They made everything better. AND they sold the Sizzle, not the steak.
This is what the haters will never understand. All they see is 6oz bacon wrapped Filet, and say "I could do that cheaper" after looking at the $60 price tag. But what they mean is they can do a 12 oz Flank Steak on a BBQ for $6. It isn't the same.
So they cut the filet into 12 pieces and wrapped it in plastic. I don't see how they can patent this since the product is still the same.
One of the reports we were given has stated that the DSL modem variant of the DNSChanger Zlob trojan actually updates the firmware and it will effectively brick the modem when the FBI shuts its servers down.
That's between you, your isp and the modem manufacturer to resolve. Not the FBI.
2. Offer a refund to Linux users and apologize for wasting their time (remember, "no one plays games on Linux", so this shouldn't shouldn't cost them anything).
Offering a refund removes one of the few penalties for people who cheat the system for as long as they can before they get caught. In Blizzard's cat and mouse game of catching EULA infringers, the only way Blizzard can win is if they catch them before they make $60 from their exploits.
Blizzard could spend the extra time to investigate every single banning to see how bad it was (botting is obviously worse than playing on Linux), but why? They already have their Terms of Use and Policies which plainly say that you are not supposed to run the game in any manner that Blizzard did not intend. And I don't remember seeing any hint of Linux support on the box.
They already do a lot of research. There are false positive though and if you're banned you can contact Blizzard and will be unbanned. It's happened in Wow where you transfer ungodly amounts of gold in a short period of time. They would put a 3 day ban on your account assuming you were compromised. One phone call and it was fixed immediately.
When they banned for the Archaeology bot they waited 2 weeks before banning people. Blizzard figured out the bot, put the intelligence in to catch people, gathered up about 20k people and banned them all. My idiot friend was banned for it and it took him a week to admit it to me after begging Blizzard over the phone that he was improperly banned.
If you're unjustly banned you contact Blizzard and work with their escalations team. You don't go to the press and write an article about Linux users being banned for using Wine. That's definite proof imho that they were guilty.
I always defended WoW's subscription model on the basis that your purchase of the game and its expansions covered "sunk" development costs and your subs covered the ongoing cost of maintaining and incrementally enhancing the game.
Based on what Blizzard said a few years ago, the subscriptions are almost pure profit when considering WoW by itself. $200 million in 2008 would have covered four years of operation/maintenance, plus the costs of developing the Burning Crusade and Lich King expansions, all covered by two months' worth of subscription income.
Also, the impressive early numbers for D3 are largely an illusion, IMO. Lots and lots of those "sales" were freebies for people that committed to a full year of WoW subscriptions, and from Blizzard's perspective I'd argue that locking in that additional $1.2 billion or so in income was far more important than the income they'd have received from paid D3 sales. Lots of people were not happy with Cataclysm, and D3 offered Blizzard an additional way to maintain those WoW subscriptions in the face of that dissatisfaction while waiting for the release of Mists of Pandaria.
6.5 million were sold in the first 2 weeks worldwide. The free copies given by the Wow Annual Pass did *not* count in those numbers.
I have no reason not to trust Blizzard. The gold farming community is so big that every time they lose a method of exploiting for gold, they attack Blizzard. They've been on a campaign to debunk the authenticator since it came out because it eliminates a large chunk of their user base who they exploit.
So of course, a few gold farmers got banned and they try to make this as news that Linux is not allowed. Misdirecting the responsibility and the problem. That's what they do. Lie, cheat, steal, profit and repeat.
I have two friends that have been botting in D3 for about 2.5 weeks and they just got banned (Windows). Serves them right. One of them was banned in Wow for nearly the same activity.
This argument has been bandied about for almost a decade, now. Simply, the market base for Linux users is simply too small (and the subset of that contingency that uses Wine for gaming is even smaller yet) for any conglomerate consideration of that markets buying power to matter worth a damn to any of the large studios.
Small indie houses, maybe. But nobody is going to go out of business not selling to the Wine userbase.
The reality of the situation sucks, but given past trends, it's safe to conclude at this point that it will never change.
It's the truth. There really is no profitable market for Linux gaming. Of all the Linux users who actually play games, half will cite "Software should be Free" and won't spend a penny. 25% would rather boot to Windows for maximum performance and the final 25% will purchase the game.
