Could someone out there point out to me a good place to sum up all of the recent LOTR games? I can't remember who's making what game or what they're based off of (i.e., the FOTR game based off of the books, the FOTR game based off the movie, the FOTR game based off of the breakfast cereal, etc.)
Also, how is it that so many people are making so many games based off of LOTR? How is it EA didn't sew them all up?
This means that it is impossible to build a non-MS piece of software that can read.doc files that your clients will invariably send.
Have you even messed with Office 2003? Or read up on it? It can save to a multitude of file formats - old versions of Word, an XML document, and the Office 2003 format, the only one for which IRM (Information Rights Management) is an option. I've made a document in Word 2003, saved it to the XML format, then popped it open with XMLSPY. Sure, like every other Microsoft paradigm it's seemingly needlessly complicated, but it's not impossible.
Also - something people gloss over - the IRM in Office 2003 is dependent on Windows Server 2003. You have to connect to a WS2K3 machine to use it. The beta version doesn't have this in place yet, so it uses Passport for the time being, but it's not as simple as Zip file passwords where the encrypting is self contained - you have to connect to a configured Windows Server in order to use it. It's hardly simple enough for the minimum wage secratary to accidentally password protect a document and forget what password she used. It's more like the secratary forgetting her Exchange password - the local sysadmin can help.
Pet Peeve #843287: SUV drivers that whine about the price of gas. You bought that overpriced penis extension, learn to live with the consequences.
Well, when my Wife's turn came around to get a new vehicle, she insisted on getting a Ford Explorer. I guess I have a whole new round of questions for her now...
This guy has an agenda and he needs to be watched out for.
One niggling point - is it an "agenda" when all you want to do is get rich off of suing game makers over and over?
Better question - how is it that he makes any money if he keeps losing?
Of course the best question is - what is the agenda really? Does he want the fame? (for a later political career) The money? Or does he honestly believe that everyone else is wrong?
I've still got one of those 1702 monitors - they're great. Monitors (little televisions, essentially). Still holds up better than most televisions I've ever owned. In the front you could hook up standard A/V RCA cables and use it as a television. The back had two separate ports for video since the C64 split up the signal (luma/chroma, I think).
My take is this - I used to buy a lot of CD's. Back when I was in High School and on my parents' dime. Then for a long time (throughout College and for a few years after) I didn't buy CD's - I couldn't afford to. Plus I discovered MP3 - free music, free CD's. Now I have enough money to buy CD's again, and I always kinda figured I'd get back into the habit or buy the really good albums as payback - but I don't and I haven't. The main reason? I'm not interested. Most music isn't aimed towards me anymore and I couldn't care less. If they completely eradicated MP3 tommorow I still wouldn't buy CD's - my money is better spent elsewhere in my opinion. Perhaps that's what the RIAA is really afraid of - that we'll get distracted enough to not come back.
Right, so if this game is out at the end of this month, is there any way to get a demo of it?
Probably not, if they have 26 more days to get it to market and they're still playtesting and pondering issues like this.
But how about a one level test? By this I mean - not a demo to get people to buy the game, but rather something running on the Source engine to see whether or not this stupid thing will even run on your system. Make it one of the scientist guys taking you through a tour of some of the things the engine will do, and maybe he could even reccomend ways to uprade your system for better performance. Hell, ATI or whoever could sponsor it.
I just don't want to buy it and then discover I have to upgrade to run worth a damn.
Nintendo has already let Mario, Luigi and Zelda to be stars in third party games, see Mario is Missing for the PC, Mario Typist (also for the PC), and Mario Hotel and Zelda for the CD-I.
Mario is Missing and Mario Typist were "educational" titles (not sure what Missing is educating you on) so it's less of a big deal that they were on the PC. As for the CD-I titles, Nintendo had inked a deal with Phillips to make a SNES CD-ROM drive, but when that deal, like the Sony deal before it, went south, Phillips got to use some Nintendo characters in CD-I games.
But yeah, Nintendo farming out franchises is a newer phonomenon.
I think the previous Harry Potter game was pretty good actually and it wasn't made to promote the movie, that's the same as saying the book was written to promote the movie.
