Such tactics have been used for decades. EEGs and eye-motion studies are very common. Billboards are structured so that the differences in male vs female eye motion is accounted for (many billboards are actually TWO billboards, separated by the gender-specific maner of evaluating visual information).
That's not really very interesting. What is interesting is how you respond. If you insist that you are powerless in the face of ads, then you are. If you insist on applying rational, critical thinking to everything in your life, advertizing or not, you will be able to make your own choices.
Will you be happier? I can't say for sure, that's your call.
Hmm... I see your point about manufactured shame, but I don't think the ads did the manufacturing, given that 100 years ago the whole topic was considered one of the "womens mysteries" and the products that WERE available were a hell of a lot worse than what we have today (as your linked articles note, the tampon was not invented until the 30s).
Also, you make the mistake that a lot of people make with cigarettes. Yes, there have been health risks associated with women with dry or unusually constrictive vaginas, and yes, those women should avoid tampons, or at least the high absobancy ones. Yes too, to the fact that the companies who were producing these products failing to disclose that information.
Now ask yourself this. If those companies had relied 100% on word-of-mouth and never advertized, would they have disclosed any more than they did? No. This was not a case of advertizing hurting anyone, this was a case of companies hurting their customers totally independant of how they advertized the product, and the companies, not he phenomenon of advertizing should be held accountable.
Let us not provide such underhanded tactics with a straw man for them to use in their defense.
The "Pepsi Challenge" was a marketing ploy based on real, independant testing that showed people prefered Pepsi in blind taste tests. This was the whole reason that Coke introduced "New Coke", which tasted sweeter (and thus, much more like Pepsi).
I was abreviating the whole thing a bit in my comments, but the Pepsi Challenge was as legit as advertizing gets, and was re-confirmed many times by independant groups.
Moving on, you might want to try avoiding countering "bad science" with annecdotal evidence. Leaving your comments at, the suggestion that Pepsi was running its own comparison would have been more useful.
Advertising is just a way to make something seem like it is worth more than it is. It sucks.
I grew up with a lot of respect for advertizing, and as an art, I still do respect it. However, I've learned that like all profitable art, the field is mostly clogged with hacks.
Advertising need not be aimed at making a product look better than it is. In fact, some advertising does just the oposite (remember the "time to make the donuts" commercials? they actually tried to make donuts look as un-glamarous as possible, it was about service and dedication to the customer).
There are several kinds of ad:
1. The promise of return on investment (you will make money, or you will get babes, or your hair will grow back, peer aproval, etc). Tangible rewards promised. These are sometimes true and accurate, but often spurious.
2. The promise of instant gratification (mmm.... look at the tasty burger... do you really want to WAIT for someone to cook a non-fast-food burger?) These are often quite accurate, but far more manipulative than any other form of advertizing. It's also easy to combine this with the previous catagory.
3. The promise of quality. It's been said that you can sell a man his own shit as long as you tell him he's buying the highest quality shit. The best of this sort of ad, IMHO, was the razor ads where the guy talked about how the razor was so good he bought the company. Testimonials are one way you promise quality. Comparisons and tests are another (take the Pepsi Challenge, which was one of the most strikingly honest campaigns I've ever seen... people really did like the taste of Pepsi better when sampled fairly).
There are others, but that's most of them in a nutshell. Now, here's a little trick you can do. Watch the ads. PAY ATTENTION. Think to yourself, "why are you using this particular tactic?" For example, if you're promising me babes, why AREN'T you promising me quality? What other competing products CAN offer quality?
If you promise me quality, have you honestly compared yourself to the competition? Do you have to resort to tricks like "leading brand" (one of my favorites. you compare yourself to "leading brand" by picking your competition's bargain product that you and they both know is crap, while ignoring their "premium product"). If so, why? Is there a competitor that's actually higher quality?
These tricks force your perspective out of the hole that the commercial tries to channel you into. Once you do that, you can start to actually benefit from commercials!
The next trick is harder, and involves some actuall hard questions. You need to start asking yourself: "do I even want this class of product in the first place?"
I have no problem with ads for tampons, pads, etc. because I think most women will agree they are a good and necessary product. Imrpovements in that product are often a good thing and improve quality of life for many women. Since it's a stable market, the products actually do have to compete on improvements to the product, so everyone wins.
