First of all, the previous poster said that 60% never logged on to B.net. That does not mean that the remaining 40% purchased the game solely for the online capabilities.
I purchased the game, and love it. I have only just recently begun playing on B.net. I am a B.net user, but I did not purchase the game solely for the on-line element. In fact, it was just a bonus.
Let me reiterate. A bonus. Something extra. When you bought and installed the game, you agreed to a EULA. You obviously didn't read it (I didn't either, but I'm not bitching here, am I?) I will bet my left nut (my good one) that it says something to the effect of, "Blizzard is not responsible or liable for the loss of character or item information, yadda, yadda, yadda..."
Blizzard can shut down the realms today with no repercussions, other than having a bunch of people miffed at them. Perhaps sales of Warcraft 3 or D3 (if it is in the works) will siffer. But certainly no lawsuits.
Blizzard owes you nothing. The D2 community owes Blizzard a huge debt for the hard work they do in keeping the realms up, and keeping them balanced. They've gone through 8 patches so far, with 1.09 being talked about, and they're providing this all for free to users.
If the way Blizzard is handling the Realms bothers you, do something about it. Either play on Open B.net with friends, or find a different game. Either way, please don't play on the realms. We don't need you there. Your bitching simply wastes bandwidth on already overcrowded servers.
I always thought that Battle.net helped to recoup its costs by advertising, but I've just started playing on BattleNet (USEast) about a month ago, and I've only seen banner ads for Blizzard products. Does anyone know if they sell B.Net (yes, third treatment of the on-line service's name in one post - left here for your enjoyment) ad spots to outside companies?
Also, perhaps the people that actually host the servers give them a cut rate for mentioning who is providing bandwidth. I know that USEast is hosted by AT&T because I get told so every time I log on (which has been way too much lately.)
I would have a hard time believing that Blizzard is breaking even on Battle.net, even if they do sell ad space tou outside companies, and get a cut rate on the colocation costs.
Hey, why the change in e-mail/url? As a Grand Rapidian, I looked over your site with some interest, and you post often enough to keep yourself fresh in my mind.
First off, a little history. I began attending Western Kentucky University (a pretty good CS school at the time) as a CS major, and proceeded to ace my CS I and II courses without breaking a sweat. My second year, I lost interest in school, and managed to cut my cumulative GPA in half (Yes that means I took an entire year's worth of classes, and got a 0.0 my second year.) I am currently attending a local university (Grand Valley State University), slowly finishing my CS degree at nights. I'm a professional programmer doing mainly VB client-server and ASP work (yeah, I know, Microsoft == the devil.)
When I was at WKU, the beginning CS curriculum was taught in Pascal, and now at GVSU, the language du jour is Java. While the languages are different, the curriculum is essentially the same. First year CS is not about learning the ins and outs of a specific language that you're going to use for the rest of your career. It's about learning how to approach common problems (like sorting and searching), and learning how to break large problems into smaller, more easily managed problems. These skills are used across languages, and will never die. The exact syntax you used is subject to change.
In my experience, the first year of CS courses really serve two purposes: Teach students how to program, regardless of language, and weed out the undesirables. Perhaps that's somewhat high-and-mighty of me, but I've been through two CS I courses (GVSU didn't want to transfer my WKU CS courses, so I learned the difference between integer and floating-point variables twice), and watched the students who were in the class for the wrong reasons drop like flies. Twice.
It's not because Pascal and Java are hard. Programming is hard. Problem-solving is hard, and the first year of CS courses should make sure that bad problem-solvers change their major. Anyone can sit down with a book, and memorize the syntax of a programming language, but it takes a special breed to be able to apply that syntax to do something useful. After a year of CS, any remaining student should be able to do that.
OK, you can of course cancel thet order for the Nerf k/b.
That site is killing me! I just finished skimming the DirectX8 review, and I'm going to have to go home and see how many metatarsals I can get out of my GPU. Thx for the link.
I hope to God that your unique approach to the finer arts of spelling and punctuation is meant as a joke. If so, thank you, because I just laughed out loud at your post.
If not, please make sure you get a Nerf keyboard before you hurt yourself.