If a game came out to promote Order of the Phoenix then this would be true - but make no mistake, the recent games out at the same time as the movie are indeed movie tie-ins. And a closer analogy - the mass market standard sized paperbacks released alongside the movies are made to promote the movies.
What they're really trying to say is "we want people who have worked with the beta" which is ironic since the people out there who have worked with the beta are way out of their price range.
music industry will want to send their songs in this new format, so noone can copy them
I'd love to see how you're thinking of distributing music as a Word document. Besides, like any other DRM format, it will get largely ignored in favor of MP3 or OGG, which we'll always have so long as there are CD's (which will always be cracked/ripped)
And while you're at it, there's only a handful of people downloading MP3's and destroying the music industry, so we need to eradicate this menace out of existence.
Wrong. I don't like it, my boss sends me a protected document anyway. Should I just ignore that document?
OK, got me on that technicaliy. In this case "anyone" refers to any organization that chooses to use it or not, which would override "you" if you're employed by that organization. "You" can either do what your boss says or quit.
Now, if we had a culture of doing the right thing, being honest and trusting, then there would be no issue with having such DRM capabilities being built into an office software package... Of course, that kind of feature would never be used in such a world as there wouldn't be any reaon, if people could be trusted.
So you're saying because a handful of companies are doing bad things and snooping secrataries break the rules and could save the day we shouldn't implement this feature? There's tons of perfectly legitimate uses for this technology and anyone who doesn't like it can go use OO or just ignore the feature.
Besides, Kenneth Lay didn't have a clue what was going on in Enron (or so his PR firm says) - what makes you think he'd be smart enough to use this feature?
I tried that. At some point my NAV didn't "register" with LiveUpdate and it was I was too lazy to figure out how to fix it, so I manually updated via that Intelligent Updater, but then it told me I couldn't update since my subcription had expired.
I suspect at one point it was possible to do this but Symantec caught on. Unless you're currently doing it - care to share the secret?
I own Norton SystemWorks 2002 and I noticed that there's no CD key, no activation, etc. Consequently, while it says the subscription to virus updates lasts a year and has to be renewed, it's from whenever the product is installed - and it has no way of ensuring when that is. For example, if you reformat your hard drive before a year is up and reinstall it, that year starts from then. There's no way for it to tell you've installed it before.
Of course last week when the SoBig/Blaster fiasco was in full bloom my subscription expired and I figured it was worth $15 to not have to reformat/reinstall.
Also, I've had no complaints with NAV - the times I've tried to use McAfee I've gotten fucked. And then every job I've had uses McAfee. Hmmmmm...
Do not stop the chain using your hands or gentials.
I took a course in college outlining liability laws and the like. I don't recall why.
Let's say you make a lawnmower and you include warnings on it like "don't cut off your toes" and such. But then someone gets the bright idea to pick it up with their hands while it's on and trim their hedges with it, and winds up severing their fingers. Are you liable? Well, if no one's ever done it before then no, since it was unforseeable that someone out there would do that.
What happens when the next person severs their fingers. Are you liable? Yes, since it's not unforseeable anymore. Now you're liable unless you put a sticker or somesuch telling people not to do that.
So who was it, I wonder, who tried to stop a chainsaw with their dick and sued?
Well as it has been stated above, the actual cost is $1.25 per credit hour, so if you take 15 hours then that's $18.75 a semester. If we take that to be the average and multiply it by the 42,000 students Texas A&M has, then that's $787,500 per semester, or $1,575,000 per year (not including summer school). Plus the one-time $5 per CD fee, so let's say the 6,000 annual incoming freshmen buy at least Windows XP and Office XP and that's another $60,000 right there.
Microsoft may be many things, but ultimately they're not stupid.
On top of that, our CS department just got rid of our solaris lab for a microsoft ".net" lab. It's irritating how much force microsoft is exerting.
Well the other side of that coin is the fact that college has to prepare you for what the "real world" uses - which is why your high school runs Macs but your university runs PC's. The trick of course is in predicting what the real world will be using in the future - the converse of what I experienced in middle school: how to run an Apple ][.
