Comply. Or end up in the slammer. If you end up in the slammer anyway, that's not your fault.
Or avoid the entire situation and boycott the country / carrying laptops through customs which is what almost anyone I know that knows IT and works internationally does now. The only solution is to not have anything, because even a non-Windows login screen can make an idiot suspicious. You're not allowed to have "non-functioning" machines because they make you demo them operating, so having a blank drive is out. Thus it's a sacrificial copy of Windows with *nothing* on it except VPN/VNC software or nothing.
And if you're from the EU, the "You're not allowed" argument probably holds more water but they are under no obligation to follow even EU data protection law, which means the very act of transporting that data (i.e. YOU) is a violation of data protection laws - thus you will get into trouble if the security guys take it and do whatever the hell they want with it (which is pretty much what happens if they stop you - they won't sign anything to say they won't distribute the data and/or they've destroyed any copies they've made). If it's a choice between breaking EU law and other laws, don't make the choice. Don't break any by just not taking the data. You won't be the only one, I guarantee you.
If you only play a game for 4-5 hours, it's because the game was crap or cheap (i.e. indie, not budget titles) in my opinion. Games should be capable of giving a *LOT* more value for money (in terms of hours entertainment per £/$/Euro) than your average DVD. Any "good" game of mine gets much, much more gameplay than that. It very much depends on the genre, too, and whether you count multiplayer (everyone playing multiplayer on a single-player capable game suggests your AI / missions aren't challenging / interesting / long enough).
My "Altitude" account is sitting at nearly 50 hours gameplay, and that cost me about $10. That's what you have to compete with. And that's only because I've been making myself put it down and sacrificing my normal Counterstrike time. I've had it for about a month or so and racked up 10 times the "ideal length" of a single-player game in that time, just playing casually. I just bought Master of Magic / Orion again from GOG.com - it's about my fourth time of owning it and I still put in more than 4-5 hours just to *TEST* that the GOG.com version didn't crash or do anything stupid. Some of my other recent purchases got 4-5 hours just to test if the game is something I'd enjoy. I expect small indie games to last anything from 2-5 hours (and usually they do *much* better than that), but a "full-price" game should keep me intrigued for much, much, much longer than that.
I can barely even name a full-price single-player game in the last few years that has kept me interested for that amount of time, let alone feel justified enough to stump up the cash for it while it's still new. Half-life 2, I suppose - I was still enjoying that right until the end with only minor bouts of boredom when I got lost once or twice, or had to do repetitive load/save/try to survive this time around. Half-life kept me interested for that amount of time too, and I put in many hours on GTA Vice City & San Andreas (single player). Hell, even the original GTA I burned dozens of hours playing through (and never quite "completed" it). Company of Heroes saw a good few hours until it just got stupidly difficult / boring with vastly unfair missions and although I could probably beat it, it was boring by that point - I'd played for 21.8 hrs according to the Steam stats. Crayon Physics, Gish, World of Goo, hell even Peggle has clocked up dozens and dozens of hours on my Steam account.
Back in the "old" days, I only ever "completed" a single Spectrum game - Nonterraqueous. That was it. And that took the concerted efforts of myself, my brother and father mapping the damn thing on the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life. We were good at playing it even before we started and it still took longer than 4-5 hours just to do a *single* run through of a silly, old, addictive game. I owned about 250 Spectrum games, probably less than 70% could be "completed" and I completed *1*. It doesn't mean we didn't put in *thousands* of hours into that system though, and that never really had multiplayer at all (Match Day 2, Ace II, Batty, things like that wiled away a few hours or so playing 2-player).
Age of Empires II? God, I was playing that forever. Settlers, the same. And lots of other "big title" games that I got when they became cheaper. 4-5 hours is nothing to a real gamer. It's nothing to my cousins and kids in the school I work at - they have all completed most of their games and are bored with them by the time they are a week old. But apparently we're constrained in gameplay because of the % of players that never complete a game, or just buy it so they can tell their mates they have it first.
That's pretty much covered every major genre but still they are all indie games or old games that are renowned as "classics". The stuff that's churned out now, with its community-metric-based gameplay gets dull after an hour or so because "that's what the majority want" - unless it has decent multiplayer. I can't see any of the games that are out now becoming "clas
I think you're missing the point. It's not about anti-copyright, because of the reasons you describe. It's about changing the goalposts all the time - fair use has been written in law for decades / centuries. Suddenly, companies want to clamp down, pretend it doesn't exist, stop you using your "fair use" rights at all, making "fair use" almost impossible through DRM schemes etc. And then copyright extension terms gets extended *again*, and *again* until nothing ever hits the public domain at all. That's *not* what copyright was about, and it's *not* the stated purpose as written in every historical law on copyright. It's supposed to be a temporary arrangement to allow the authors to prevent plagiarism for a reasonable time in order for them to capitalise on their work, and then to ultimately let the public benefit from "archaic" works.
The message was lost. But even those people who license under the GPL release that when their copyright expires (if it *ever* does), their works may revert to the public domain (I don't know if anyone's looked at the copyright expiration situation but it's very difficult given the average development history of popular GPL software). At the rate things are going, that's going to be never.
Most people *aren't* anti-copyright. They actually want the laws to be enforced as written and for the law to stay static. Hell, most Disney stuff, The Beatles, etc. should have expired into the public domain *YEARS* ago.
The only significant works that I know where you can get public domain copies of them are the books on things like Project Gutenburg (and we're talking still-money-making stuff like the original Beatrix Potter illustrations and novels etc. and the rights-holders are still making a killing... you just have to be sure that you took the images from the *original* books, not from the modern (re-copyrighted) reprints). Music, software, video, where's the public domain stuff now?
For my work, I use "real" software for the most part (and some of that is Free software with appropriate commercial support). For all my other stuff, I don't see why I should pay hundreds or thousands of $/£/ in order to burn a home movie to disk, or install an operating system on an old machine, or edit photos or design a personal website. Hell, you are technically paying just to burn a DVD-R or watch a DVD under most versions of Windows because they have to bundle software to make it work.
If you do, and want to, pay for that sort of thing for your own personal computers - go ahead and piss your leisure money away. If you think that "putting some video data on a disk that about 17% of people can even watch (current market penetration figures), and only about 10% of those can actually watch as it was intended (i.e. better than DVD quality)" is a good use of your money, feel free to pay the companies that invented it thousands of pounds to "do it properly". The rest of us will still be using cheap, simple, non-demanding software to burn onto DVD and/or trialling free software to do the same thing.
For work, it's an entirely different matter because by the time something is "mainstream", your business is already sunk, so you *have* to pay those extortionate license fees in order to be able to do the same simple task: put some video onto a disk. You're just paying a stupid premium in order to be able to do that before or at the same time as your competitors.
We might be the Amish, but you're the Emperor with his "new clothes". At least we're actually wearing *something*, and it does the job, and it didn't cost us a penny. In ten years time when you work out how much each bit on a disk cost you over that decade, you might be wondering if it was actually worth it.
"Google is not doing any individual act that's illegal, and isn't doing anything in aggregate that's illegal"
That *very* much depends on where you live. In the UK, for instance, that MAC address may well be classed as personal information (because it's a unique code on a product that a person owns and thus links the product manufacturer (MAC prefix), possibly the product type and an address of a personal residence - Google already has to blank out car number plates because of this, what's different between that and a MAC?) and thus subject to the Data Protection Act - WHETHER OR NOT that information is easily available to anyone and "broadcast" to everyone. In some countries, there are legal precedents that say that even *trying* to connect to a wireless network that you don't own is an unlawful intrusion (to stop people piggybacking on other's wifi without permission)... Google may well not be doing just a passive scan of the local area.
Just because America has crap laws against these things, it doesn't mean other places have. And Germany probably has some of the tightest personal information laws in the EU.