Right. Like this guy's an admin. Any admin that expects me to know he has a webserver up for me to sent a GET request to without attempting a connection in the first place (a port scan) has no business being an admin.
If this guy is serving in any sort of administrative capacity, I feel sorry for his coworkers, because he's obviously a great sucking void of technical knowledge, but he thinks he knows it all. May God have mercy on his users.
Why would they go to all the trouble of breaking into his computer, when the same information can surely be had elsewhere more easily?
First of all, they might want to break into Bush's computer, since he is the President now (unless they're looking for Bill & Monica's Webcam Porn stash)
Secondly, there's got to be some other gov't agency that already monitors said computer, and some employee of said agency probably keeps a copy of those files somewhere less secure than the machine itself.
No, I don't think the FBI would help the Russians, but if they wanted to, they'd probably just give them an FTP address, rather than break into the machine all over again.
Every time I see one of these stores, I get choked up. Seriously, I can't fathom the resoning these people use to come to the conclusion that video (games) killed the basketball (not radio) star.
First of all, my condolences (sp?) go out to the friends & family of the Columbine shootings (or any other shootings of the kind, for that matter), but they have to realize that games are not to blame for the actions of these kids.
I don't think we can blame one specific impetus for these actions, but the biggest one that I see is a complete lack of parenting. I remember a news story after the Columbine shootings, when they were talking about the bombs the shooters had set, which thankfully didn't go off. The neighbors had called the police and filed a noise complaint (I think -- I know there was a lot of noise coming from the garage) because they heard breaking glass and stuff in one of the kids' garages the weekend before. I think a simple, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" might have gone a long way towards preventing this. Even the most neglecting parent would thing something was strange about the answer, "Nothing, just making shrapnel."
These guys were unstable in the first place, and if they had liked Lawrence Welk (shudder) instead of FPSes, someone would have been trying to outlaw Lawrence Welk. If you put a bottle of pure water in the freezer, you can get it a few degrees below zero, without freezing. If you then insert any foreign object into said bottle, you can watch the entire body of water crystallize. That's what I think the psyches in question were like. They were just waiting for something to start crystallizing, and they would have found something at some point, whether Doom existed or not.
There will always be unstable people in society. High School's a bitch for a lot of people, but it helps a lot to have parents who actually care what you're doing. I got picked on in High School, and my father had a rifle of my Grandfather's under his bed. The reason I never shot half of my classmates isn't because I thought about killing them, and decided violence isn't the answer... I just never thought of it, and if I had, I'd bet my left nut that my parents would have intervened.
The only thing that FPSes could possibly have taught the shooters is to conserve ammo, and such knowledge isn't a problem if the thought of killing your classmates never even crosses your mind.
I realize this is sort of rambling, but the issue has been out there for so long that all my thoughts become jumbled. The Executive Summary is this: Bad parents will always look for some outside reason for their children's behavior. Good parents will look at themselves, even when it's not their fault. There will always be people who have these kind of tendencies; it's the job of their friends and family to recognize these tendencies, and stop them. FPSes, Marilyn Manson, Sex on TV, and Dungeons and Dragons will not make your child kill half of his class. You will. We shouldn't outlaw games with violent content until somebody gets killed headbutting trains, and thought it would be ok, because (s)he thought "IDDQD" before stepping on the track.
Actually, I'd say that last part is a perfect example of thinning the herd, and should probably be encouraged.
OK, I was off by a factor of four(ish), but at 1-2mps, could a reliable defense be put up?
One other thing that came to mind... At that speed, what kind of accuracy could we get? Could we do the "smart bomb" thing, or would we have to go for entire cities?
I'm not quite sure I understand this penchant for living on other planets.
Yeah, it'd be nice to be able to say we did it, but who are we gonna brag to? And I know, we're destroying our planet, blah blah blah, but I don't think we're going to blast a hole in the side of the planet anytime real soon, so to me, your hurry is a little overdone.
I'm pretty sure Kubrick knew he was writing fiction, and I'm not sure how you came to believe that 2001 was some sort of Nostradamus-sanctioned prediction of the future.
