I guess my friends are smarter than yours, in that they've grasped simple logic. I've got call waiting, and if I don't click over, they know I'm jerking some telemarketer around, or I'm having an important conversation. Either way, they try back in about 10 minutes.
I don't get calls from telemarketers all the time, so my phone is open for calls from friends/fiance/parents most of the time. I'm not the victim of some weird self-afflicted, telemarketer-inspired telephone DOS.
This will be a real boon to the telemarketers that call me. Generally, I get a call, wait for the guy/gal to pick up, and the following conversation ensues:
TM: Hello, is there?
Me: Yep, hang on a second...
At this point, The phone goes on a sofa or something, and I come back in about 10 minutes. I haven't had one yet that wanted to talk to me that badly.
Unfortunately, if they can see I'm not trying to get myself, they'll hang up, and call some other poor sap. At least this way, I can tie them up for a little while.
You may have better results if you spell the title of the movie correctly. Not that there aren't any misspellings on P2P networks (that'll be the day...), but I would hope it would be out there spelled correctly.
I was still revved up on the original when 2 came out. My roommate got a copy of 2, but failed to read the system requirements on the box.
The game looked killer, much more depth than the original, but alas, none of the machines in the house would run it at a decent resolution/framerate combination.
I would assume that there's no disc launcher in MOHAA, so that particular skill would probably deteriorate pretty quickly...
I don't know much about online gaming, but I would assume that the online cheats are possable because of cheats and hacks in the game meant for local, non-networked play.
This is rarely, if ever, the case. A few examples: First, one of the cheats mentioned in the article is auto-aiming in FPSes, starting with Quake. Quake never had any cheat to automagically nail the closest enemy, yet that was what happened when a cheater pressed his/her fire button.
Second, I played Diablo II long and hard, until I grew tired of the senseless repetition of Meph/Bloody/Pindleskin runs. One of the things that plagued the D2 economy was the ability of cheaters to duplicate items (SOJs, for example, or uber-elite items.) This was never a cheat in Single-player DII. It was possible with item editors, but that's a third-party add-on. The way you duped items in D2 was generally to trade the item to a friend, and then crash the server after it had written your friend's character data, but before it had written your character's data.
Finally, I used to play a game called Tribes a lot. To my knowledge, it was pretty tough to cheat in Tribes, without a cheat being enabled on the server. This is an example of cheats being built into a game, disabled by default, and requiring manual activation by someone with admin rights to the server. I never knew of it being exploited by anyone without admin rights.
Sorry, but your analysis of online cheating is severely flawed. In my opinion, the best method of preventing online cheating is to make sure your servers trust the clients as little as possible, and are as fault-tolerant as possible, along with keeping a staff of "cyber-police" employed to ferret out cheaters, and deal with them accordingly. Dipping n boiling almond oil comes to mind...
The last line of the article cracked me up. Blizzard has an uphill legal battle.
I'm making an assumption here, but I don't think the guys running the bnetd project don't have piles of money to take this thing to court. The ISP isn't going to burn tons of cash for these guys, and ignore Blizzard.
It's unfortunate that a company with deep pockets and a shaky legal footing can shut down projects it doesn't agree with. I used to play DII like a fiend, but got sick of the cheating/tradehacks/etc., so I don't have anything to gain from this project. I do, however, think it's a real shame that a nice project like this is getting squeezed. I hope the bnetd team can weather the storm.
I also wonder if maybe Blizzard's time and energies might be put to better use by focusing on things like Realm stability, and getting rid of the cheaters that are bringing the realms down, looking for the next duping method.
All right,/.ers that made it this far in the thread, you caught me.
I didn't read the article before posting the parent, and I just realized that they were suing Sony too.
Just wanted to let everyone know that yes, I'm an ass, and yes, I know it now, thank you very much. (I always kind of figures as much; I just never had any empirical proof.)
Interesting that Immersion went for Microsoft, when Sony and Nintendo have had force-feedback preipherals since quite a while before the XBox came out. Hell, Interact had that crazy vest, which was nothing more than a chest-worn subwoofer.
Prior art discussions (actually, controller-innards discussions in general) are tangential to my original point, anyway. My point was that the controllers are cheap to manufacture, and that Microsoft is probably makinf a profit from them.
Thanks for the link, though. I missed that article somehow, and I'll have to go back and read it.