There speaks someone who thinks that "new" = "good". Afraid not. Most schoolkids fall into this trap ("Oh, it's GTA4, it must be better than GTA3!" - and no, I don't think kids should be buying those games but I work in schools and that's the reality) but they learn to grow out of it once they've been stung a couple of times using their own hard-earned money. Sorry, but give me a decent old game anyday, where "longevity" meant dozens or hundreds of hours, not five levels (literally - there are games being sold now that have "five environments" and "several hours of play-time"), where 3D graphics were recognised as just getting in the way of the game most of the time (unless they were in fact *good* uses of 3D which get rarer by the day), where I can play them on my laptop without having to upgrade it, where I can actually enjoy a game without taking longer to learn the control system than I do to complete the game. There's a reason that the Wii, the silly Flash/Facebook games and the remakes of old classics on mobile phones took off - because people want to play the games, not coo over the graphics. "Games" covers more than just the No. 1 in the shops today, in the same way as "Music" does.
And yes, the games industry may not care about me but this is the amazing point: I don't care. I don't care if Sony carries on doing DRM or not. I don't care if a company I use wants to do that... I just find another company if not. The thought that somehow I'm "bringing down the system" doesn't occur to me. Moreover, my thoughts are "Well, *I'm* not getting screwed like other people are". And that's all that counts, really. I don't care if 99.9% of morons pay to play DRM-laden rubbish - the fact is that I *don't* any more and am happier for it. You cannot believe the value for money that I get - hundreds and hundreds of hours playing games, having fun (and, yes, actually a lot more fun than my last few big purchases which were all pretty disappointing) and I do it for less than the price of one, boxed, full-price, modern game. If the games industry doesn't care about me, that's their loss - quite literally, in some cases.
And in three years time I'll be playing that same modern game that you like, on a system more than capable of playing it, for about £10 and I'll have its bugs patched properly and the DRM will, most probably, be disabled. You can laugh at me then, and the games industry can ignore me then too. Fabulous. I don't really care. Or, if that game's not available later because of the DRM or because the games industry doesn't want people trading them second-hand, or doesn't want it becoming a budget title... no problem, I don't want to play it while it's like that anyway.
I'm helping to keep a shed-load of small independent games publishers alive and productive though (not that I "care" about the little guys, but they are certainly more deserving of my money if they can actually make something that I want), with much more interesting and stimulating games than "Yet Another FPS Shooter With A Tacked-On Plot, Bad Multiplayer, Horrible DRM, No Game Balance, Completable Within One Session, Turbo Hyper-Fighting 3D with PhysX and DirectX 46". So the game *industry* should really have a think about the competition... how are Sony, Nintendo, etc. doing in monopolising the huge market for things like Facebook games? They're not. How about portable games, e.g. iPhones, Java, etc.? Not so well still, except for the occasional franchised port. An industry covers more than a £60 PC game. And others are making *millions* off that side of the industry. How disillusioned are the kids when the latest sequel turns out to be shit and Sony et al have to invent another franchise? Nintendo are the experts in the game industry... they started off making playing cards but they damn well know how to sell games that people want to play. The others aren't doing so well and just about every 5 years of so a major games company fails after an initial hit and gets sucked into one of the other bra
Of course Sony won't be trumpeting. When was the last time that *any* DRM scheme was advertised as being a good thing? Never. And DRM has been around since the early 80's (in terms of home computer software, *much* longer than that in terms of corporate). If you're not already aware it exists, then that means you've never used a DVD from another region, never installed Windows or run WGA, never used iTunes with it's 5-computer limits, never struggled to copy a video or a CD onto a blank tape, never had to have your car serviced by (or parts bought from) the original manufacturer because the computer / lock / whatever are "owned" by the company, never owned an inkjet printer that only takes authorised inks, etc. If you've managed to get that far in life without doing those things, chances are you won't know or care about DRM at all. And if you have, then you're the kind of person who does say "Hold on a sec... what *am* I buying here?".
And this is a heavy-tech site. Everybody here knows about DRM already. Everybody can name five DRM schemes just for software off the top of their head and / or has bought and probably avoided games in the past for their DRM. Having the article on here is preaching to the choir and most readers just won't care... bought something with silly restrictions because you didn't properly know what you were buying? Tough. And it was from Sony? Shock, horror. I'd be happier to see this article on BBC News (but it would never happen because it's not a noteworthy enough bit of software) because at least then previously uneducated people might learn something about DRM. But, let's be honest, if you use a computer, you know about DRM - even some grannies know DRM schemes that are in place in the real world even if they don't know that's what they are called.
P.S. This is exactly why I gave up buying most games, except through Steam. Steam's "DRM" I can suffer with, it's convenient, never interferes and just works. And even if the worst happens, I get to play the single-player games I've bought (internet multi-player games *all* die off eventually - try finding a Red Alert or Age of Empires server with enough people on it). Even then, I avoid the crap on Steam that has additional DRM because it's just not needed - no GTA4 for me.
I've said it before: the most effective copy protection scheme I've ever seen was on the Spectrum version of Saboteur. It printed up a message on game load that said "If the word Durell is not visible on the tape, it's an illegal copy". As an 8-year-old, I ejected the tape from the player, picked it up and looked to see the little word "Durell" repeatedly stamped on the tape leader. Eight. And I bothered to double-check that I had a legitimate copy. That's as good as a copy protection system ever gets. Nothing else has ever been more effective - the pirates crack absolutely everything and sometimes it is hard to tell if your copy is properly licensed. Hell, I refuse to let my own personal laptop (with a fully-licensed version of Windows XP) run WGA's "checker" to see if it's fraudulent. I *know* it isn't - it uses my employer's VLK and we track licences. But I'll be damned if something that has reported false-positives is just going to disable my computer.
And now, because of stupid DRM, I'm re-discovering old classic games and actually having a lot more fun... GOG.com is a god-send to me. No DRM. Games that run on just about any PC. Thousands of hours of gameplay for the price of a full-price, DRM-laden game. Bargain.
Final Fight was the only arcade game that I *ever* completed in an arcade... my brother and I found one in a old arcade in a Butlin's holiday camp that took 10p's. It still cost us about £3 but we got there in the end. Those were the days.
Similarly, seeing that same game boot up in a CPS emulator a few years ago brought back some memories.
Oh, find the DRM restrictive? Don't buy it. Problem solved. I fail to see why that's worth an article, I was just hoping that there was some "new" Final Fight coming out.
The main factors there are 1) distance, 2) length of time you spend focusing.
Sitting further away actually works counter to this guy's argument - because then you need larger pixels (lower DPI) or you're just wasting your money on things you can't see. What "solves" your eye problem is more that you are changing your focus more often - you cannot damage your eyes by being "too close" to something (and no, TV's are no worse than papers in that regard, that's an old wive's tale, it's just that our habits change with a TV)... you damage them by forcing them to do something unnatural (i.e. stare at a very close object intently for a very long time without a break).
My optician always played a very old trick and asked his patients to sign a form after their examination. They were relaxed, thought things were over and the kids were just excited about having to sign something like an adult. When you did so, he then told you off if you were too close to the paper... it's amazing how automatic it is to get too close to something when your glasses/eyes *do* work perfectly from much further away... examinations are a good example of this - everyone "crouches" over the desk even though they'd be more relaxed and have less eye-strain if they looked at the paper from a sitting-up position.
Change your focus, look around, don't sit for hours staring at the same screen (even something like putting your clock on a high shelf is helpful because when you are working to a deadline, you'll find yourself looking somewhere else for the time).
Such a limit when you have literally 100's of $5 and old-archive games on there, some of them running on DOSBox... however will those games cope with only 4Gb of addressable RAM?!!?!