On the other hand, extruded cheese snack #147 is *not* something that you need in your life. The ad is still successful even if you end up buying the competition because it has convinced you that you need to to buy extruded cheese snacks at all, ever. The ad has essentially created a new market space, and just as Linux vendors don't much care which Linux you go with as long as you stop running Windows (it all serves to expand and validate the Linux market) the cheese snack vendors just want you to avoid asking "why do I need a cheese snack?"
Re:Since "abductions" are really ...
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Spielberg's Taken
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"alien abductions are anecdotal at best, while HSP is well-researched and documented"
Ok, and the connection is?
Sure, I've heard some accounts that match the scenario of HSP, and that might well be the explanation, but you need to draw a more credible link here. You have no outlined all of the possibilities, you've simply presented one alternative, and jumped to the conclusion that because it is a real phenomenon, it must be the correct interpretation.
Occam's Razor is a useful tool, and a guide when making decisions among seemingly equal choices, but when you artificially restrict the number of choices, you defeat any course of logic.
What *is* a bad thing is assuming that your average MCSE is capable of architecting a large network of machines to solve a complex problem. There are good Windows admins. They're expensive because complex Windows networks are very hard to administer. There are good Linux admins and they are expensive because large Linux networks are hard to administer (you can apply this function with the single paramter "OS Name" to any major OS like Solaris, MacOS/X, etc).
Now, what's bad is that Microsoft pushes the line that you can hire the dummy who knows how to mouse a Web server into existance and he will be able to solve complicated problems for you. He won't any more than the kid who knows how to run his own Web server and mailer on his home Linux box will. You're going to need seasoned professionals who understand the complexities of the task enough to hit the ground running with YOUR particular needs.
Once you get past all of that you get to tool selection. There are many factors: what special tools do you need? Do you have existing technical talent? What do they know? How critical is a single machine? How much can you distribute load?
These and many other questions get answered and you start to get a feel for what the right tool is (again, assuming that you have the experience to understand what those answers mean).
In the end, there probably won't be much debate. The right answer should be fairly obvious if you've don the right homework, and TCO is actually a fairly minimal concern in most cases.
Sony has the right to decide whether or not you can play on their servers or not. They're not stopping you from making any modifications to their product after purachse... merely setting rules and conditions for play on their servers.
They have that right. They can ban each an every one of us at a moment's notice. In fact, that trigger-happy attitude is likely the reason I'll stop playing EQ some day.
But the question still remains, what will we, the players make of ShowEQ. I don't really care about what Sony thinks. If they ban me, I'm free at last. If they don't I'll do what I want.
But I respect the opinions of many of my fellow players. Let's say for sake of argument that I don't use ShowEQ, but I'm thinking about it. How will my guild-mates feel? How will my RL friends who play feel? Will the benefits to myself and my friends be outweighed by the social pressure? Will I be a paraih?
Those are the issues that concern me, not Sony's silly rules.
Wow, good stuff. I think you've nailed down most of what we're talking about and summarized it well. Just one thing:
The big question is "Who is in the right?"
I don't agree that this is even a question worth asking in this context. Everyone comes to the table with their own morals and ethics and new ethics will be developed in-game (e.g. KSing is bad, but we all have a general "sense" for when it's just one of those things that happens, and you walk away).
The real question is how do we, as a player base, feel about ShowEQ? Do we approve of its use always? Are we ok with its use in certain circumstances? It's kind of like The Matrix. ShowEQ, in some respects, lets you be Neo. You can step behind the illusion and see what's really going on. I have no problem with the idea that someone in the zone with me is "a Neo", as long as they obey Crowley's 8 little words ("An it harm none, do what thou will").
The word "cheating" may be a red herring in this case, and you and I will simply have different takes on it.
I think Sony's real problem here is that they're thinking of this as a video game. They're absolutely stunned that people don't play it for the reasons that they want them to. You do want to get to the "end-game" right? You are playing this to see what's around the next corner, right?
Nope. Lots of people play to socialize. Lots play to get a sense of being helpful (e.g. the vast majority of clerics). Lots play the game specifically to find bugs and play with them (I know I've had fun running along the walls in Cabilis, looking at the mazes). There are even a huge number of people who play the game to make real-world money. All of the above I have no problem with, and would even encourage as long as it's not harming anyone. But, Sony is stuck on this idea of the traditional video game.