Finally, this technology could be used as a stepping stone towards your goal of inhabiting Mars (or whatever it is you want to do.) If you want NASA to work towards inhabiting other planets, get a job there. If you already have a job there, quit reading Slashdot, and get to work.
One of the thoughts that has come up in relation to this story has been the speedy delivery (Thanks, Mr. McFeely) of warheads to strategic targets (like Chinese Embassies and the such.)
Now, obviously, we can't exactly send a traditional fighter out to shoot this thing down, but would it be possible to detonate something in front of the craft, which would pepper the area with oversized buckshot, and let the craft fly through it?
I'm not well versed in the mechanics of air travel, and I know that at supersonic speeds, it becomes harder to maneuver (jumping into hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy!), but at the speeds this thing moves, would it be pretty much limited to a straight line, or could it "go around" the danger zone?
Also, if this can go from one end of the globe to another in 30 min, would anybody be able to detect it, track it, and send up a countermeasure in enough time?
After a quick skim of my Inbox, I can roughly divide the spammers wo send to me into two groups.
The first is your traditional account-fishing, mass-mailing, waste-of-space spammer. These are the guys who want you to MAKE MONEY FAST, TRY MY NEW DIET PILLS, and RID YOURSELF OF SPAM FOREVER (one of my favorites.) And yeah, these guys are generally hard to track down because they use fake addresses, bounce their spam off of unsecured mail servers, and use dial-up accounts, so they don't have a static IPs.
The second group, and the group that I feel is more insidious, is the legitimate businesses. Any idiot can spot one of the aforementioned spams from a mile away, but when I get a piece of e-mail from a real company, and it looks like someone with at least a 5th-grade education wrote it, I'll usually read it. In this case, the plaintiff specifically asked not to get e-mail from this company, and they sent her crap anyway. They even went so far as to tell her that they knew she opted out of getting e-mail from them, but they just wanted her to know she could.
This is nothing but thinly-veiled bullshit. Apply this to almost any other situation, and it becomes evident that this practice is wrong. For example, let's say I just moved, and I got a new phone installed. When I called the Phone Co., they asked me if I wanted some add-on service, like Caller ID, which I declined. Now, let's say in a month, I get a call from someone at the telephone company, saying that they know I didn't want Caller ID a month ago, but they thought I might be interested in it now. I can assure you that you wouldn't want to be in the room if I got that call. (Well, actually, it might be kind of funny...)
The only reason some people think this is OK with e-mail is because they pay a fixed rate per month (rather than per byte or kilobyte), and they can just delete the mail in a split second. Well, some people do have to pay for data transfer (or connection charges for time on-line, and over a modem, spam can add up), and this is still a waste of my time, whether it's a second of my time (in the case of spam), or ten minutes of my time (in the case of a phone call, where I'd be conversing with the unfortunate soul on the other end of the line for a while.)
Executive Summary: Spam that is blatantly spam is bad, but spam that poses as genuine business-to-business or business-to-consumer marketing is even worse. All forms of spam should be stopped post-haste.
Hate to answer this if you're joking, but in case anyone else is wondering the same thing, I'd assume that "Ximian" is some sort f reverse phonetical treatment to the word simian, relating to monkeys or apes. Hence the dancing monkey logo.
Kind of reminds me of a joke I used to play on two really stupid girls @ college. I'd see them at a party or something, and I'd always say, "You're looking positively bovine today" (They were portly lasses.) Either they never heard me well enough, or they didn't know what bovine meant, but they always thought that was great. If only they had money...
Well, yeah, it was his originally, but he gave it to Ben with the express purpose of having it given to his son. So, it was really Luke's at the time of the unfortunate incident.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that using these devices that can translate smells into mechanical movement (or whatever else you want, I guess), in conjunction with the iSmell (may it rest in piece), would make the beginnings of a nice Rube Goldberg invention?
OK, drug-sniffing robots are cool and all, but when can I have a medical droid give me a new right hand when my dad cuts it off? (Lost a perfectly good lightsabre, too, dammit.)
It seems to me that Apple's (and a lot of other companies, too) Legal department would do well to at least run this stuff by their Public Relations or Marketing departments before they start sending out nastygrams.