I don't think that's true at all. The purpose of the web browser is to display content. Thus, almost by definition, any browser that can end up executing arbitrary code by doing so is not doing its job. With Opera, the only avenues are from things like null-pointers, buffer overflows etc. - the usual methods that do apply to *all* software and are covered by your reasoning. You can compromise a plugin, but that is common to all browsers that use that plugin - that's not a "browser" problem (I don't blame Opera if Java is compromisable, unless it's something to do with the way Opera implements Java). However, IE has in the past had any number of ways of executing code directly without the user's knowledge or consent - sadly Firefox followed suit by allowing things like ActiveX on the Windows platform. Those avenues may be fixed now but it's the design that's bad, not just the execution. Still, Firefox doesn't do half as many stupid things as IE has done in its history.
I've used Opera for years, always kept it up to date, and I've actually used it in the past to go to those websites that people hand me and say "Is this safe to click?" - with Opera the worst that happens is you get a download link or something asks for permission to execute... with IE, a VAST proportion of the time, even with automatic updates, the same actions would instantly and without permission start executing code. Try it - set up a virtual machine (on a host you don't care about and on a secured network) and patch IE to the hilt - then go off exploring (googling for pirate games is a good way to flag up some malware websites)... you will get code executions and compromises all over the place. Now do the same in Opera - because it doesn't even *try* to trust things from the web, it will survive a lot better - not because it's less targetted, but because it really doesn't do a lot of the stupid crap that IE has done in the past.
And please don't give me the "IE has more users" crap - any software with a hole can and will be exploited but the fact is that IE is *also* an easy target. If it has more users, then they should/can/do put more developers on fixing it. And that's *NO* excuse for having insecure software - I don't care if the software on my networks has 1 or 1,000,000 users outside my company - I damn well expect it to be secure and to have timely patches to known (and HUGELY announced) problems, especially if I'm paying money for support for it.
The graphs speak for themselves and they only cover Opera 10 and IE 8 - go back into the historical versions and the picture is even more damning to Microsoft.
The simple fact is: stick an idiot user on IE and you *will* get "Advanced Registry Optimisers" and all sorts of crap automatically installing, a lot of the time without any dialogs at all. I know, I just cleaned off *YET ANOTHER* private laptop for the staff where I work where they'd done just that. Stick them on Firefox, the chances are reduced. Stick them on Opera, the chances are reduced again. Yes, an expert on IE can probably circumvent some of those problems with IE but there are some things you just *cannot* stop on IE and there's no *WAY* on Earth I would ever browse around on IE on my networks - it's just so easy to compromise with nothing more than a bit of dodgy HTML.
According to Secunia, 40% of the known, documented and reported security problems with IE 8.0 are still unpatched - only one of those is from 2010, the rest are in previous years. That's just *disgusting* for a major software vendor. How many problems does Opera have unpatched?
I think the people who have software that autodeploys updates to 20-50k employees without getting a say in the matter (i.e. testing, change management, etc.) have a lot more to answer for. When the software that supposed to *save* your productivity by preventing viruses ends up doing this to your sites, it's time to just throw it in the bin.
To be honest 2, 4 and 5 are perfectly adequate for a knowledgeable user and the rest provide little if any advantage. And they also happen to apply to all OS's and all versions of those OS's.
I don't click on ads. I rarely, if ever, pay them any attention. When I do, it's for something that would interest me regardless and I probably already knew about. I don't block ads - it's not as reliable as I would want it to be and I don't like pages which load up with missing blocks - I hate my screen looking like they've been loaded on a copy of IE where 50% of DNS queries fail... it's just horrible. I can easily look *around* the ads when they load. I build web-filters for schools as part of my job and I actually go out of my way to configure the open-source filtering software I use to only block what's necessary, not to block sites just because they are used to load ads (a lot of filters come with the ad-domains blacklisted by default).
That said, if your ads are obnoxious I won't bother to block them, even though I could do it in a second, I just won't go to your website very often. If it becomes a real problem, I will complain (if I actually care about the site, like I did with the BBC's TV listings site when it filled up with noisy Crazy Frog ads, and they were promptly removed) or just stop visiting. The beauty of the Internet is that someone, somewhere will have the same content at the same time as you do... there's no such thing as an "exclusive" any more, even if that means someone just copy/pasted an article onto Digg or something. If you have a problem with the way I browse your website - fine, I won't browse it. It's really not that big a deal. I'm not going to be crying myself to sleep because of it.
However, forum moderation is one of my biggest bug-bears. I hate overzealous moderation. And if you moderate comments about your moderation, you're just starting down a slippery slope that will destroy any forum community. I have never been banned, but I have posted comments about bad moderation that I've seen. I've never been banned because, basically, I would never hang out on a forum that I suspected the mods would ever do that sort of thing for just *discussing* a quite reasonable, legal activity. It's just not the way to promote discussion, and if you don't want to promote discussion, don't have a forum.
Forums where every single comment is moderated tend to be dull, enclosed and "up themselves" (i.e. self-promoting). I don't read them, I have little interest in contributing to them. I think the exception would be things like The Register, where I've never had a comment disallowed even when I've been discussing things I would imagine some forums ban you for. Forums which contain an "off-topic" or "general discussion" forum? Sorry, but that's a free reign for anyone. I can understand not breaking the law or discussing breaking the law but virtually everything else is fair game.
Removing fair criticism of yourself is the one thing guaranteed to stop me coming back to your website, though. It means you're a charlatan and a liar - you're trying to paint the picture that your forum is perfect and everyone is happy and that's just disgusting. Some support forums do this, and I just stop buying their products.
If you wonder why you're losing ad-revenue, it's not because of those people who don't want to see ads ever at all (who are in the minority... I don't know the official stats but if it's more than 5% I'd be surprised), it's those people who just won't touch your site/forum ever.
I think the Internet has made my commercial habits even more honed - I stick with a product/website until it pissed me off, and when it does I just find another and stick with that, etc. I take much less crap in terms of things that hinder me getting at the information I need than I do in other media. A TV listings site that I used for *years* and never even bothered to research any other changed its look overnight and destroyed its usability. After the third week or so of trying to cope with it, I just researched others, moved on and have *never* been back to that site since. On the Internet, the user is king. Even a bad redesign or dodgy scripts or slow access ca
Yes, this pisses me off too. Until I can literally destroy *anything* in the game, without limitation at all, even if the game slowed to an absolute crawl when I do so... it's not a "true" destructible environment. I should be able to knock down every building, chop every door into small pieces, blast a tunnel through a hill or mountain, drain a lake by building a canal system etc... anything else is just "another" clever way of making it look like I can do that but actually just changing the limits of what I can do (i.e. stopping me doing some things and letting me do new things).
I'm looking forward to the day that I can tunnel up underneath the main zombie/alien/terrorist hideout.
In fact, I'm a Rainbow Six fan myself, but the older versions (I find the latest ones too "showy"), and Thief fan, and Quake fan, and Counterstrike fan, and Project IGI fan, and DoD fan, and L4D fan, so I do cover all types of FPS... you can't play Rainbow Six or Thief by just charging in guns blazing. However you *ALWAYS* need to ability to fine control your shots and then in the next minute turn around fast to react to something, no matter what the game... you hope you never need it but otherwise you might as well be playing a slideshow, tactics or not. And without that sort of turn ability, accuracy, etc. you tend to die, get caught out in the open, get shot by the one enemy you missed sneaking up behind you etc.
Teamwork and cover are nothing to do with having the correct control system for the job. Hell, L4D requires teamwork and cover and I'd hardly class that as a non-action FPS. And when that job needs pixel-perfect aiming for sniping one minute, accurate movement for traversing through dense forest the next, rapid turns for reaction to events, etc. *even if it's only once in a while* then you need a control system that can do all those comfortably and equally as well.
But those people who "enjoy" taking literally 5 seconds to do an about turn in a game (and usually those games give you a key to "quick-turn" because they know it's so awful and you can't do it with the usual control system) need a kick up the arse, fast-paced gameplay or not. It's not about speed of thought, or snap-shots, or the style of gameplay - when you *do* need to duck back into cover after sniping, you still need a control system that doesn't take 5 seconds to turn you around.