Wow, you obviously feel very strongly about this, and I'm glad. People should feel strongly about this sort of thing, because EQ is just the start. In 20-30 years, online societies will be the norm, and we should be discussing now what that means to us.
As for your comments, well, I disagree but you knew that:-)
Specifically, you say, "You shall not cheat (as defined by what the game developers decide is cheating)" and much of your comments are shades of this statement. If you are happy with that, then I invite you to go play the game that way. I'm not taking a stand either way, I'm just saying that the people who use ShowEQ will continue to do so, and Sony can never stop that. They don't "own" the world in the sense that they cannot take their ball and go home with it. If they do, they have no players and there is no "ball". They must negotiate the behavior of the world with the players, and they do. If they simply banned all users of ShowEQ (assuming they could tell who they were) their profits would take a huge hit (some estimates put ShowEQ use at 10% of the user-base).
So, in the end your notions of a dictatorship of the developers falls flat. ShowEQ is not cheating because nothing is cheating in a complex society.
Let's take another angle and see if that becomes more clear.
Sony has introduced a very poor pathing model into the game. Mobs behave stupidly with respect to following other mobs (including players), and this leads to all manner of problems. One of those problems is that there are places where certain tactics become more favorable. One example: on the sixth floor of ToFS, there is a place where the mobs will get lost, running back-and forth. If you don't know about it, it can lead to trains that can wipe out your party. If you do know about it, it can be used to great advantage. According to Verant, you're supposed to suffer the first run-in with this bug and get wiped out, but while you may wish to avoid that wipe-out a second time you cannot use this new knowledge to your advantage. You must simply ignore it, and fight elsewhere.
Of course, this is not what people do. Necromancers fear-kite there all the time because it's easy. I have not done this, so I feel fairly safe in pointing it out, but I play a high-level necro, so I've come across it in a number of forums and discussions in-game.
Is this cheating? According to Verant, yes. But according to necromancers, no. Gaining an understanding of a zone and how it will interact with your primary soloing strategy is one of the most important things for a necro to do. Why on earth would you NOT do that? And when you discover a mob that you can kill and a place that is safe for you to do it, why would you not? Because Verant/Sony says you should not? Why does creating a bad pathing system give you the right to tell people how to use it? This is not a competition between Sony and I. I just want to kill the mob so I can gain a level and try out new abilities. Sony can bite my shiny new spell-slots.
Now, if I was using ShowEQ to gain an edge in PvP, *that* is cheating. Why? Because there is a direct competition between you and me, and I'm violating the rules of our competition. THIS is what cheating is. Cheating is not violating some tyrant's decree, it's violating the rules of a competition.
ShowEQ is a tool. It can be used for good (I've seen people help others get their corpses when no necros would stop to help, and I know they're using ShowEQ); it can be used in ways that no one should care about (locating groups, etc); and it can be used to cheat (as above). Does it give you an edge? Sure. So does having a fast machine, a fast connection and a guide on initial character creation. So does using pathing to your advantage. So does tracking. So does using fear in PvP (which Sony finally got around to disallowing).
Everyone has access to that edge, and IMHO, everyone should use it. Sony says no now, but what happens when EVERY SINGLE PLAYER uses it? Then it's a non-issue. They'll fix the protocol so that the stuff they don't want to get out won't and ShowEQ will just be another sort of UI-mod.
incorrect on one point. All the same information is still sent except for one thing. The game is now smarter about not sending updates when nothing changes. This means that your location and health are sent once (along with other details like visible armor and weapons) but it's not updated if you just sit still, so how much you heal may not get shown unless someone is right next to you.
All of this discussion of ShowEQ, but I'm amazed that on Slashdot we're not discussing things like the difficulties with the encryption, the ability to create and hold a long-term playerbase, etc. Oh well, I guess debating the morality of ShowEQ sounds more fun:)
1) you assume there is a universal "spirit of the game". There is not. There are quests in this game that are nearly unsolvable (even given detailed descriptions) without ShowEQ. There are players who simply would not play if they couldn't tell where the group that just invited them was (I'm paraphrasing another poster).