I would assume that any sane person in either of the latter groups would se this as a Pyrrhic victory at best, and tell Legal to drop it.
Unfortunately, I wonder if all of the recent talk about copyright infringement (both here on/., and in the rest of the world) has made the lawyers hypersensitive to anything that might come close to perverting Apple's brand.
Still, if I ever met any of these lawyers at a party (probably not very likely), I wouldn't be able to decide if I should ask him to build me a rocket, or pull a friggin' tumor out of my frontal lobe. They seem to be a little short on common sense.
OK, I have seen the error of my ways, and from now on, I will attempt to use noone@example.com, but I'm not quite sure how long it'll take to break the habit. I've been entering 'noone@nowhere.com' for something like 5-6 years now, so it's kind of ingrained. Thanks for the info, though.
Slashdot Mirror
I purchased the game, and love it. I have only just recently begun playing on B.net. I am a B.net user, but I did not purchase the game solely for the on-line element. In fact, it was just a bonus.
Let me reiterate. A bonus. Something extra. When you bought and installed the game, you agreed to a EULA. You obviously didn't read it (I didn't either, but I'm not bitching here, am I?) I will bet my left nut (my good one) that it says something to the effect of, "Blizzard is not responsible or liable for the loss of character or item information, yadda, yadda, yadda..."
Blizzard can shut down the realms today with no repercussions, other than having a bunch of people miffed at them. Perhaps sales of Warcraft 3 or D3 (if it is in the works) will siffer. But certainly no lawsuits.
Blizzard owes you nothing. The D2 community owes Blizzard a huge debt for the hard work they do in keeping the realms up, and keeping them balanced. They've gone through 8 patches so far, with 1.09 being talked about, and they're providing this all for free to users.
If the way Blizzard is handling the Realms bothers you, do something about it. Either play on Open B.net with friends, or find a different game. Either way, please don't play on the realms. We don't need you there. Your bitching simply wastes bandwidth on already overcrowded servers.
Also, perhaps the people that actually host the servers give them a cut rate for mentioning who is providing bandwidth. I know that USEast is hosted by AT&T because I get told so every time I log on (which has been way too much lately.)
I would have a hard time believing that Blizzard is breaking even on Battle.net, even if they do sell ad space tou outside companies, and get a cut rate on the colocation costs.
Just curious. Glad I'm not a cat.
Hmm...
First off, a little history. I began attending Western Kentucky University (a pretty good CS school at the time) as a CS major, and proceeded to ace my CS I and II courses without breaking a sweat. My second year, I lost interest in school, and managed to cut my cumulative GPA in half (Yes that means I took an entire year's worth of classes, and got a 0.0 my second year.) I am currently attending a local university (Grand Valley State University), slowly finishing my CS degree at nights. I'm a professional programmer doing mainly VB client-server and ASP work (yeah, I know, Microsoft == the devil.)
When I was at WKU, the beginning CS curriculum was taught in Pascal, and now at GVSU, the language du jour is Java. While the languages are different, the curriculum is essentially the same. First year CS is not about learning the ins and outs of a specific language that you're going to use for the rest of your career. It's about learning how to approach common problems (like sorting and searching), and learning how to break large problems into smaller, more easily managed problems. These skills are used across languages, and will never die. The exact syntax you used is subject to change.
In my experience, the first year of CS courses really serve two purposes: Teach students how to program, regardless of language, and weed out the undesirables. Perhaps that's somewhat high-and-mighty of me, but I've been through two CS I courses (GVSU didn't want to transfer my WKU CS courses, so I learned the difference between integer and floating-point variables twice), and watched the students who were in the class for the wrong reasons drop like flies. Twice.
It's not because Pascal and Java are hard. Programming is hard. Problem-solving is hard, and the first year of CS courses should make sure that bad problem-solvers change their major. Anyone can sit down with a book, and memorize the syntax of a programming language, but it takes a special breed to be able to apply that syntax to do something useful. After a year of CS, any remaining student should be able to do that.
That site is killing me! I just finished skimming the DirectX8 review, and I'm going to have to go home and see how many metatarsals I can get out of my GPU. Thx for the link.