"We have an expectation that mouse controls will translate into very rapid changes of direction - with a quick flick being enough for an instant 180 degree turn. This is disconcerting when controlling a "heavy" character, who is actually designed to turn relatively slowly."
It leads me to wonder, just how long does it take to hear a noise of a gun behind you, turn around to see what the noise is, throw yourself to the ground and shoot back with the weapon you're holding? I would suggest much, much less than a second or so in a combat situation, even with a 40-lb pack strapped to your back. Anything slower, then, is counter-intuitive and unreasonable no matter what the "heaviness" of a character. If you can walk / run / jump at any speed with any amount of dexterity then you can see behind you in the time it takes your head to turn (next to nothing), rotate your arms in a fraction of a second to point that way (especially if you're already looking that way because your shoulders will be halfway there) and only a step or two with your feet to turn completely around.
I know realism isn't everything (it's only a game) but I think in any FPS there is a certain expectation that sometimes you have to turn around bloody fast, run, shoot vaguely accurately and quickly, and quickly observe your entire surroundings (not all at the same time). That's only possible with a mouse in my experience - every FPS I've played on any other control system is hideously slow, quirky, "unnatural" (I know a mouse isn't natural either), or just too inaccurate / robotic. I have seen FPS where it can take 4 or even 5 seconds to turn 360 degrees, and that in a perfectly straight line. They were all on limited-control-system consoles with input devices that can't handle both rapid turns and accuracy with the same control devices (not at the same time, necessarily, just both extremes of control). The only other system that would be close that a mouse's control in that would be something approaching VR suits where you can do the movement yourself.
Seriously... stand up with a big tip-you-backwards rucksack filled with weight and see how long it takes to turn 180 when you think a bomb's gone off behind you.
Well, for some kind of "expert" I find his component-swapping "diagnosis" a bit dubious to be honest. Yeah, a lot of the time you can just swap out a suspect component but swapping a hard drive for a installation-hang? It's towards the bottom of my list, especially if that drive has handled other OS installations without any problem and doesn't have SMART errors (Did he check? Did he clean-format in between? Even a corrupt NTFS can exhibit those same symptoms... nary a mention of things like that). I'd actually be suspecting a Windows bug before most of the stuff he replaces, considering that he suggests he was already using that hardware fine on the 32-bit editions of Windows - I'd be making an up-to-the-minute Windows 7 installation CD with every update I could find.
And the graphics card replacement is just completely illogical unless there was some hint that the graphics card was the fault - bad imagery, hangs happening on a resolution change or reboot, etc. The graphics cards use doesn't change during the installation except at those points and so unless there was a temperature problem or something related, it would just be *weird* to suspect that. Power supplies can present odd problems certainly but it makes me wonder how reliable his testing really is normally if he's powering things up on the wrong wattage of power supply without even noticing and then possibly publishing benchmarks / stability reports etc.
By the time you get to the casing, he's just clutching at straws rather than thinking. I'm not saying that I'd suspect the CPU immediately, or even at all, but the logical processes he's using are just dubious. I mean, he changes the memory before he remembers that he has some stupid BIOS option for upping the memory speeds enabled. And doesn't think to do a simple memtest at *ANY* stage? Surely a memtest would have picked up the same memory errors before all the testing, and that would lead him to check the BIOS and then replace the RAM way before he does? It saves a lot of hurt to do *checks* like that, rather than blindly assuming, especially if you're replacing one set of RAM with another that is "older, and well-tried and trusted" (with memory, there's no such thing as tried and trusted... they can die overnight, don't take kindly to handling, etc.). He was using a non-standard CPU cooler, too, which doesn't get mentioned until later in the article. I'd be suspecting temperature problems with his setup which he doesn't even consider.
But at no point does he actually suspect the *only* engineering *sample* that he's ever used and that's been in the machine all along. He just blindly replaces it eventually but he never suspects it until he "finds" the problem.
Hell, must be nice to just be able to order random components until your problem goes away. Other people have to do the same job, with cheaper, shittier hardware, no budget, no diagnostic tools, useless vendor support, while under pressure, to earn their living. But then according to the Wiki he's a "freelance writer", "trainer", "Internet consultant" (Yeurk...), "Director of Technical Marketing" (for a year), "Technical Evangelist", "Director of Training", "Senior Researcher", "series editor", "currently writes for... TechTarget.com Web sites... Tom's Hardware and Tom's Guide... the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)... InformIT.com., "content development and book publishing projects". To be absolutely honest, the glaring thing that sticks out like a sore thumb in that list is writing for Tom's Hardware - everything else is book/article-writing and sales. This guy isn't a tech - he's a marketer. Why his "diagnosis" should be interesting at all is beyond me, except possibly as a humour article.
Oh, and the article seems to just be a way to show off brandnames, model names, and his hardware. I expect as much from a marketing guy.
And if you read my post, you'll find we agree... the original comment was about whether BeOS did this any better than any other OS. Nobody cares what the OS is so long as they can click their damn icons when they see them on the screen.
I do think that current OS's really suffer from the "give me my damn mouse back, let me click that button, don't make me wait for seven thousand services to start up before you let me click the start button that appeared in the first second" syndrome. But that doesn't make an OS, that makes a GUI on top of an OS. The problem is "easily" solved (for a definition of easily) by queueing user events and handling mouse motion / keyboard input in a separate thread (not at all a performance problem with modern machines).
User reponsiveness is vital, that much I can agree on. I can't wait for the OS that can properly remember and queue user events from the first second so that I can send a list of keystrokes and have it get on with them - I hate when Windows chugs and your button clicks are completely ignored (programmatically, graphically, etc.) and then there's a burst of activity once it's idle again. Ideally, such interaction would be per-application (so non-busy apps would still respond as fast no matter what else was chugging away) - incidentally, window-focus-steals are the worst idea ever invented, whether by the OS or the applications themselves.
But that's a GUI issue, for the most part. Yes, the OS shouldn't chug that badly in the first place but when it does, the underlying GUI still has millions of cycles in which to respond. It doesn't, because of deep-level order dependencies and other things. The main problem, though, is programs and OS's drawing themselves before they are actually able to respond - I've seen Windows desktop, start bar, etc. appear sometimes MINUTES before the start button can actually be clicked in any useful manner, and that's *completely* pointless and just makes me think that the computer is much slower than it actually is. It's a pain in the arse and all programs should be made to draw to a back-buffer until they are actually ready to respond to user input, and any that don't within 0.5 of a second should be terminated in the style of Windows' "This program has stopped responding".
The problem is not the OS (though some OS queueing techniques can help desktop interactivity), it's mainly the application side... programs that draw too early, set themselves up piece-meal and serially, draw the user into clicking them before they can respond (what's wrong with greying out any buttons/menus until you *are* ready to respond to them?), don't queue events properly and aren't allocated a high-enough event priority when they are the main-focus app.
That's not worth an obsolete (sorry, but it is) OS, when it can be fixed by a simple event model and some slightly stricter application requirements. You can't hold an OS responsible if the programs draw themselves, then go through a serial setup and ignore all button presses in between, or when they are busy, etc. Proper multithread use is the main factor. The OS is not.
What on Earth makes you think that any modern adaptor will accept that ancient type of hard drive, even if it used IDE connectivity? Hell, it's hard to read anything less than about a Gig with modern adaptors sometimes. The addressing modes have been changed any number of times since then, and the specs in the article even refer to it as a "Winchester" drive... when was the last time you heard that?
Slashdot Mirror
Comply. Or end up in the slammer. If you end up in the slammer anyway, that's not your fault.
Or avoid the entire situation and boycott the country / carrying laptops through customs which is what almost anyone I know that knows IT and works internationally does now. The only solution is to not have anything, because even a non-Windows login screen can make an idiot suspicious. You're not allowed to have "non-functioning" machines because they make you demo them operating, so having a blank drive is out. Thus it's a sacrificial copy of Windows with *nothing* on it except VPN/VNC software or nothing.