With lack of driver support for Video card articles being posted once a week it's a surprise anyone really believes Linux gaming will be a reality.
So you're deeply ashamed of who you are and don't have courage or the conviction to own up to your life?
For a second there I thought you were some sort of dissident in a third world nation or corporate whistleblower.
No. Society is so damn judgmental that is forces people to conceal things about themselves. If I told you I played with Gi-Joe action figures at age 42 would you still go the clubs with me to pick up single ladies? No. If I jerked off to porn 8 times a day would you want to date me? Probably not. If I watch Rainbow Brite and Jem on Saturdays, would you find me strange?
These are things that could be private to someone that is 100% normal in the privacy of your home. But when introduced into the public eye you will be ridiculed for it. If you say you don't do anything weird than you're either lying or you life a poor life. Something you don't wish to share as well. Privacy 101. You don't understand it until it's been breached.
Apple's market share is 66% for all personal computers sold in stores for more than $1,000. In addition, Apple's market share as been increasing as sales of PCs as a whole have been dropping.
That's because most Windows PC's are less than $1000. We don't pay the $2-300 extra for the Apple tax. My completely decked out PC was $1300 and had twice the computing power of an Mac of the same price. So of course an entry level model will not register in the $1000+ market.
Replying to my own ftw. It's funny how many people put up with this crap with Linux. When it's Windows it could be a 10,000 page thread bitching about the evil Microsoft. But when Linux does it, it's assumed as something natural and innovative because its open source. You can't have it both ways...
There's a reason why all my Linux boxes except the oldest one have either Nvidia or Intel graphics. In the case of the old one I had to manually patch the ATI driver kludge source because ATI dropped support and a kernel change broke it.
So, not a penny of my IT budget has gone to ATI since 2008 because their drivers aren't very good and they don't support them.
A kernel change broke it for a card 4 years old? So the driver worked fine until Linus broke it? The biggest problem here is there is no standard for changes make by the kernel team. They have ultimate power and break anything they want, forcing companies to change.
Microsoft does this also but only on major revisions of their OS. Windows XP, Vista, 7, etc. If Microsoft broke video drivers once a month when Windows updates came out there would be an uproar as well.
Would you care to explain how AMD/ATI's revenue is different because I choose to use Linux instead of windows?
I still paid the same amount of money for the card.
Furthermore, we all know for a fact (because it's happened for every other piece of hardware) that if they released the details needed for the Linux community to write it's own drivers, they'd never have to write another one for Linux, ever, AND they would benefit from being able to take the concepts and optimizations created by the Linux community and fold them into their windows drivers.
Statistics show that people aren't going to go out and spend $500 on a nice video card to display X on Linux. The high powered video cards are for games and gaming is non-existent on Linux. So their revenue is directly affected by drivers working *great* when gaming on Windows. Successful gaming equals new cards purchased in the future.
If the Linux community could optimize OpenGL to compete with Directx you might have a solid argument. But OpenGL is slow, buggy and doesn't compete so why would AMD/Nvidia have any interest in the input of the open source community on their drivers?
What leeches? The drivers don't cost the user anything extra (far as I know?). If I've already paid for the hardware, I expect drivers that work and support all the functionality, and there is no valid excuse for any hardware manufacturer to withhold them.
They do work on the hardware listed on the box when you purchased it.
Century link? don't you mean Quest? or Qwest? or USWest? or maybe southern pacific telco? or maybe Sprint? Yea, WTF, the name change so we won't remember how crappy they were is getting a little stupid. The only time I've ever had service from them, they charged me for 6 months of DSL that i never ordered or received.
They installed Fiber in my city, came door to door, got my wife all excited to save $150 a month in cable/internet services. I looked up their website and saw it was originally QWEST and said no effing way. Uswest is the devil!
Most people using IE7 are probably stuck with it at work or on a work laptop and can't do anything about it, so I doubt it will "encourage" much upgrading unfortunately.
Then maybe they should shop at home if they don't want to pay extra?
So what implications does this have for proprietary mobile browsers? Companies can suddenly decide, 'fuck it, I'll just charge them more for not using my browser of choice'?
Whilst nobody cares about IE7, the wider implications of this are potentially pretty onerous.