I think the issue with being unable to use Japanese controllers with a US XBox is because the Japanese controllers are a little smaller than their counterparts in the states, and easier for those with smallish (or more normally-sized) hands to handle.
I have always gotten burned on third-party controllers, and now I refuse to use anything not made by the same manufacturer as the console. However, I think using a Microsoft-sanctioned Japanese controller would fall under that category.
That's a good point. Microsoft is also extremely brand-conscious (security is another story...), and they may be doing this in order to keep from diluting their brand.
I don't like Microsoft either, and I'd rather be dipped in boiling almond oil than pay money for their space-heater-that-plugs-into-your-tv, but they may have reasons for doing this, other than iron-fisted control over the console and cashflow.
(I know this post is a little at odds with my previous post, but I hadn't read this comment when I posted originally. I think this decision may have been driven by all of the factors people are speculating on, and I still hope that the update to the site in question proves to be accurate.)
Most (prolly all) game manufacturers take a loss on every console they sell, since that's where all of the Good Stuff(TM) is.
The controller is just a hunk of plastic, with a few microswitches(?) in it. I'd bet that Microsoft is making a profit on every controller they sell, even with the huge amount of raw materials they have to dump into a controller of that size.
Regardless of whether or not Microsoft is making a profit on controller sales, this is an underhanded thing to do. I'm hoping this is some sort of mistake, and that the update to the site is correct. I would like nothing better than to see the XBox fail miserably, but I'd hate to see consumers (even the ones silly enough to buy an XBox) hurt in the process.
I wasn't able to find terribly great photos of the product (mainly a front view of the LCD), but it's a nice, small component that would look pretty good sitting next to the rest of my A/V rig (nothing special, just the usual TV/DVD/VCR/Receiver/CD player.)
I'm not big on shelling out exorbitant amounts of cash for components, and I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination (hence my looking at MP3 players), but $269 isn't bad for a component, and a niche (Not a typo. I meant "niche".) one at that.
For $269, I can give my receiver access to all of my MP3s, I get a nifty remote to let my fiance play with, and I don't have to put an actual computer in my living room. I know I can do all of this by throwing a modest processor and some RAM into a 1U rackmount case, but I'm willing to pay the extra cash (which is probably not much, since rackmount cases are expensive) to not have to screw around with setting stuff up. I'm not afraid of tweaking; I like a little digital wrassling from time to time, but soemtimes I just want to sit down, and listen to some music.
Obviously, for someone in a dorm room, or a small apartment, running a long cable from a computer to the stereo is a fine solution, and what I'd do rpovided I was in that situation. This just works better for me.
Actually, I'm surprised I didn't start a flamewar with that. I thought about using something else (say, window manager), but decided on my first instinct.
It's unfortuante, as Slashdot is one of the best places on the Internet to go for news, and heady, informed discussion.
OK, I come here for news, and for discussion. I read the headlines, generally the blurbs, and I poke around in the discussion until I can't stand it any more.
I don't use this site as a basis for generating opinions regarding what company is bad, what company is good, or what text editor I should use. I have my own methods for said exercise.
Surely, you realize that this site is coded, maintained, and read by geeks. I find it quite unlikely that a reader of this site hasn't formed an opinion one way or another regarding Microsoft. We don't thaw out cavemen, and then teach them to read, using Slashdot (boy, that's be an exercise in futility, with the l33t speak, and the horriffic grammar and spelling.)
Bottom line is this, and I know it's been said many times in the past: This is not a real news site. It's just a weblog, and it happens to have a lot of people who like it. The Slashdot editors are under no obligation to be fair, or unbiased. If you don't like it, create your own site. Buh-bye.
With all of these Microsoft worms running rampant (can worms run?), I can't say I'm surprised to hear about another one. It's not even news any more. It's like reporting that the sun rose this morning (provided you live at a reasonable latitude.)
The nice thing about this one is, it's just hitting e-mail. When Nimda and Code Red were wreaking havoc on the internet, they made it impossible for me to play games on my cable modem. I had so many incoming requests on port 80, I couldn't do anything.
How many times does this have to happen before Microsoft starts putting security in front of the user experience? I can't see how having to remove viruses from your machine on a near-daily basis inproves the user experience.
Actually, in that movie (Sneakers, not Misfits of Science, like the AC said (and wasn't that a TV show?)), the big breakthrough wasn't Quantum computing per se. The guy was a Mathemetician (sp?), who figured out a shortcut to factoring large numbers.