And if you're from the EU, the "You're not allowed" argument probably holds more water but they are under no obligation to follow even EU data protection law, which means the very act of transporting that data (i.e. YOU) is a violation of data protection laws - thus you will get into trouble if the security guys take it and do whatever the hell they want with it (which is pretty much what happens if they stop you - they won't sign anything to say they won't distribute the data and/or they've destroyed any copies they've made). If it's a choice between breaking EU law and other laws, don't make the choice. Don't break any by just not taking the data. You won't be the only one, I guarantee you.
If you only play a game for 4-5 hours, it's because the game was crap or cheap (i.e. indie, not budget titles) in my opinion. Games should be capable of giving a *LOT* more value for money (in terms of hours entertainment per £/$/Euro) than your average DVD. Any "good" game of mine gets much, much more gameplay than that. It very much depends on the genre, too, and whether you count multiplayer (everyone playing multiplayer on a single-player capable game suggests your AI / missions aren't challenging / interesting / long enough).
My "Altitude" account is sitting at nearly 50 hours gameplay, and that cost me about $10. That's what you have to compete with. And that's only because I've been making myself put it down and sacrificing my normal Counterstrike time. I've had it for about a month or so and racked up 10 times the "ideal length" of a single-player game in that time, just playing casually. I just bought Master of Magic / Orion again from GOG.com - it's about my fourth time of owning it and I still put in more than 4-5 hours just to *TEST* that the GOG.com version didn't crash or do anything stupid. Some of my other recent purchases got 4-5 hours just to test if the game is something I'd enjoy. I expect small indie games to last anything from 2-5 hours (and usually they do *much* better than that), but a "full-price" game should keep me intrigued for much, much, much longer than that.
I can barely even name a full-price single-player game in the last few years that has kept me interested for that amount of time, let alone feel justified enough to stump up the cash for it while it's still new. Half-life 2, I suppose - I was still enjoying that right until the end with only minor bouts of boredom when I got lost once or twice, or had to do repetitive load/save/try to survive this time around. Half-life kept me interested for that amount of time too, and I put in many hours on GTA Vice City & San Andreas (single player). Hell, even the original GTA I burned dozens of hours playing through (and never quite "completed" it). Company of Heroes saw a good few hours until it just got stupidly difficult / boring with vastly unfair missions and although I could probably beat it, it was boring by that point - I'd played for 21.8 hrs according to the Steam stats. Crayon Physics, Gish, World of Goo, hell even Peggle has clocked up dozens and dozens of hours on my Steam account.
Back in the "old" days, I only ever "completed" a single Spectrum game - Nonterraqueous. That was it. And that took the concerted efforts of myself, my brother and father mapping the damn thing on the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life. We were good at playing it even before we started and it still took longer than 4-5 hours just to do a *single* run through of a silly, old, addictive game. I owned about 250 Spectrum games, probably less than 70% could be "completed" and I completed *1*. It doesn't mean we didn't put in *thousands* of hours into that system though, and that never really had multiplayer at all (Match Day 2, Ace II, Batty, things like that wiled away a few hours or so playing 2-player).
Age of Empires II? God, I was playing that forever. Settlers, the same. And lots of other "big title" games that I got when they became cheaper. 4-5 hours is nothing to a real gamer. It's nothing to my cousins and kids in the school I work at - they have all completed most of their games and are bored with them by the time they are a week old. But apparently we're constrained in gameplay because of the % of players that never complete a game, or just buy it so they can tell their mates they have it first.
That's pretty much covered every major genre but still they are all indie games or old games that are renowned as "classics". The stuff that's churned out now, with its community-metric-based gameplay gets dull after an hour or so because "that's what the majority want" - unless it has decent multiplayer. I can't see any of the games that are out now becoming "clas
And if it was true, they should really start suing the BBC for their Dirac codec...
And almost certainly followed by the wording "this does not affect your statutory rights."
I can get people to sign a contract stating that if I murder them, I can't be sued. Doesn't mean it's legally enforceable.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about anti-copyright, because of the reasons you describe. It's about changing the goalposts all the time - fair use has been written in law for decades / centuries. Suddenly, companies want to clamp down, pretend it doesn't exist, stop you using your "fair use" rights at all, making "fair use" almost impossible through DRM schemes etc. And then copyright extension terms gets extended *again*, and *again* until nothing ever hits the public domain at all. That's *not* what copyright was about, and it's *not* the stated purpose as written in every historical law on copyright. It's supposed to be a temporary arrangement to allow the authors to prevent plagiarism for a reasonable time in order for them to capitalise on their work, and then to ultimately let the public benefit from "archaic" works.
The message was lost. But even those people who license under the GPL release that when their copyright expires (if it *ever* does), their works may revert to the public domain (I don't know if anyone's looked at the copyright expiration situation but it's very difficult given the average development history of popular GPL software). At the rate things are going, that's going to be never.
Most people *aren't* anti-copyright. They actually want the laws to be enforced as written and for the law to stay static. Hell, most Disney stuff, The Beatles, etc. should have expired into the public domain *YEARS* ago.
The only significant works that I know where you can get public domain copies of them are the books on things like Project Gutenburg (and we're talking still-money-making stuff like the original Beatrix Potter illustrations and novels etc. and the rights-holders are still making a killing... you just have to be sure that you took the images from the *original* books, not from the modern (re-copyrighted) reprints). Music, software, video, where's the public domain stuff now?
I'll quote one word from your trolling: "work".
For my work, I use "real" software for the most part (and some of that is Free software with appropriate commercial support). For all my other stuff, I don't see why I should pay hundreds or thousands of $/£/ in order to burn a home movie to disk, or install an operating system on an old machine, or edit photos or design a personal website. Hell, you are technically paying just to burn a DVD-R or watch a DVD under most versions of Windows because they have to bundle software to make it work.
If you do, and want to, pay for that sort of thing for your own personal computers - go ahead and piss your leisure money away. If you think that "putting some video data on a disk that about 17% of people can even watch (current market penetration figures), and only about 10% of those can actually watch as it was intended (i.e. better than DVD quality)" is a good use of your money, feel free to pay the companies that invented it thousands of pounds to "do it properly". The rest of us will still be using cheap, simple, non-demanding software to burn onto DVD and/or trialling free software to do the same thing.
For work, it's an entirely different matter because by the time something is "mainstream", your business is already sunk, so you *have* to pay those extortionate license fees in order to be able to do the same simple task: put some video onto a disk. You're just paying a stupid premium in order to be able to do that before or at the same time as your competitors.
We might be the Amish, but you're the Emperor with his "new clothes". At least we're actually wearing *something*, and it does the job, and it didn't cost us a penny. In ten years time when you work out how much each bit on a disk cost you over that decade, you might be wondering if it was actually worth it.
"Google is not doing any individual act that's illegal, and isn't doing anything in aggregate that's illegal"
That *very* much depends on where you live. In the UK, for instance, that MAC address may well be classed as personal information (because it's a unique code on a product that a person owns and thus links the product manufacturer (MAC prefix), possibly the product type and an address of a personal residence - Google already has to blank out car number plates because of this, what's different between that and a MAC?) and thus subject to the Data Protection Act - WHETHER OR NOT that information is easily available to anyone and "broadcast" to everyone. In some countries, there are legal precedents that say that even *trying* to connect to a wireless network that you don't own is an unlawful intrusion (to stop people piggybacking on other's wifi without permission)... Google may well not be doing just a passive scan of the local area.
Just because America has crap laws against these things, it doesn't mean other places have. And Germany probably has some of the tightest personal information laws in the EU.