If you're too lazy to either upgrade your browser, or use a different one supporting standards, they will charge an IE7 tax. It's not like changing to a modern browser takes effort. XP loses paid support soon so that means IE7 is not supported.
They don't provide direct technical support for betas. That's nothing new in the industry. It's a beta for a reason. Provide a bug report with details and hope it will be fixed in the next build of the installer. Blizzard isn't obligated to support your specific configuration during beta.
You missed the three most important reasons: because Blizzard has violated your property rights by performing a technological end-run around the First Sale Doctrine, because your property will eventually evaporate when (not if) Blizzard turns the servers off, and because Blizzard has stolen it from it's rightful eventual place in the Public Domain.
Just like the Diablo 2 servers and characters have gone offline? Oh wait, 12 years later they are still running. In another year the current OS and two OS's following them, which D2 was designed to work under will be end of life.
I disagree. I see no value in the DRM, and see no reason that it always has to be online. To me, Blizzard's reasons and excuses are clearly nonsense.
It's not DRM. Requiring you to use their servers to play the game equates to hacking protection. This isn't DRM. Is World of Warcraft DRM based now also? No.
Yes, you can play solo, but that is not the intention of how the game is supposed to be played.
It does not matter how they intended the game to be played. What matters is how the player (the one who actually owns the game) wishes to play it, and there happens to be a single player made (playing alone, single player mode, whatever you wish to call it).
No, it really doesn't matter. If you choose to play counterstrike alone with bots, it's not a single player game. If you play Wow and never once group with a human, it's not a single player game. Just because you close all the doors to social interaction and make D3 appear to be single player, it doesn't make it a single player game.
Slashdot Mirror
They made everything better. AND they sold the Sizzle, not the steak.
This is what the haters will never understand. All they see is 6oz bacon wrapped Filet, and say "I could do that cheaper" after looking at the $60 price tag. But what they mean is they can do a 12 oz Flank Steak on a BBQ for $6. It isn't the same.
So they cut the filet into 12 pieces and wrapped it in plastic. I don't see how they can patent this since the product is still the same.
One of the reports we were given has stated that the DSL modem variant of the DNSChanger Zlob trojan actually updates the firmware and it will effectively brick the modem when the FBI shuts its servers down.
That's between you, your isp and the modem manufacturer to resolve. Not the FBI.
2. Offer a refund to Linux users and apologize for wasting their time (remember, "no one plays games on Linux", so this shouldn't shouldn't cost them anything).
Offering a refund removes one of the few penalties for people who cheat the system for as long as they can before they get caught. In Blizzard's cat and mouse game of catching EULA infringers, the only way Blizzard can win is if they catch them before they make $60 from their exploits.
Blizzard could spend the extra time to investigate every single banning to see how bad it was (botting is obviously worse than playing on Linux), but why? They already have their Terms of Use and Policies which plainly say that you are not supposed to run the game in any manner that Blizzard did not intend. And I don't remember seeing any hint of Linux support on the box.
They already do a lot of research. There are false positive though and if you're banned you can contact Blizzard and will be unbanned. It's happened in Wow where you transfer ungodly amounts of gold in a short period of time. They would put a 3 day ban on your account assuming you were compromised. One phone call and it was fixed immediately. When they banned for the Archaeology bot they waited 2 weeks before banning people. Blizzard figured out the bot, put the intelligence in to catch people, gathered up about 20k people and banned them all. My idiot friend was banned for it and it took him a week to admit it to me after begging Blizzard over the phone that he was improperly banned. If you're unjustly banned you contact Blizzard and work with their escalations team. You don't go to the press and write an article about Linux users being banned for using Wine. That's definite proof imho that they were guilty.
I always defended WoW's subscription model on the basis that your purchase of the game and its expansions covered "sunk" development costs and your subs covered the ongoing cost of maintaining and incrementally enhancing the game. Based on what Blizzard said a few years ago, the subscriptions are almost pure profit when considering WoW by itself. $200 million in 2008 would have covered four years of operation/maintenance, plus the costs of developing the Burning Crusade and Lich King expansions, all covered by two months' worth of subscription income. Also, the impressive early numbers for D3 are largely an illusion, IMO. Lots and lots of those "sales" were freebies for people that committed to a full year of WoW subscriptions, and from Blizzard's perspective I'd argue that locking in that additional $1.2 billion or so in income was far more important than the income they'd have received from paid D3 sales. Lots of people were not happy with Cataclysm, and D3 offered Blizzard an additional way to maintain those WoW subscriptions in the face of that dissatisfaction while waiting for the release of Mists of Pandaria.