If not, please make sure you get a Nerf keyboard before you hurt yourself.
If this guy is serving in any sort of administrative capacity, I feel sorry for his coworkers, because he's obviously a great sucking void of technical knowledge, but he thinks he knows it all. May God have mercy on his users.
Although I think Richard Pryor beat them to the punch.
First of all, they might want to break into Bush's computer, since he is the President now (unless they're looking for Bill & Monica's Webcam Porn stash)
Secondly, there's got to be some other gov't agency that already monitors said computer, and some employee of said agency probably keeps a copy of those files somewhere less secure than the machine itself.
No, I don't think the FBI would help the Russians, but if they wanted to, they'd probably just give them an FTP address, rather than break into the machine all over again.
First of all, my condolences (sp?) go out to the friends & family of the Columbine shootings (or any other shootings of the kind, for that matter), but they have to realize that games are not to blame for the actions of these kids.
I don't think we can blame one specific impetus for these actions, but the biggest one that I see is a complete lack of parenting. I remember a news story after the Columbine shootings, when they were talking about the bombs the shooters had set, which thankfully didn't go off. The neighbors had called the police and filed a noise complaint (I think -- I know there was a lot of noise coming from the garage) because they heard breaking glass and stuff in one of the kids' garages the weekend before. I think a simple, "Hey, what are you guys doing?" might have gone a long way towards preventing this. Even the most neglecting parent would thing something was strange about the answer, "Nothing, just making shrapnel."
These guys were unstable in the first place, and if they had liked Lawrence Welk (shudder) instead of FPSes, someone would have been trying to outlaw Lawrence Welk. If you put a bottle of pure water in the freezer, you can get it a few degrees below zero, without freezing. If you then insert any foreign object into said bottle, you can watch the entire body of water crystallize. That's what I think the psyches in question were like. They were just waiting for something to start crystallizing, and they would have found something at some point, whether Doom existed or not.
There will always be unstable people in society. High School's a bitch for a lot of people, but it helps a lot to have parents who actually care what you're doing. I got picked on in High School, and my father had a rifle of my Grandfather's under his bed. The reason I never shot half of my classmates isn't because I thought about killing them, and decided violence isn't the answer... I just never thought of it, and if I had, I'd bet my left nut that my parents would have intervened.
The only thing that FPSes could possibly have taught the shooters is to conserve ammo, and such knowledge isn't a problem if the thought of killing your classmates never even crosses your mind.
I realize this is sort of rambling, but the issue has been out there for so long that all my thoughts become jumbled. The Executive Summary is this: Bad parents will always look for some outside reason for their children's behavior. Good parents will look at themselves, even when it's not their fault. There will always be people who have these kind of tendencies; it's the job of their friends and family to recognize these tendencies, and stop them. FPSes, Marilyn Manson, Sex on TV, and Dungeons and Dragons will not make your child kill half of his class. You will. We shouldn't outlaw games with violent content until somebody gets killed headbutting trains, and thought it would be ok, because (s)he thought "IDDQD" before stepping on the track.
Actually, I'd say that last part is a perfect example of thinning the herd, and should probably be encouraged.
Monty Pytonh's Quest for the Holy Grail, in case you're not joking.
OK, I was off by a factor of four(ish), but at 1-2mps, could a reliable defense be put up?
One other thing that came to mind... At that speed, what kind of accuracy could we get? Could we do the "smart bomb" thing, or would we have to go for entire cities?
Yeah, it'd be nice to be able to say we did it, but who are we gonna brag to? And I know, we're destroying our planet, blah blah blah, but I don't think we're going to blast a hole in the side of the planet anytime real soon, so to me, your hurry is a little overdone.
I'm pretty sure Kubrick knew he was writing fiction, and I'm not sure how you came to believe that 2001 was some sort of Nostradamus-sanctioned prediction of the future.
Finally, this technology could be used as a stepping stone towards your goal of inhabiting Mars (or whatever it is you want to do.) If you want NASA to work towards inhabiting other planets, get a job there. If you already have a job there, quit reading Slashdot, and get to work.
Now, obviously, we can't exactly send a traditional fighter out to shoot this thing down, but would it be possible to detonate something in front of the craft, which would pepper the area with oversized buckshot, and let the craft fly through it?