When A&M's CS department decided to switch a lot of their curriculum to Java in 1997 or so, lots of people were livid, since Java was seen as a way to make buzzing web pages, and web pages were not seen as something neccessarily useful. But I've heard a prediction that in five years, 40% of the world's actively written (i.e., not just maintained) code will be in Java, 40% will be in.NET, and 20% other - by switching to.net, colleges are trying to prepare students for what's going to be out there.
Plus, in many cases, Windows development is where the money is at and colleges have to be able to adapt to that. Linux may be better technology but Red Hat doesn't take 5,000 developers out to lunch. Ask most college freshmen and they'll tell you to take your principles and stick it - they want the career path with the most money.
I worked for Texas A&M when they went to this system. I don't recall exactly but I'm pretty sure that the Office CD wasn't an upgrade. The OS CD may have been, but that might have been so that the students wouldn't have to blow away their existing OS install. Either way shafts people. If you fail out of the University you don't get to keep the software (or at the very least you wind up a EULA violator), but graduate and you geet to keep the software.
If memory serves, the cost for each student was something like $50 per semester, or $5 per credit hour or something like that. This is in addition to the $5 per CD, so if you want WinXP it's $5 for the CD, VS.NET was $25 for the 5 CD's. Financially, it works out best for people about to graduate.
And at A&M the students voted it in. There was a referendum and everything. To put it in perspective, say it was a $5 per credit hour increase - we had just passed a $30 per credit hour fee increase and people raised bloody hell. I was even in charge of writing the code to select all the students "grandfathered" against that fee when they decided only to hand it to incoming freshmen and certian other students with this bizarre algorithm.
But at a major university, you've got to remember who's paying. Many of the kids are there on their parents' nickel, and they see anything on the bill as something they won't have to see or mess with. It's kinda the same mentality of paying for something with a credit card - anything that's not out of pocket is seen as "free" (no surprise then that credit card companies often target college students).
No, it's only the students that either have restrictive scholarships or are paying for everything themselves through financial aid or out of pocket that raise issues - and they're voted down by the majority of the students. Ultimately it boils down to college being expensive in any event.
But on the other side of the coin, to some degree we all know piracy is rampant on college campuses, and students instinct is not to go to free (as in GPL) software. Your parents buy you a Dell but it has XP Home and you need XP Pro to join a domain. No problem, find the guy with the XP Pro Corporate God edition to upgrade your system. Get Office XP Pro and VS.NET while you're at it (even though you're an English major and will never need VS.NET ever). Now Microsoft is offering you the opportunity to not be a dirty pirate for the low price of $5 a CD and some fees you'll never see because the bill goes to your folks.
So let's say you take 15 hours a semester - two semesters times $5 per credit hour is $150, plus a one-time $5 per CD fee. VS.NET alone is over a thousand dollars (though in all fairness not everyone needs it). By your numbers, you would have to be in college for over ten years to rack up $2000 in these MS fees.
Yeah well, not being from the US (North America)I never quite understood that tradition, for ten grand I knew better things to do than buy a ring.
I read a story about this, posted by some other Slashdot Poster a long time ago. Since I didn't bookmark it, I'll just regurgitate it as best I remember. No warranties against urban legendry (Snopes pulls up nothing on this one)
At one point in time it was the status quo that women didn't have premarital sex, ever. To have any was seen as being a harlot. Consequently, the only way for men to get sex was to be married.
What would often happen though is that after a man and woman got engaged the woman would bend the rules a bit and they'd have a go at it. However, it didn't take long for men to find the loophole (no pun intended) in this plan - just get "engaged", shag, then ditch. As a result, someone (may have been the women, could have been the fathers) came up with this idea - an engagement ring, valued at two months salary (who's salary I'm not sure). This way if the guy did try and split, he was at least leaving behind a significant financial investment. This shifted the paradigm from "gullible woman" to "dumbass guy".
See here's the rub - the average person thinks "we have poverty, no cure for cancer, we need better schools, better paid teachers... (etc.)" and then NASA says they want to put a man on Mars for the tiny sum of, say, $400 billion dollars (I think that was the number at some point). Oh and it will take like four years to send someone there (and four years to get them back) while at the same time we've lost unmanned probes on their way there and we have 16-day missions end in tragedy. The average person will say let's not go to Mars, and instead let's spend that money on domestic issues. Once you get the kids educated, the cancer cured, the projects fixed and the teachers paid, I'm sure that we'll all want to go explore space, but until then there's more pressing issues to spend money on.