There speaks someone who thinks that "new" = "good". Afraid not. Most schoolkids fall into this trap ("Oh, it's GTA4, it must be better than GTA3!" - and no, I don't think kids should be buying those games but I work in schools and that's the reality) but they learn to grow out of it once they've been stung a couple of times using their own hard-earned money. Sorry, but give me a decent old game anyday, where "longevity" meant dozens or hundreds of hours, not five levels (literally - there are games being sold now that have "five environments" and "several hours of play-time"), where 3D graphics were recognised as just getting in the way of the game most of the time (unless they were in fact *good* uses of 3D which get rarer by the day), where I can play them on my laptop without having to upgrade it, where I can actually enjoy a game without taking longer to learn the control system than I do to complete the game. There's a reason that the Wii, the silly Flash/Facebook games and the remakes of old classics on mobile phones took off - because people want to play the games, not coo over the graphics. "Games" covers more than just the No. 1 in the shops today, in the same way as "Music" does.
And yes, the games industry may not care about me but this is the amazing point: I don't care. I don't care if Sony carries on doing DRM or not. I don't care if a company I use wants to do that... I just find another company if not. The thought that somehow I'm "bringing down the system" doesn't occur to me. Moreover, my thoughts are "Well, *I'm* not getting screwed like other people are". And that's all that counts, really. I don't care if 99.9% of morons pay to play DRM-laden rubbish - the fact is that I *don't* any more and am happier for it. You cannot believe the value for money that I get - hundreds and hundreds of hours playing games, having fun (and, yes, actually a lot more fun than my last few big purchases which were all pretty disappointing) and I do it for less than the price of one, boxed, full-price, modern game. If the games industry doesn't care about me, that's their loss - quite literally, in some cases.
And in three years time I'll be playing that same modern game that you like, on a system more than capable of playing it, for about £10 and I'll have its bugs patched properly and the DRM will, most probably, be disabled. You can laugh at me then, and the games industry can ignore me then too. Fabulous. I don't really care. Or, if that game's not available later because of the DRM or because the games industry doesn't want people trading them second-hand, or doesn't want it becoming a budget title... no problem, I don't want to play it while it's like that anyway.
I'm helping to keep a shed-load of small independent games publishers alive and productive though (not that I "care" about the little guys, but they are certainly more deserving of my money if they can actually make something that I want), with much more interesting and stimulating games than "Yet Another FPS Shooter With A Tacked-On Plot, Bad Multiplayer, Horrible DRM, No Game Balance, Completable Within One Session, Turbo Hyper-Fighting 3D with PhysX and DirectX 46". So the game *industry* should really have a think about the competition... how are Sony, Nintendo, etc. doing in monopolising the huge market for things like Facebook games? They're not. How about portable games, e.g. iPhones, Java, etc.? Not so well still, except for the occasional franchised port. An industry covers more than a £60 PC game. And others are making *millions* off that side of the industry. How disillusioned are the kids when the latest sequel turns out to be shit and Sony et al have to invent another franchise? Nintendo are the experts in the game industry... they started off making playing cards but they damn well know how to sell games that people want to play. The others aren't doing so well and just about every 5 years of so a major games company fails after an initial hit and gets sucked into one of the other bra
Of course Sony won't be trumpeting. When was the last time that *any* DRM scheme was advertised as being a good thing? Never. And DRM has been around since the early 80's (in terms of home computer software, *much* longer than that in terms of corporate). If you're not already aware it exists, then that means you've never used a DVD from another region, never installed Windows or run WGA, never used iTunes with it's 5-computer limits, never struggled to copy a video or a CD onto a blank tape, never had to have your car serviced by (or parts bought from) the original manufacturer because the computer / lock / whatever are "owned" by the company, never owned an inkjet printer that only takes authorised inks, etc. If you've managed to get that far in life without doing those things, chances are you won't know or care about DRM at all. And if you have, then you're the kind of person who does say "Hold on a sec... what *am* I buying here?".
And this is a heavy-tech site. Everybody here knows about DRM already. Everybody can name five DRM schemes just for software off the top of their head and / or has bought and probably avoided games in the past for their DRM. Having the article on here is preaching to the choir and most readers just won't care... bought something with silly restrictions because you didn't properly know what you were buying? Tough. And it was from Sony? Shock, horror. I'd be happier to see this article on BBC News (but it would never happen because it's not a noteworthy enough bit of software) because at least then previously uneducated people might learn something about DRM. But, let's be honest, if you use a computer, you know about DRM - even some grannies know DRM schemes that are in place in the real world even if they don't know that's what they are called.
P.S. This is exactly why I gave up buying most games, except through Steam. Steam's "DRM" I can suffer with, it's convenient, never interferes and just works. And even if the worst happens, I get to play the single-player games I've bought (internet multi-player games *all* die off eventually - try finding a Red Alert or Age of Empires server with enough people on it). Even then, I avoid the crap on Steam that has additional DRM because it's just not needed - no GTA4 for me.
I've said it before: the most effective copy protection scheme I've ever seen was on the Spectrum version of Saboteur. It printed up a message on game load that said "If the word Durell is not visible on the tape, it's an illegal copy". As an 8-year-old, I ejected the tape from the player, picked it up and looked to see the little word "Durell" repeatedly stamped on the tape leader. Eight. And I bothered to double-check that I had a legitimate copy. That's as good as a copy protection system ever gets. Nothing else has ever been more effective - the pirates crack absolutely everything and sometimes it is hard to tell if your copy is properly licensed. Hell, I refuse to let my own personal laptop (with a fully-licensed version of Windows XP) run WGA's "checker" to see if it's fraudulent. I *know* it isn't - it uses my employer's VLK and we track licences. But I'll be damned if something that has reported false-positives is just going to disable my computer.
And now, because of stupid DRM, I'm re-discovering old classic games and actually having a lot more fun... GOG.com is a god-send to me. No DRM. Games that run on just about any PC. Thousands of hours of gameplay for the price of a full-price, DRM-laden game. Bargain.
Final Fight was the only arcade game that I *ever* completed in an arcade... my brother and I found one in a old arcade in a Butlin's holiday camp that took 10p's. It still cost us about £3 but we got there in the end. Those were the days.
Similarly, seeing that same game boot up in a CPS emulator a few years ago brought back some memories.
Oh, find the DRM restrictive? Don't buy it. Problem solved. I fail to see why that's worth an article, I was just hoping that there was some "new" Final Fight coming out.
The main factors there are 1) distance, 2) length of time you spend focusing.
Sitting further away actually works counter to this guy's argument - because then you need larger pixels (lower DPI) or you're just wasting your money on things you can't see. What "solves" your eye problem is more that you are changing your focus more often - you cannot damage your eyes by being "too close" to something (and no, TV's are no worse than papers in that regard, that's an old wive's tale, it's just that our habits change with a TV)... you damage them by forcing them to do something unnatural (i.e. stare at a very close object intently for a very long time without a break).
My optician always played a very old trick and asked his patients to sign a form after their examination. They were relaxed, thought things were over and the kids were just excited about having to sign something like an adult. When you did so, he then told you off if you were too close to the paper... it's amazing how automatic it is to get too close to something when your glasses/eyes *do* work perfectly from much further away... examinations are a good example of this - everyone "crouches" over the desk even though they'd be more relaxed and have less eye-strain if they looked at the paper from a sitting-up position.
Change your focus, look around, don't sit for hours staring at the same screen (even something like putting your clock on a high shelf is helpful because when you are working to a deadline, you'll find yourself looking somewhere else for the time).
Yeah, really limited. Only over 50% of the machines running Steam only run 32-bit operating systems:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Such a limit when you have literally 100's of $5 and old-archive games on there, some of them running on DOSBox... however will those games cope with only 4Gb of addressable RAM?!!?!