6.5 million were sold in the first 2 weeks worldwide. The free copies given by the Wow Annual Pass did *not* count in those numbers.
I have no reason not to trust Blizzard. The gold farming community is so big that every time they lose a method of exploiting for gold, they attack Blizzard. They've been on a campaign to debunk the authenticator since it came out because it eliminates a large chunk of their user base who they exploit. So of course, a few gold farmers got banned and they try to make this as news that Linux is not allowed. Misdirecting the responsibility and the problem. That's what they do. Lie, cheat, steal, profit and repeat. I have two friends that have been botting in D3 for about 2.5 weeks and they just got banned (Windows). Serves them right. One of them was banned in Wow for nearly the same activity.
You could rollback your client and cancel your Auction but you could not receive gold. There's been no proof of this yet.
This argument has been bandied about for almost a decade, now. Simply, the market base for Linux users is simply too small (and the subset of that contingency that uses Wine for gaming is even smaller yet) for any conglomerate consideration of that markets buying power to matter worth a damn to any of the large studios.
Small indie houses, maybe. But nobody is going to go out of business not selling to the Wine userbase.
The reality of the situation sucks, but given past trends, it's safe to conclude at this point that it will never change.
It's the truth. There really is no profitable market for Linux gaming. Of all the Linux users who actually play games, half will cite "Software should be Free" and won't spend a penny. 25% would rather boot to Windows for maximum performance and the final 25% will purchase the game. With lack of driver support for Video card articles being posted once a week it's a surprise anyone really believes Linux gaming will be a reality.
So you're deeply ashamed of who you are and don't have courage or the conviction to own up to your life?
For a second there I thought you were some sort of dissident in a third world nation or corporate whistleblower.
No. Society is so damn judgmental that is forces people to conceal things about themselves. If I told you I played with Gi-Joe action figures at age 42 would you still go the clubs with me to pick up single ladies? No. If I jerked off to porn 8 times a day would you want to date me? Probably not. If I watch Rainbow Brite and Jem on Saturdays, would you find me strange? These are things that could be private to someone that is 100% normal in the privacy of your home. But when introduced into the public eye you will be ridiculed for it. If you say you don't do anything weird than you're either lying or you life a poor life. Something you don't wish to share as well. Privacy 101. You don't understand it until it's been breached.
Apple's market share is 66% for all personal computers sold in stores for more than $1,000. In addition, Apple's market share as been increasing as sales of PCs as a whole have been dropping.
That's because most Windows PC's are less than $1000. We don't pay the $2-300 extra for the Apple tax. My completely decked out PC was $1300 and had twice the computing power of an Mac of the same price. So of course an entry level model will not register in the $1000+ market.
IIRC, the claim was that Macs were immune to "Windows viruses".
Which is 100% incorrect. If you run bootcamp and get infected then your Mac is not immune.
HP, Dell, Acer, and whoever else they can recruit should pledge $1 million for REACTOS development.
http://reactos.org
Windows 8: enough of this foolishness.
Only 1 million? That might get you a boot loader.
Replying to my own ftw. It's funny how many people put up with this crap with Linux. When it's Windows it could be a 10,000 page thread bitching about the evil Microsoft. But when Linux does it, it's assumed as something natural and innovative because its open source. You can't have it both ways...
Why should they support Linux leeches?
There's a reason why all my Linux boxes except the oldest one have either Nvidia or Intel graphics. In the case of the old one I had to manually patch the ATI driver kludge source because ATI dropped support and a kernel change broke it.
So, not a penny of my IT budget has gone to ATI since 2008 because their drivers aren't very good and they don't support them.
A kernel change broke it for a card 4 years old? So the driver worked fine until Linus broke it? The biggest problem here is there is no standard for changes make by the kernel team. They have ultimate power and break anything they want, forcing companies to change. Microsoft does this also but only on major revisions of their OS. Windows XP, Vista, 7, etc. If Microsoft broke video drivers once a month when Windows updates came out there would be an uproar as well.