2) I'm not playing semantic games. If you're playing chess with another person, you two agree on rules and violating those is cheating. If you and I take part in a larger social group and we things that the people who organized the group do not want, that's just how humans work in large groups. Not everyone follows the same code, and much as Sony wants to think of EQ as subscription donkey-kong, they're dead wrong. They've created a world, and catch-phrases asside, it's not theirs anymore, it belongs to the nebies and the ubers, the ebayers and the showeqers, the guides and the pvpers. They can shut off the servers and refund everyone's money, but that's about the extent of the "ownership" that they have over what people do. Beyond that, there's enforcement. Notice that in the real world we have enforcement too. *That* is the key. The guides and GMs will arbitrate what is and isn't an abuse, and since I know that many guides use ShowEQ, I'm confident that *that* arbitration will be somewhat even-handed. The only way it could get better is if we elected the guides in the first place.
As for UI-mod mapping. I can get a map on a piece of paper too, and it's about as useful (read: not). Real games have maps. So does EQ, Sony just dosn't like it. Tough nuts, I guess.
The problem is not the users of ShowEQ, here. It's the game. Sony should not be sending your location and health to everyone in the zone and then saying "please, please, please don't read this yet". Don't blame the kiddies who abuse ShowEQ for stupid reasons like this any more than those who used to (ab)use the spells that are now banned in pvp. It's Sony's fault for making the game so easily abused and then placing no checks in the game for such abuse.
Sony can accept ShowEQ or not. It will impact *how much* but not *if* it is used.
You can jump up and down until you are red in the face, but EVERY GAME will have this kind of program written for it. In the end, what is the real harm of ShowEQ? To my eyes it seems to have improved the game. I honestly think that ring events were a direct result of ShowEQ, and they're one of the things players have enjoyed most about EQ in the past year or so.
If Verant was willing to add the features the players ask for like mapping and better tracking for the classes that get it, then I'd feel that there was some doubt as to the validity of ShowEQ, but that's not the case.
Sony thinks of it as cheating because they think of EverQuest as a game. However, there are thousands of people who play EverQuest to whom it is not a game, but a social venue. Now, EQ breaks the local laws of that venue, but to call it cheating is like calling MP3-swapping cheating.
Now on to the impact. There are several kinds of ShowEQ users. One is the "I just want a damn map" sort. For them, even post-new-encryption, ShowEQ works just as well as it always has. If Sony would add a map to the game, most of them would probably stop using ShowEQ. But the last thing Sony wants is after-market tools for EQ (they've banned people for using MP3 players that cat attach to DirectX for the controls).
There are also the people who use ShowEQ as an edge. IMHO, when the people who play that game spend cumulative weeks of their lives playing, I don't see running a program that tells you where the nearest creature of your level is as a terribly bad thing. The fact that it's available to all and not horded by a select few is a bonus, since most information in the game *is* horded.
Then there are the people who use ShowEQ for things like guild raids and the like. These people are just a different kind of mage, IMHO. You have your warriors, your damage-mages, your healers and the clairsentient who can tell when your target has spawned. Some people get very upset about this latter class of player because they give an engtire guild an edge. Me, I'm neutral. I'd be upset if that guild pushed it too far, but honestly when Sony comes out with an entire expansion and 90% of it is beyond the capabilities of 99% of the player-base I have to ask who THEY are trying to convince that the game is good enough as delivered....
It's even worse. They worked so hard at the encryption and the net result is that the client will now be ported to windows so that EVERYONE can run it. Their encryption doesn't stop anyone of course, since as soon as the key is generated it can be read from memory:)
Every patch can change the license. How often am I expected to read it all. No, I click a button that for all intents and purposes reads "get me the f**k into EverQuest".
If you are using Phoenix, you are using Mozilla. Remember that Mozilla is two things, a browser and a development platform. Netscape, Mozilla the browser, Galeon, Phoenix, and the many other browsers based on it as well as the non-browsers like Komodo are all the same familly of application.
It's not like X/Emacs and GNU/Emacs where there really was a code fork. These browsers all use the Mozilla code-base in the way that it was meant to be used.
I was never a fan of Michael O'Hare's or Claudia Christian's acting, but you have to admit that Mira Furlan, Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik did an amazing job, even through all of the makeup and given the occasionally bad dialog that plagued the "off" episodes of the first season.
Take a look at Signs and Portents, Chrysalis and The Coming of Shadows for examples of just how good television can be when the likes of these actors team up with the likes of JMS at his writing peak.