I don't think that's true at all. The purpose of the web browser is to display content. Thus, almost by definition, any browser that can end up executing arbitrary code by doing so is not doing its job. With Opera, the only avenues are from things like null-pointers, buffer overflows etc. - the usual methods that do apply to *all* software and are covered by your reasoning. You can compromise a plugin, but that is common to all browsers that use that plugin - that's not a "browser" problem (I don't blame Opera if Java is compromisable, unless it's something to do with the way Opera implements Java). However, IE has in the past had any number of ways of executing code directly without the user's knowledge or consent - sadly Firefox followed suit by allowing things like ActiveX on the Windows platform. Those avenues may be fixed now but it's the design that's bad, not just the execution. Still, Firefox doesn't do half as many stupid things as IE has done in its history.
I've used Opera for years, always kept it up to date, and I've actually used it in the past to go to those websites that people hand me and say "Is this safe to click?" - with Opera the worst that happens is you get a download link or something asks for permission to execute... with IE, a VAST proportion of the time, even with automatic updates, the same actions would instantly and without permission start executing code. Try it - set up a virtual machine (on a host you don't care about and on a secured network) and patch IE to the hilt - then go off exploring (googling for pirate games is a good way to flag up some malware websites)... you will get code executions and compromises all over the place. Now do the same in Opera - because it doesn't even *try* to trust things from the web, it will survive a lot better - not because it's less targetted, but because it really doesn't do a lot of the stupid crap that IE has done in the past.
And please don't give me the "IE has more users" crap - any software with a hole can and will be exploited but the fact is that IE is *also* an easy target. If it has more users, then they should/can/do put more developers on fixing it. And that's *NO* excuse for having insecure software - I don't care if the software on my networks has 1 or 1,000,000 users outside my company - I damn well expect it to be secure and to have timely patches to known (and HUGELY announced) problems, especially if I'm paying money for support for it.
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/26745/?task=statistics
vs
http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21625/?task=statistics
The graphs speak for themselves and they only cover Opera 10 and IE 8 - go back into the historical versions and the picture is even more damning to Microsoft.
The simple fact is: stick an idiot user on IE and you *will* get "Advanced Registry Optimisers" and all sorts of crap automatically installing, a lot of the time without any dialogs at all. I know, I just cleaned off *YET ANOTHER* private laptop for the staff where I work where they'd done just that. Stick them on Firefox, the chances are reduced. Stick them on Opera, the chances are reduced again. Yes, an expert on IE can probably circumvent some of those problems with IE but there are some things you just *cannot* stop on IE and there's no *WAY* on Earth I would ever browse around on IE on my networks - it's just so easy to compromise with nothing more than a bit of dodgy HTML.
According to Secunia, 40% of the known, documented and reported security problems with IE 8.0 are still unpatched - only one of those is from 2010, the rest are in previous years. That's just *disgusting* for a major software vendor. How many problems does Opera have unpatched?
v10: 0%
v9: 4% (1 advisory)
v8: 0%
v7: 0%
v6: 3% (1 advisory)
v5 (year 2000): 4% (1 advisory)
So IE actually has a MULTIPLE of th
I think the people who have software that autodeploys updates to 20-50k employees without getting a say in the matter (i.e. testing, change management, etc.) have a lot more to answer for. When the software that supposed to *save* your productivity by preventing viruses ends up doing this to your sites, it's time to just throw it in the bin.
Nice change management you have there.
To be honest 2, 4 and 5 are perfectly adequate for a knowledgeable user and the rest provide little if any advantage. And they also happen to apply to all OS's and all versions of those OS's.
I don't click on ads. I rarely, if ever, pay them any attention. When I do, it's for something that would interest me regardless and I probably already knew about. I don't block ads - it's not as reliable as I would want it to be and I don't like pages which load up with missing blocks - I hate my screen looking like they've been loaded on a copy of IE where 50% of DNS queries fail... it's just horrible. I can easily look *around* the ads when they load. I build web-filters for schools as part of my job and I actually go out of my way to configure the open-source filtering software I use to only block what's necessary, not to block sites just because they are used to load ads (a lot of filters come with the ad-domains blacklisted by default).
That said, if your ads are obnoxious I won't bother to block them, even though I could do it in a second, I just won't go to your website very often. If it becomes a real problem, I will complain (if I actually care about the site, like I did with the BBC's TV listings site when it filled up with noisy Crazy Frog ads, and they were promptly removed) or just stop visiting. The beauty of the Internet is that someone, somewhere will have the same content at the same time as you do... there's no such thing as an "exclusive" any more, even if that means someone just copy/pasted an article onto Digg or something. If you have a problem with the way I browse your website - fine, I won't browse it. It's really not that big a deal. I'm not going to be crying myself to sleep because of it.
However, forum moderation is one of my biggest bug-bears. I hate overzealous moderation. And if you moderate comments about your moderation, you're just starting down a slippery slope that will destroy any forum community. I have never been banned, but I have posted comments about bad moderation that I've seen. I've never been banned because, basically, I would never hang out on a forum that I suspected the mods would ever do that sort of thing for just *discussing* a quite reasonable, legal activity. It's just not the way to promote discussion, and if you don't want to promote discussion, don't have a forum.
Forums where every single comment is moderated tend to be dull, enclosed and "up themselves" (i.e. self-promoting). I don't read them, I have little interest in contributing to them. I think the exception would be things like The Register, where I've never had a comment disallowed even when I've been discussing things I would imagine some forums ban you for. Forums which contain an "off-topic" or "general discussion" forum? Sorry, but that's a free reign for anyone. I can understand not breaking the law or discussing breaking the law but virtually everything else is fair game.
Removing fair criticism of yourself is the one thing guaranteed to stop me coming back to your website, though. It means you're a charlatan and a liar - you're trying to paint the picture that your forum is perfect and everyone is happy and that's just disgusting. Some support forums do this, and I just stop buying their products.
If you wonder why you're losing ad-revenue, it's not because of those people who don't want to see ads ever at all (who are in the minority... I don't know the official stats but if it's more than 5% I'd be surprised), it's those people who just won't touch your site/forum ever.
I think the Internet has made my commercial habits even more honed - I stick with a product/website until it pissed me off, and when it does I just find another and stick with that, etc. I take much less crap in terms of things that hinder me getting at the information I need than I do in other media. A TV listings site that I used for *years* and never even bothered to research any other changed its look overnight and destroyed its usability. After the third week or so of trying to cope with it, I just researched others, moved on and have *never* been back to that site since. On the Internet, the user is king. Even a bad redesign or dodgy scripts or slow access ca
Yes, this pisses me off too. Until I can literally destroy *anything* in the game, without limitation at all, even if the game slowed to an absolute crawl when I do so... it's not a "true" destructible environment. I should be able to knock down every building, chop every door into small pieces, blast a tunnel through a hill or mountain, drain a lake by building a canal system etc... anything else is just "another" clever way of making it look like I can do that but actually just changing the limits of what I can do (i.e. stopping me doing some things and letting me do new things).
I'm looking forward to the day that I can tunnel up underneath the main zombie/alien/terrorist hideout.
You obviously missed the word sometimes.
In fact, I'm a Rainbow Six fan myself, but the older versions (I find the latest ones too "showy"), and Thief fan, and Quake fan, and Counterstrike fan, and Project IGI fan, and DoD fan, and L4D fan, so I do cover all types of FPS... you can't play Rainbow Six or Thief by just charging in guns blazing. However you *ALWAYS* need to ability to fine control your shots and then in the next minute turn around fast to react to something, no matter what the game... you hope you never need it but otherwise you might as well be playing a slideshow, tactics or not. And without that sort of turn ability, accuracy, etc. you tend to die, get caught out in the open, get shot by the one enemy you missed sneaking up behind you etc.
Teamwork and cover are nothing to do with having the correct control system for the job. Hell, L4D requires teamwork and cover and I'd hardly class that as a non-action FPS. And when that job needs pixel-perfect aiming for sniping one minute, accurate movement for traversing through dense forest the next, rapid turns for reaction to events, etc. *even if it's only once in a while* then you need a control system that can do all those comfortably and equally as well.
