trying to stem piracy on the regular internet since there are so few users on it. But hey, it's their money to waste...
Apollo 12 lunar surface journal.
Actually, they have all of them and some are pretty good reads.
If you're stuck somwhere without a phone or 'net access and you need to install XP, you're up shit crick.
Nope, because MS has a grace period. You don't need to have a mobile phone or something nearby right at that time. And you have to be a pretty poor isolated fella if you can't contact the outer world for over a week / month or whatever it is.
I can't see why people have so hard time accepting this. It's basically just a replacement for a CD key verified by a server. Just more flexible. Since it's an important piece of software.
There's no real point to cracking it if you have a legal version.
:-)
Yeah, a big reason is to play single player (many people buy HL2 just for that reason) without having to be connected to the internet.
You'd risk running some hacker's code on your machine just to save -maybe- 10 or 15 seconds
Or being unable to connect at all if their authentication server happens to be down (it's not like it has never happened before), or being delayed as you say, or having to have your network connection ready which can be annoying if you play with a laptop and move around a bit more from your geek cellar.
The worst part is that according to the linked forum, no one says Valve has released a warez version to fool pirates.
End of story, IMHO.
This is the official word:
"We're running a bit of an experiment. We're keeping track of the accounts that do this and will be shutting them off."
Then it's assumed the "experiment" was to release a warez version. The "experiment" can of course be anything, like leaking an invalid key to some IRC channel. But that would be nowhere near spreading a warez version. It could probably mean something else too as "keeping track" is quite ambiguous.
The FileFront guy goes on with
"Therefore, I strongly suggest that you DO NOT participate in these illegal activities as it would only lead to your own harm."
Why, the most common cracked version doesn't even connect to Steam. How would they be able to do anyhting? And if you loose your account, you're free to make a new one. Maybe they ban by IP ranges, but that's risky for dynamic IP's and nothing like that is even mentioned.
Meanwhile, Winamp can't rip and burn CDs unless you pay for the functionality, doesn't provide an easy way to share songs across a network
He wasn't saying it could do this for free, but that he'd like to use third party utilities. There's a lot of great utilities like Exact Audio Copy that I bet has even more features than iTunes' ripper, and comes for free too.
Let HL2 just bypass them. If they still so much want to stop piracy in this foolish way, they can always enable them whenever they wish, right? Like after the initial rush has died down a little. Actually if they had done that from the start, they would've pissed of a whole lot of pirates getting only a sneak peek. :)
"And the beast had returned, appearing as the already reborn great bird, this time throwing a million ads at the unbelievers. For now was the time of redundancy, now was the time of advertising. The followers of Mammon trembled in fear as they gazed upon this horrible clone and its machine of marketing that followed, leaving a trail of discs in its wake."
Recent research pointed out that the majority of domainkey users so far have been spammers, because it makes it more likely they pass the spam filters
However, I doubt this will hold true for long if enough mail providers start supporting it, companies starts registering them, and black lists with "bad domain keys" are created. Yes, it might take a while for all this to happen, but so would it do for many people to accept your suggestion.
Gmail already support DomainKeys too.
And, of course, nowhere in the story or in his post is any contact information to be found. :-/
Hopefully, this one works well: volkerdi_at_slackware.com.
The best would of course be a phone number. He needs help now. But being the geek he is, he'll read the mail ASAP.
It can depend a lot on your hardware.
If you're unlucky and have a notebook from Acer before October, it's at risk of crashing horribly, for example. Acer said they didn't support SP2 before that date and refuse to give support for any problems caused by their conflicting drivers they didn't fix before SP2 went RTM, by testing with the numerous public SP2 betas.
It also shows MS took some good precationary steps with it, as some recent vulnerbalities that have surfaced doesn't apply to Windows XP SP2. Can't really say much else about it, no crashes, no bugs, no annoyances besides a bit more agressive Windows Update, but I suppose that's necessary when stupid users don't get it. :-P
I use Kerio's firewall instead of Microsoft's (which should really have controls for outgoing traffic) and Firefox instead of IE so these are unused and can't really comment about them.
That's actually a comparison that matches better how I think. Good replayability => fun a longer time => more value in the game since... well, you have fun a longer time. I'd be much more easily convinced of buying a game if I knew it would last for at least a few months rather than a weekend or two of hardcore gaming. But of course, I can have fun with short games too, and it's not the only deciding factor (and why I don't play Tetris all day long).
:P
I'm sure many game developers know this too, otherwise we wouldn't have all these games where the story have different endings depending on how you play the game. RTS games usually have different races you can choose for this reason too, with multiple strategies, and so on. I just think these steps should be taken to FPS games as well, if they haven't already (which was why I asked, I didn't know how HL1 and HL2 played here -- I have only played Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena, and UT2004 in the past, since their replayability comes from the multiplayer factor).
Complex missions, side quests, large open world, as much elements of randomness as possible, multiple character classes playing vastly differently compared to each other, yet fast-paced action with glorious graphics, and so on. Morrowind was kinda cool, but that wasn't really an FPS but an RPG. Too slow and boring for my tastes.
Don't bother.
:-)
:-)
Why, I could've been missing out on something great.
Do you only watch movies wich you can watch over and over again?
No, but I think games are different.
I won't bother with making comparisons, but I think games with good replayability last longer so you have fun a longer time with it. Does that make sense to you?
But of course the answer is simple. No half-life 2 is not a endless replay game. It is heavily story based and once you know the story you can only improve your "score" except it doesn't keep a score.
Yeah, I was mostly wondering if that had added elements to the game so it would be able to be completed in several different ways, with several different characters, and so on. Even if it's story based, there's a lot of things you can do to it to increase it's longevity, you know.
Go play tetris.
Hate the game.
Do not underestimate the power of the RFC 1149. They need careful fine tuning, but if done right, the results are mind boggling. :-)
Is there any?
:-/
I didn't play HL1, but think that while the single player mode is great and pretty, I fear it gets worn out pretty quickly?
A major factor when I buy games is nowadays is the amount of replayability.