And I have to say I agree with them.
Plus another thing is that we all realize the cool shit we see in things like Star Trek will only happen if we start exploring now - but we all realize it'll never happen within our lifetimes - maybe not even in our great grandkids'. Meanwhile we have issues today that need solving. This is why people don't want us to spend more money on the space program.
the NASA seeemed to spend a lot (several $100k) to develop a ballpen which could be used upside down in space. the russians used to use pencils at $0.1/piece...
That's actually an urban legend (and a particularly persistent one - it was on The West Wing even). Basically it boils down to the Fisher pen company volunteering to develop a pen which would work in space's conditions for NASA, in return they got to advertise their pen as "developed for the Space Program!" (which was a bigger deal in 1967 than it would be today). It worked better than pencils since pencils break easily and create debris - a problem in zero gravity.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, how is it that so many people are making so many games based off of LOTR? How is it EA didn't sew them all up?
Also - something people gloss over - the IRM in Office 2003 is dependent on Windows Server 2003. You have to connect to a WS2K3 machine to use it. The beta version doesn't have this in place yet, so it uses Passport for the time being, but it's not as simple as Zip file passwords where the encrypting is self contained - you have to connect to a configured Windows Server in order to use it. It's hardly simple enough for the minimum wage secratary to accidentally password protect a document and forget what password she used. It's more like the secratary forgetting her Exchange password - the local sysadmin can help.
Well, since two of the languages are .NET languages (VB.NET and C#), why couldn't you do it in any .NET language? (COBOL.NET for example)
Better question - how is it that he makes any money if he keeps losing?
Of course the best question is - what is the agenda really? Does he want the fame? (for a later political career) The money? Or does he honestly believe that everyone else is wrong?
I've still got one of those 1702 monitors - they're great. Monitors (little televisions, essentially). Still holds up better than most televisions I've ever owned. In the front you could hook up standard A/V RCA cables and use it as a television. The back had two separate ports for video since the C64 split up the signal (luma/chroma, I think).
My take is this - I used to buy a lot of CD's. Back when I was in High School and on my parents' dime. Then for a long time (throughout College and for a few years after) I didn't buy CD's - I couldn't afford to. Plus I discovered MP3 - free music, free CD's. Now I have enough money to buy CD's again, and I always kinda figured I'd get back into the habit or buy the really good albums as payback - but I don't and I haven't. The main reason? I'm not interested. Most music isn't aimed towards me anymore and I couldn't care less. If they completely eradicated MP3 tommorow I still wouldn't buy CD's - my money is better spent elsewhere in my opinion. Perhaps that's what the RIAA is really afraid of - that we'll get distracted enough to not come back.
Right, so if this game is out at the end of this month, is there any way to get a demo of it?
Probably not, if they have 26 more days to get it to market and they're still playtesting and pondering issues like this.
But how about a one level test? By this I mean - not a demo to get people to buy the game, but rather something running on the Source engine to see whether or not this stupid thing will even run on your system. Make it one of the scientist guys taking you through a tour of some of the things the engine will do, and maybe he could even reccomend ways to uprade your system for better performance. Hell, ATI or whoever could sponsor it.
I just don't want to buy it and then discover I have to upgrade to run worth a damn.
But yeah, Nintendo farming out franchises is a newer phonomenon.
What they're really trying to say is "we want people who have worked with the beta" which is ironic since the people out there who have worked with the beta are way out of their price range.
Okay, bad example.
Besides, Kenneth Lay didn't have a clue what was going on in Enron (or so his PR firm says) - what makes you think he'd be smart enough to use this feature?
I suspect at one point it was possible to do this but Symantec caught on. Unless you're currently doing it - care to share the secret?
Of course last week when the SoBig/Blaster fiasco was in full bloom my subscription expired and I figured it was worth $15 to not have to reformat/reinstall.
Also, I've had no complaints with NAV - the times I've tried to use McAfee I've gotten fucked. And then every job I've had uses McAfee. Hmmmmm...