But those people who "enjoy" taking literally 5 seconds to do an about turn in a game (and usually those games give you a key to "quick-turn" because they know it's so awful and you can't do it with the usual control system) need a kick up the arse, fast-paced gameplay or not. It's not about speed of thought, or snap-shots, or the style of gameplay - when you *do* need to duck back into cover after sniping, you still need a control system that doesn't take 5 seconds to turn you around.
"We have an expectation that mouse controls will translate into very rapid changes of direction - with a quick flick being enough for an instant 180 degree turn. This is disconcerting when controlling a "heavy" character, who is actually designed to turn relatively slowly."
It leads me to wonder, just how long does it take to hear a noise of a gun behind you, turn around to see what the noise is, throw yourself to the ground and shoot back with the weapon you're holding? I would suggest much, much less than a second or so in a combat situation, even with a 40-lb pack strapped to your back. Anything slower, then, is counter-intuitive and unreasonable no matter what the "heaviness" of a character. If you can walk / run / jump at any speed with any amount of dexterity then you can see behind you in the time it takes your head to turn (next to nothing), rotate your arms in a fraction of a second to point that way (especially if you're already looking that way because your shoulders will be halfway there) and only a step or two with your feet to turn completely around.
I know realism isn't everything (it's only a game) but I think in any FPS there is a certain expectation that sometimes you have to turn around bloody fast, run, shoot vaguely accurately and quickly, and quickly observe your entire surroundings (not all at the same time). That's only possible with a mouse in my experience - every FPS I've played on any other control system is hideously slow, quirky, "unnatural" (I know a mouse isn't natural either), or just too inaccurate / robotic. I have seen FPS where it can take 4 or even 5 seconds to turn 360 degrees, and that in a perfectly straight line. They were all on limited-control-system consoles with input devices that can't handle both rapid turns and accuracy with the same control devices (not at the same time, necessarily, just both extremes of control). The only other system that would be close that a mouse's control in that would be something approaching VR suits where you can do the movement yourself.
Seriously... stand up with a big tip-you-backwards rucksack filled with weight and see how long it takes to turn 180 when you think a bomb's gone off behind you.
Well, for some kind of "expert" I find his component-swapping "diagnosis" a bit dubious to be honest. Yeah, a lot of the time you can just swap out a suspect component but swapping a hard drive for a installation-hang? It's towards the bottom of my list, especially if that drive has handled other OS installations without any problem and doesn't have SMART errors (Did he check? Did he clean-format in between? Even a corrupt NTFS can exhibit those same symptoms... nary a mention of things like that). I'd actually be suspecting a Windows bug before most of the stuff he replaces, considering that he suggests he was already using that hardware fine on the 32-bit editions of Windows - I'd be making an up-to-the-minute Windows 7 installation CD with every update I could find.
And the graphics card replacement is just completely illogical unless there was some hint that the graphics card was the fault - bad imagery, hangs happening on a resolution change or reboot, etc. The graphics cards use doesn't change during the installation except at those points and so unless there was a temperature problem or something related, it would just be *weird* to suspect that. Power supplies can present odd problems certainly but it makes me wonder how reliable his testing really is normally if he's powering things up on the wrong wattage of power supply without even noticing and then possibly publishing benchmarks / stability reports etc.
By the time you get to the casing, he's just clutching at straws rather than thinking. I'm not saying that I'd suspect the CPU immediately, or even at all, but the logical processes he's using are just dubious. I mean, he changes the memory before he remembers that he has some stupid BIOS option for upping the memory speeds enabled. And doesn't think to do a simple memtest at *ANY* stage? Surely a memtest would have picked up the same memory errors before all the testing, and that would lead him to check the BIOS and then replace the RAM way before he does? It saves a lot of hurt to do *checks* like that, rather than blindly assuming, especially if you're replacing one set of RAM with another that is "older, and well-tried and trusted" (with memory, there's no such thing as tried and trusted... they can die overnight, don't take kindly to handling, etc.). He was using a non-standard CPU cooler, too, which doesn't get mentioned until later in the article. I'd be suspecting temperature problems with his setup which he doesn't even consider.
But at no point does he actually suspect the *only* engineering *sample* that he's ever used and that's been in the machine all along. He just blindly replaces it eventually but he never suspects it until he "finds" the problem.
Hell, must be nice to just be able to order random components until your problem goes away. Other people have to do the same job, with cheaper, shittier hardware, no budget, no diagnostic tools, useless vendor support, while under pressure, to earn their living. But then according to the Wiki he's a "freelance writer", "trainer", "Internet consultant" (Yeurk...), "Director of Technical Marketing" (for a year), "Technical Evangelist", "Director of Training", "Senior Researcher", "series editor", "currently writes for... TechTarget.com Web sites... Tom's Hardware and Tom's Guide... the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)... InformIT.com., "content development and book publishing projects". To be absolutely honest, the glaring thing that sticks out like a sore thumb in that list is writing for Tom's Hardware - everything else is book/article-writing and sales. This guy isn't a tech - he's a marketer. Why his "diagnosis" should be interesting at all is beyond me, except possibly as a humour article.
Oh, and the article seems to just be a way to show off brandnames, model names, and his hardware. I expect as much from a marketing guy.
And if you read my post, you'll find we agree... the original comment was about whether BeOS did this any better than any other OS. Nobody cares what the OS is so long as they can click their damn icons when they see them on the screen.
I do think that current OS's really suffer from the "give me my damn mouse back, let me click that button, don't make me wait for seven thousand services to start up before you let me click the start button that appeared in the first second" syndrome. But that doesn't make an OS, that makes a GUI on top of an OS. The problem is "easily" solved (for a definition of easily) by queueing user events and handling mouse motion / keyboard input in a separate thread (not at all a performance problem with modern machines).
User reponsiveness is vital, that much I can agree on. I can't wait for the OS that can properly remember and queue user events from the first second so that I can send a list of keystrokes and have it get on with them - I hate when Windows chugs and your button clicks are completely ignored (programmatically, graphically, etc.) and then there's a burst of activity once it's idle again. Ideally, such interaction would be per-application (so non-busy apps would still respond as fast no matter what else was chugging away) - incidentally, window-focus-steals are the worst idea ever invented, whether by the OS or the applications themselves.
But that's a GUI issue, for the most part. Yes, the OS shouldn't chug that badly in the first place but when it does, the underlying GUI still has millions of cycles in which to respond. It doesn't, because of deep-level order dependencies and other things. The main problem, though, is programs and OS's drawing themselves before they are actually able to respond - I've seen Windows desktop, start bar, etc. appear sometimes MINUTES before the start button can actually be clicked in any useful manner, and that's *completely* pointless and just makes me think that the computer is much slower than it actually is. It's a pain in the arse and all programs should be made to draw to a back-buffer until they are actually ready to respond to user input, and any that don't within 0.5 of a second should be terminated in the style of Windows' "This program has stopped responding".
The problem is not the OS (though some OS queueing techniques can help desktop interactivity), it's mainly the application side... programs that draw too early, set themselves up piece-meal and serially, draw the user into clicking them before they can respond (what's wrong with greying out any buttons/menus until you *are* ready to respond to them?), don't queue events properly and aren't allocated a high-enough event priority when they are the main-focus app.
That's not worth an obsolete (sorry, but it is) OS, when it can be fixed by a simple event model and some slightly stricter application requirements. You can't hold an OS responsible if the programs draw themselves, then go through a serial setup and ignore all button presses in between, or when they are busy, etc. Proper multithread use is the main factor. The OS is not.
http://xkcd.com/16/
And, please, take note of the hover-tag too.
Signed,
A British citizen.
What on Earth makes you think that any modern adaptor will accept that ancient type of hard drive, even if it used IDE connectivity? Hell, it's hard to read anything less than about a Gig with modern adaptors sometimes. The addressing modes have been changed any number of times since then, and the specs in the article even refer to it as a "Winchester" drive... when was the last time you heard that?