Also of note, now that I think of it is the negative reinforcement. If your TiVo makes too broad an assumption, don't just hang your head and go back to surfing, rub it's nose in the carpet. You can thumbs down every one of those shows that it recorded and you didn't like.
Think of it like a conversation:
You: I like Battle Bots and Junkyard Wars
TiVo: Oh, so you like game shows. There's a bunch of those: Price is Right, Jeopardy, Beat the Geeks....
You: Oh, well I'm not really into generic game shows like Price is Right or Jeopardy, but Beat the Geeks can be fun once in a while.
I'm not interested in a language war, but your take on what CGI.pm is for is a little off. If you want to "talk CGI" (which is a very simple protocol for communicating with the Web server and ultimately with a client), you use CGI.pm to do so.
If you want to dynamically generate content for the Web, you use Bricolage, Slash or any of the other fine packages out there. Bricolage is especially nice, as it is based on HTML::Mason, a very nice templating system for HTML. Slash, you may know from some of the sites that were built with it....
Sometimes the TiVo suggestion feature is stupid, but on the other hand, it's far superior to surfing channels. If you're out of "scheduled items" to record, and you want to surf, you're far more likely to find something interesting in the suggestions. What you ran into was probably before the most recent upgrade. It seems to have been a bug, and I ran into it too (I gave a thumbs up to something that was vaguely western, and TiVo couldn't get enough of recording old Westerns).
I recommend trying it again. Give an explicit two-thumbs up to anything that you really like and three thumbs up to the two things you think are the best shows/movies on. Leave the default on-thumb for everything that you set up to record, but set anything to neutral that you record on speculation.
I find that 50-60% of the stuff it records for me is junk, which is a much better rate than surfing channels, at least in my experience.
The thing was, we'd gotten the story we wanted. Farscape could go on for decades and never end. B5 was designed to be a single story, and while it was initially 5-years long, Straczynski cut it down to 4 mid-season 4 because of the chance that it would get cancelled. One of the reasons that so many fans are *not* fans of the 5th season is that it has very little in the way of story left to tell. He'd filmed the final episode of Season 5 during season 4, and all that was left was tell the story of how we got there.
I ranted to my local station at the time, but I never bothered to get involved when it came to season 5. I was happy with what I'd gotten and there were rumors of a big-screen movie to keep me happy.
Of course, the landscape has changed a lot. If you want good, continuity-based storytelling, you can watch Aaron Sorkin's shows, Joss Whedons or even Straczynski's on Showtime. Back then, B5 was it, and while it was sad to see it go, I think season 4 would have been a more graceful exit.
Babylon 5's fan base was quite active and vocal, but there was no need for the sort of attention-getting that one has to go through to get a show put back on the air. For the most part, with Babylon 5 the largest problem fans had was getting syndicators to show it in a stable time-slot, and that was done market-by-market.
So, I think you're comparing apples-to-oranges when you say, "Even Babylon 5 didn't inspire loyalty on the same level".
Speaking of which, I just got my B5 DVDs in the mail for season 1. I'm going to see if I can get some decent video-editing software and create that 3-hour "all you need to know about season 1" tape that I've been threatening. It's basically:
Midnight on the Firing Line -- Large chunks Soul Hunter -- A bit, mostly intro Born to the Purple, Infection, The Parliament of Dreams -- A few scenes Mind War -- Intro of bester The War Prayer -- Bits And The Sky Full Of Stars -- Some of the war Deathwalker -- Ending Believers -- Bits Survivors -- Bits By Any Means Necessary -- None, I think Signs and Portents -- 30 min or so TKO, Grail, Eyes, Legacies -- None, I think A Voice in the Wilderness part 1 & 2 -- Bits Babylon Squared -- Bits about B4 The Quality of Mercy -- Bits Chrysalis -- 30 min or so
I can edit that down to 5 hours easily, 3 hours if I'm very, very harsh about cutting out stuff that is amazingly cool and interesting, but not part of the B5 story arc.
When I do, I'm going to get all of my friends who keep saying "I'd love to watch, but I don't have time" and strap them to chairs for 3 hours:)
Slashdot Mirror
Such tactics have been used for decades. EEGs and eye-motion studies are very common. Billboards are structured so that the differences in male vs female eye motion is accounted for (many billboards are actually TWO billboards, separated by the gender-specific maner of evaluating visual information).