Would you care to explain how AMD/ATI's revenue is different because I choose to use Linux instead of windows? I still paid the same amount of money for the card.
Furthermore, we all know for a fact (because it's happened for every other piece of hardware) that if they released the details needed for the Linux community to write it's own drivers, they'd never have to write another one for Linux, ever, AND they would benefit from being able to take the concepts and optimizations created by the Linux community and fold them into their windows drivers.
Statistics show that people aren't going to go out and spend $500 on a nice video card to display X on Linux. The high powered video cards are for games and gaming is non-existent on Linux. So their revenue is directly affected by drivers working *great* when gaming on Windows. Successful gaming equals new cards purchased in the future. If the Linux community could optimize OpenGL to compete with Directx you might have a solid argument. But OpenGL is slow, buggy and doesn't compete so why would AMD/Nvidia have any interest in the input of the open source community on their drivers?
What leeches? The drivers don't cost the user anything extra (far as I know?). If I've already paid for the hardware, I expect drivers that work and support all the functionality, and there is no valid excuse for any hardware manufacturer to withhold them.
They do work on the hardware listed on the box when you purchased it.
The probe will return in 150 years, alone with chaotic thoughts and images causing people to go insane.
Century link? don't you mean Quest? or Qwest? or USWest? or maybe southern pacific telco? or maybe Sprint? Yea, WTF, the name change so we won't remember how crappy they were is getting a little stupid. The only time I've ever had service from them, they charged me for 6 months of DSL that i never ordered or received.
They installed Fiber in my city, came door to door, got my wife all excited to save $150 a month in cable/internet services. I looked up their website and saw it was originally QWEST and said no effing way. Uswest is the devil!
Thinking it over, I suspect that Verizon is about to prove that yes, consumers really are that stupid.
After all, they've been raping their customers for years, almost at will and whim. What makes 'em think that anything will change now?
You're just figuring this out? Wait and see exactly how stupid people are when a million of the new macbooks are sold.
Most people using IE7 are probably stuck with it at work or on a work laptop and can't do anything about it, so I doubt it will "encourage" much upgrading unfortunately.
Then maybe they should shop at home if they don't want to pay extra?
So what implications does this have for proprietary mobile browsers? Companies can suddenly decide, 'fuck it, I'll just charge them more for not using my browser of choice'? Whilst nobody cares about IE7, the wider implications of this are potentially pretty onerous.
If you're too lazy to either upgrade your browser, or use a different one supporting standards, they will charge an IE7 tax. It's not like changing to a modern browser takes effort. XP loses paid support soon so that means IE7 is not supported.
They don't provide direct technical support for betas. That's nothing new in the industry. It's a beta for a reason. Provide a bug report with details and hope it will be fixed in the next build of the installer. Blizzard isn't obligated to support your specific configuration during beta.
Blizzard provides better game support than any OS on the market!
You missed the three most important reasons: because Blizzard has violated your property rights by performing a technological end-run around the First Sale Doctrine, because your property will eventually evaporate when (not if) Blizzard turns the servers off, and because Blizzard has stolen it from it's rightful eventual place in the Public Domain.
Just like the Diablo 2 servers and characters have gone offline? Oh wait, 12 years later they are still running. In another year the current OS and two OS's following them, which D2 was designed to work under will be end of life.
You are both just being pedantic, really.
I disagree. I see no value in the DRM, and see no reason that it always has to be online. To me, Blizzard's reasons and excuses are clearly nonsense.
It's not DRM. Requiring you to use their servers to play the game equates to hacking protection. This isn't DRM. Is World of Warcraft DRM based now also? No.
Yes, you can play solo, but that is not the intention of how the game is supposed to be played.
It does not matter how they intended the game to be played. What matters is how the player (the one who actually owns the game) wishes to play it, and there happens to be a single player made (playing alone, single player mode, whatever you wish to call it).
No, it really doesn't matter. If you choose to play counterstrike alone with bots, it's not a single player game. If you play Wow and never once group with a human, it's not a single player game. Just because you close all the doors to social interaction and make D3 appear to be single player, it doesn't make it a single player game.