I guess it was never stated what exactly the chip did, so it could have been a quantum computer, although how this guy would get a Quantum computer into a chip, I dunno. It's not like the movie was really great on the details, anyway.
"Computer, zoom in and enhance. Indefinitely. I wanna see if that guy's got dandruff."
First off, I was also incensed that the SNES wasn't included in the console list. But then I looked at the chart in a little more detail. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I could have sworn that the PSX was/is a 32-bit system. Also, on the system specs for the current lineup, they show the capacity of the GameCube's memory card is 1Mb, when Nintendo plainly states on their site that it's a 4Mb card.
And why did the writer skip from Infocomm straight to Doom. There were a lot of genres that grew up between text adventures and FPSes. What happened to the side-scrolling platform jumpers like Sonic and Super Mario Brothers? What about all of the RPGs published by Square? Sports games grew by leaps and bounds during that time.
I generally like the articles on Tom's Hardware, but this one seemed like it was thrown together by a team of rabid monkeys (or some other randomly-generated/. page creator) in a matter of minutes. I know that failure to check your sources is nothing new to most slashdotters, but I hope it doesn't become the norm for other sites like Tom's.
I don't have a Morpheus/Napster/your favorite Peer-To-Peer app install on this machine, but I'm pretty sure that if I did a search for "Yoko Ono", I'd turn something up.
It appears that your theory about CD's containing music noone wants to hear not being copied is flawed. Perhaps there's a deaf person out there just ripping and posting random CDs?
When they switched to the new version of Slashcode, my default posting type (the droplist below your comment box) went to "Plain Text", instead of the "HTML Formatted" option I was used to.
The next time you call someone an imbecile, please make sure you can spell it correctly. As a linux user, you should be able to use gdict or something in about two seconds. That spelling made my teeth curl.
I do agree, however, that the speed for the price is really nice, and I'm somewhat worried about what I'm going to do if they do go under. Here in Grand Rapids, there aren't many other alternatives (although I do hear that Ameritech is beginning DSL...)
I can't believe I'm replying to an AC. PLease grow a set, and post with a name.
OK, here's how it works. The poster 2 posts above me said that 60% of people had never logged on to battle.net. The next poster somehow thought that just because someone had bought the game, and played on battle.net, that meant they bought the game solely for online play. That's not necessarily true. This is quite simple. Not everyone on battle.net bought the game solely for online play. I certainly didn't, even though I play regularly on USEast.
I am sure there are people who did buy the game solely to play on battle.net, just not 40%.
If you bought the game to play on battle.net, you can still play. You have unlimited access. Your data may get munged from time to time. That's life. I know for a fact that the box did not say "Free unlimited play on Battle.net, with total security, and 100% uptime"
That was my real point. The fact that you didn't get past the first paragraph of my post, and decided to argue about math (If you knew me, you would think this was a really bad idea.) saddens me.
The time you spent doing those things IS REAL. The rewards for doing those things, other than the satisfaction you get, IS NOT REAL.
I play the game quite often, and it's not real until I have to wipe Flayer blood off my face.
If you're that concerned about your character, find a group of friends and play on Open games hosted by yourself or one of them. Keep a backup of your character files. Stay off the realms, and stop bitching.
Finally, get some sun. If you're playing the game 40 hours a week, you're playing too much. Perhaps you can spend some of that extra time learning how to write a properly capitalized and punctuated post that doesn't devolve into script kiddie garbage in the first line.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess my friends are smarter than yours, in that they've grasped simple logic. I've got call waiting, and if I don't click over, they know I'm jerking some telemarketer around, or I'm having an important conversation. Either way, they try back in about 10 minutes.
I don't get calls from telemarketers all the time, so my phone is open for calls from friends/fiance/parents most of the time. I'm not the victim of some weird self-afflicted, telemarketer-inspired telephone DOS.
TM: Hello, is there?
Me: Yep, hang on a second...
At this point, The phone goes on a sofa or something, and I come back in about 10 minutes. I haven't had one yet that wanted to talk to me that badly.
Unfortunately, if they can see I'm not trying to get myself, they'll hang up, and call some other poor sap. At least this way, I can tie them up for a little while.
You may have better results if you spell the title of the movie correctly. Not that there aren't any misspellings on P2P networks (that'll be the day...), but I would hope it would be out there spelled correctly.