I'm not well versed in the mechanics of air travel, and I know that at supersonic speeds, it becomes harder to maneuver (jumping into hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy!), but at the speeds this thing moves, would it be pretty much limited to a straight line, or could it "go around" the danger zone?
Also, if this can go from one end of the globe to another in 30 min, would anybody be able to detect it, track it, and send up a countermeasure in enough time?
Somebody get this guy some ink blots. I want to see what else he sees.
The first is your traditional account-fishing, mass-mailing, waste-of-space spammer. These are the guys who want you to MAKE MONEY FAST, TRY MY NEW DIET PILLS, and RID YOURSELF OF SPAM FOREVER (one of my favorites.) And yeah, these guys are generally hard to track down because they use fake addresses, bounce their spam off of unsecured mail servers, and use dial-up accounts, so they don't have a static IPs.
The second group, and the group that I feel is more insidious, is the legitimate businesses. Any idiot can spot one of the aforementioned spams from a mile away, but when I get a piece of e-mail from a real company, and it looks like someone with at least a 5th-grade education wrote it, I'll usually read it. In this case, the plaintiff specifically asked not to get e-mail from this company, and they sent her crap anyway. They even went so far as to tell her that they knew she opted out of getting e-mail from them, but they just wanted her to know she could.
This is nothing but thinly-veiled bullshit. Apply this to almost any other situation, and it becomes evident that this practice is wrong. For example, let's say I just moved, and I got a new phone installed. When I called the Phone Co., they asked me if I wanted some add-on service, like Caller ID, which I declined. Now, let's say in a month, I get a call from someone at the telephone company, saying that they know I didn't want Caller ID a month ago, but they thought I might be interested in it now. I can assure you that you wouldn't want to be in the room if I got that call. (Well, actually, it might be kind of funny...)
The only reason some people think this is OK with e-mail is because they pay a fixed rate per month (rather than per byte or kilobyte), and they can just delete the mail in a split second. Well, some people do have to pay for data transfer (or connection charges for time on-line, and over a modem, spam can add up), and this is still a waste of my time, whether it's a second of my time (in the case of spam), or ten minutes of my time (in the case of a phone call, where I'd be conversing with the unfortunate soul on the other end of the line for a while.)
Executive Summary: Spam that is blatantly spam is bad, but spam that poses as genuine business-to-business or business-to-consumer marketing is even worse. All forms of spam should be stopped post-haste.
Basically, if they had some money, I could probably have conned it out of them.
I will make it legal.
Kind of reminds me of a joke I used to play on two really stupid girls @ college. I'd see them at a party or something, and I'd always say, "You're looking positively bovine today" (They were portly lasses.) Either they never heard me well enough, or they didn't know what bovine meant, but they always thought that was great. If only they had money...
Well, yeah, it was his originally, but he gave it to Ben with the express purpose of having it given to his son. So, it was really Luke's at the time of the unfortunate incident.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that using these devices that can translate smells into mechanical movement (or whatever else you want, I guess), in conjunction with the iSmell (may it rest in piece), would make the beginnings of a nice Rube Goldberg invention?
OK, drug-sniffing robots are cool and all, but when can I have a medical droid give me a new right hand when my dad cuts it off? (Lost a perfectly good lightsabre, too, dammit.)
I would assume that any sane person in either of the latter groups would se this as a Pyrrhic victory at best, and tell Legal to drop it.
Unfortunately, I wonder if all of the recent talk about copyright infringement (both here on /., and in the rest of the world) has made the lawyers hypersensitive to anything that might come close to perverting Apple's brand.
Still, if I ever met any of these lawyers at a party (probably not very likely), I wouldn't be able to decide if I should ask him to build me a rocket, or pull a friggin' tumor out of my frontal lobe. They seem to be a little short on common sense.
OK, I have seen the error of my ways, and from now on, I will attempt to use noone@example.com, but I'm not quite sure how long it'll take to break the habit. I've been entering 'noone@nowhere.com' for something like 5-6 years now, so it's kind of ingrained. Thanks for the info, though.