Let's say you make a lawnmower and you include warnings on it like "don't cut off your toes" and such. But then someone gets the bright idea to pick it up with their hands while it's on and trim their hedges with it, and winds up severing their fingers. Are you liable? Well, if no one's ever done it before then no, since it was unforseeable that someone out there would do that.
What happens when the next person severs their fingers. Are you liable? Yes, since it's not unforseeable anymore. Now you're liable unless you put a sticker or somesuch telling people not to do that.
So who was it, I wonder, who tried to stop a chainsaw with their dick and sued?
Why #define PI 3.14159265358979? In case the value of PI ever changes.
I guess in case PI ever becomes 23 or something.
Microsoft may be many things, but ultimately they're not stupid.
When A&M's CS department decided to switch a lot of their curriculum to Java in 1997 or so, lots of people were livid, since Java was seen as a way to make buzzing web pages, and web pages were not seen as something neccessarily useful. But I've heard a prediction that in five years, 40% of the world's actively written (i.e., not just maintained) code will be in Java, 40% will be in .NET, and 20% other - by switching to .net, colleges are trying to prepare students for what's going to be out there.
Plus, in many cases, Windows development is where the money is at and colleges have to be able to adapt to that. Linux may be better technology but Red Hat doesn't take 5,000 developers out to lunch. Ask most college freshmen and they'll tell you to take your principles and stick it - they want the career path with the most money.
If memory serves, the cost for each student was something like $50 per semester, or $5 per credit hour or something like that. This is in addition to the $5 per CD, so if you want WinXP it's $5 for the CD, VS.NET was $25 for the 5 CD's. Financially, it works out best for people about to graduate.
And at A&M the students voted it in. There was a referendum and everything. To put it in perspective, say it was a $5 per credit hour increase - we had just passed a $30 per credit hour fee increase and people raised bloody hell. I was even in charge of writing the code to select all the students "grandfathered" against that fee when they decided only to hand it to incoming freshmen and certian other students with this bizarre algorithm.
But at a major university, you've got to remember who's paying. Many of the kids are there on their parents' nickel, and they see anything on the bill as something they won't have to see or mess with. It's kinda the same mentality of paying for something with a credit card - anything that's not out of pocket is seen as "free" (no surprise then that credit card companies often target college students).
No, it's only the students that either have restrictive scholarships or are paying for everything themselves through financial aid or out of pocket that raise issues - and they're voted down by the majority of the students. Ultimately it boils down to college being expensive in any event.
But on the other side of the coin, to some degree we all know piracy is rampant on college campuses, and students instinct is not to go to free (as in GPL) software. Your parents buy you a Dell but it has XP Home and you need XP Pro to join a domain. No problem, find the guy with the XP Pro Corporate God edition to upgrade your system. Get Office XP Pro and VS.NET while you're at it (even though you're an English major and will never need VS.NET ever). Now Microsoft is offering you the opportunity to not be a dirty pirate for the low price of $5 a CD and some fees you'll never see because the bill goes to your folks.
So let's say you take 15 hours a semester - two semesters times $5 per credit hour is $150, plus a one-time $5 per CD fee. VS.NET alone is over a thousand dollars (though in all fairness not everyone needs it). By your numbers, you would have to be in college for over ten years to rack up $2000 in these MS fees.
At one point in time it was the status quo that women didn't have premarital sex, ever. To have any was seen as being a harlot. Consequently, the only way for men to get sex was to be married.
What would often happen though is that after a man and woman got engaged the woman would bend the rules a bit and they'd have a go at it. However, it didn't take long for men to find the loophole (no pun intended) in this plan - just get "engaged", shag, then ditch. As a result, someone (may have been the women, could have been the fathers) came up with this idea - an engagement ring, valued at two months salary (who's salary I'm not sure). This way if the guy did try and split, he was at least leaving behind a significant financial investment. This shifted the paradigm from "gullible woman" to "dumbass guy".
And I have to say I agree with them.
Plus another thing is that we all realize the cool shit we see in things like Star Trek will only happen if we start exploring now - but we all realize it'll never happen within our lifetimes - maybe not even in our great grandkids'. Meanwhile we have issues today that need solving. This is why people don't want us to spend more money on the space program.