The game looked killer, much more depth than the original, but alas, none of the machines in the house would run it at a decent resolution/framerate combination.
I would assume that there's no disc launcher in MOHAA, so that particular skill would probably deteriorate pretty quickly...
Thanks for reminding me why I quit playing.
This is rarely, if ever, the case. A few examples: First, one of the cheats mentioned in the article is auto-aiming in FPSes, starting with Quake. Quake never had any cheat to automagically nail the closest enemy, yet that was what happened when a cheater pressed his/her fire button.
Second, I played Diablo II long and hard, until I grew tired of the senseless repetition of Meph/Bloody/Pindleskin runs. One of the things that plagued the D2 economy was the ability of cheaters to duplicate items (SOJs, for example, or uber-elite items.) This was never a cheat in Single-player DII. It was possible with item editors, but that's a third-party add-on. The way you duped items in D2 was generally to trade the item to a friend, and then crash the server after it had written your friend's character data, but before it had written your character's data.
Finally, I used to play a game called Tribes a lot. To my knowledge, it was pretty tough to cheat in Tribes, without a cheat being enabled on the server. This is an example of cheats being built into a game, disabled by default, and requiring manual activation by someone with admin rights to the server. I never knew of it being exploited by anyone without admin rights.
Sorry, but your analysis of online cheating is severely flawed. In my opinion, the best method of preventing online cheating is to make sure your servers trust the clients as little as possible, and are as fault-tolerant as possible, along with keeping a staff of "cyber-police" employed to ferret out cheaters, and deal with them accordingly. Dipping n boiling almond oil comes to mind...
Maybe they'll get lucky, and find some lawyer that just had his lvl 80+ Hardcore Druid PKed because of some hole Blizz never patched.
I'm making an assumption here, but I don't think the guys running the bnetd project don't have piles of money to take this thing to court. The ISP isn't going to burn tons of cash for these guys, and ignore Blizzard.
It's unfortunate that a company with deep pockets and a shaky legal footing can shut down projects it doesn't agree with. I used to play DII like a fiend, but got sick of the cheating/tradehacks/etc., so I don't have anything to gain from this project. I do, however, think it's a real shame that a nice project like this is getting squeezed. I hope the bnetd team can weather the storm.
I also wonder if maybe Blizzard's time and energies might be put to better use by focusing on things like Realm stability, and getting rid of the cheaters that are bringing the realms down, looking for the next duping method.
I didn't read the article before posting the parent, and I just realized that they were suing Sony too.
Just wanted to let everyone know that yes, I'm an ass, and yes, I know it now, thank you very much. (I always kind of figures as much; I just never had any empirical proof.)
Prior art discussions (actually, controller-innards discussions in general) are tangential to my original point, anyway. My point was that the controllers are cheap to manufacture, and that Microsoft is probably makinf a profit from them.
Thanks for the link, though. I missed that article somehow, and I'll have to go back and read it.
I have always gotten burned on third-party controllers, and now I refuse to use anything not made by the same manufacturer as the console. However, I think using a Microsoft-sanctioned Japanese controller would fall under that category.
I don't like Microsoft either, and I'd rather be dipped in boiling almond oil than pay money for their space-heater-that-plugs-into-your-tv, but they may have reasons for doing this, other than iron-fisted control over the console and cashflow.
(I know this post is a little at odds with my previous post, but I hadn't read this comment when I posted originally. I think this decision may have been driven by all of the factors people are speculating on, and I still hope that the update to the site in question proves to be accurate.)
The controller is just a hunk of plastic, with a few microswitches(?) in it. I'd bet that Microsoft is making a profit on every controller they sell, even with the huge amount of raw materials they have to dump into a controller of that size.
Regardless of whether or not Microsoft is making a profit on controller sales, this is an underhanded thing to do. I'm hoping this is some sort of mistake, and that the update to the site is correct. I would like nothing better than to see the XBox fail miserably, but I'd hate to see consumers (even the ones silly enough to buy an XBox) hurt in the process.
I'm not big on shelling out exorbitant amounts of cash for components, and I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination (hence my looking at MP3 players), but $269 isn't bad for a component, and a niche (Not a typo. I meant "niche".) one at that.
For $269, I can give my receiver access to all of my MP3s, I get a nifty remote to let my fiance play with, and I don't have to put an actual computer in my living room. I know I can do all of this by throwing a modest processor and some RAM into a 1U rackmount case, but I'm willing to pay the extra cash (which is probably not much, since rackmount cases are expensive) to not have to screw around with setting stuff up. I'm not afraid of tweaking; I like a little digital wrassling from time to time, but soemtimes I just want to sit down, and listen to some music.
Obviously, for someone in a dorm room, or a small apartment, running a long cable from a computer to the stereo is a fine solution, and what I'd do rpovided I was in that situation. This just works better for me.
Thanks for the text-editor vote. It's duly noted.
OK, I come here for news, and for discussion. I read the headlines, generally the blurbs, and I poke around in the discussion until I can't stand it any more.
I don't use this site as a basis for generating opinions regarding what company is bad, what company is good, or what text editor I should use. I have my own methods for said exercise.
Surely, you realize that this site is coded, maintained, and read by geeks. I find it quite unlikely that a reader of this site hasn't formed an opinion one way or another regarding Microsoft. We don't thaw out cavemen, and then teach them to read, using Slashdot (boy, that's be an exercise in futility, with the l33t speak, and the horriffic grammar and spelling.)
Bottom line is this, and I know it's been said many times in the past: This is not a real news site. It's just a weblog, and it happens to have a lot of people who like it. The Slashdot editors are under no obligation to be fair, or unbiased. If you don't like it, create your own site. Buh-bye.
The nice thing about this one is, it's just hitting e-mail. When Nimda and Code Red were wreaking havoc on the internet, they made it impossible for me to play games on my cable modem. I had so many incoming requests on port 80, I couldn't do anything.
How many times does this have to happen before Microsoft starts putting security in front of the user experience? I can't see how having to remove viruses from your machine on a near-daily basis inproves the user experience.
I guess it was never stated what exactly the chip did, so it could have been a quantum computer, although how this guy would get a Quantum computer into a chip, I dunno. It's not like the movie was really great on the details, anyway.
"Computer, zoom in and enhance. Indefinitely. I wanna see if that guy's got dandruff."
And why did the writer skip from Infocomm straight to Doom. There were a lot of genres that grew up between text adventures and FPSes. What happened to the side-scrolling platform jumpers like Sonic and Super Mario Brothers? What about all of the RPGs published by Square? Sports games grew by leaps and bounds during that time.
I generally like the articles on Tom's Hardware, but this one seemed like it was thrown together by a team of rabid monkeys (or some other randomly-generated /. page creator) in a matter of minutes. I know that failure to check your sources is nothing new to most slashdotters, but I hope it doesn't become the norm for other sites like Tom's.
</RANT>
It appears that your theory about CD's containing music noone wants to hear not being copied is flawed. Perhaps there's a deaf person out there just ripping and posting random CDs?
I'd assume the same thing happened to you.
I do agree, however, that the speed for the price is really nice, and I'm somewhat worried about what I'm going to do if they do go under. Here in Grand Rapids, there aren't many other alternatives (although I do hear that Ameritech is beginning DSL...)
Beating Rabbit on hurdles was a bitch, tho... Not the speed, but the timing.
OK, here's how it works. The poster 2 posts above me said that 60% of people had never logged on to battle.net. The next poster somehow thought that just because someone had bought the game, and played on battle.net, that meant they bought the game solely for online play. That's not necessarily true. This is quite simple. Not everyone on battle.net bought the game solely for online play. I certainly didn't, even though I play regularly on USEast.
I am sure there are people who did buy the game solely to play on battle.net, just not 40%.
If you bought the game to play on battle.net, you can still play. You have unlimited access. Your data may get munged from time to time. That's life. I know for a fact that the box did not say "Free unlimited play on Battle.net, with total security, and 100% uptime"
That was my real point. The fact that you didn't get past the first paragraph of my post, and decided to argue about math (If you knew me, you would think this was a really bad idea.) saddens me.
I play the game quite often, and it's not real until I have to wipe Flayer blood off my face.
If you're that concerned about your character, find a group of friends and play on Open games hosted by yourself or one of them. Keep a backup of your character files. Stay off the realms, and stop bitching.
Finally, get some sun. If you're playing the game 40 hours a week, you're playing too much. Perhaps you can spend some of that extra time learning how to write a properly capitalized and punctuated post that doesn't devolve into script kiddie garbage in the first line.