That's not really very interesting. What is interesting is how you respond. If you insist that you are powerless in the face of ads, then you are. If you insist on applying rational, critical thinking to everything in your life, advertizing or not, you will be able to make your own choices.
Will you be happier? I can't say for sure, that's your call.
Hmm... I see your point about manufactured shame, but I don't think the ads did the manufacturing, given that 100 years ago the whole topic was considered one of the "womens mysteries" and the products that WERE available were a hell of a lot worse than what we have today (as your linked articles note, the tampon was not invented until the 30s).
Also, you make the mistake that a lot of people make with cigarettes. Yes, there have been health risks associated with women with dry or unusually constrictive vaginas, and yes, those women should avoid tampons, or at least the high absobancy ones. Yes too, to the fact that the companies who were producing these products failing to disclose that information.
Now ask yourself this. If those companies had relied 100% on word-of-mouth and never advertized, would they have disclosed any more than they did? No. This was not a case of advertizing hurting anyone, this was a case of companies hurting their customers totally independant of how they advertized the product, and the companies, not he phenomenon of advertizing should be held accountable.
Let us not provide such underhanded tactics with a straw man for them to use in their defense.
The "Pepsi Challenge" was a marketing ploy based on real, independant testing that showed people prefered Pepsi in blind taste tests. This was the whole reason that Coke introduced "New Coke", which tasted sweeter (and thus, much more like Pepsi).
I was abreviating the whole thing a bit in my comments, but the Pepsi Challenge was as legit as advertizing gets, and was re-confirmed many times by independant groups.
Moving on, you might want to try avoiding countering "bad science" with annecdotal evidence. Leaving your comments at, the suggestion that Pepsi was running its own comparison would have been more useful.
Advertising is just a way to make something seem like it is worth more than it is. It sucks.
I grew up with a lot of respect for advertizing, and as an art, I still do respect it. However, I've learned that like all profitable art, the field is mostly clogged with hacks.
Advertising need not be aimed at making a product look better than it is. In fact, some advertising does just the oposite (remember the "time to make the donuts" commercials? they actually tried to make donuts look as un-glamarous as possible, it was about service and dedication to the customer).
There are several kinds of ad:
1. The promise of return on investment (you will make money, or you will get babes, or your hair will grow back, peer aproval, etc). Tangible rewards promised. These are sometimes true and accurate, but often spurious.
2. The promise of instant gratification (mmm.... look at the tasty burger... do you really want to WAIT for someone to cook a non-fast-food burger?) These are often quite accurate, but far more manipulative than any other form of advertizing. It's also easy to combine this with the previous catagory.
3. The promise of quality. It's been said that you can sell a man his own shit as long as you tell him he's buying the highest quality shit. The best of this sort of ad, IMHO, was the razor ads where the guy talked about how the razor was so good he bought the company. Testimonials are one way you promise quality. Comparisons and tests are another (take the Pepsi Challenge, which was one of the most strikingly honest campaigns I've ever seen... people really did like the taste of Pepsi better when sampled fairly).
There are others, but that's most of them in a nutshell. Now, here's a little trick you can do. Watch the ads. PAY ATTENTION. Think to yourself, "why are you using this particular tactic?" For example, if you're promising me babes, why AREN'T you promising me quality? What other competing products CAN offer quality?
If you promise me quality, have you honestly compared yourself to the competition? Do you have to resort to tricks like "leading brand" (one of my favorites. you compare yourself to "leading brand" by picking your competition's bargain product that you and they both know is crap, while ignoring their "premium product"). If so, why? Is there a competitor that's actually higher quality?
These tricks force your perspective out of the hole that the commercial tries to channel you into. Once you do that, you can start to actually benefit from commercials!
The next trick is harder, and involves some actuall hard questions. You need to start asking yourself: "do I even want this class of product in the first place?"
I have no problem with ads for tampons, pads, etc. because I think most women will agree they are a good and necessary product. Imrpovements in that product are often a good thing and improve quality of life for many women. Since it's a stable market, the products actually do have to compete on improvements to the product, so everyone wins.
On the other hand, extruded cheese snack #147 is *not* something that you need in your life. The ad is still successful even if you end up buying the competition because it has convinced you that you need to to buy extruded cheese snacks at all, ever. The ad has essentially created a new market space, and just as Linux vendors don't much care which Linux you go with as long as you stop running Windows (it all serves to expand and validate the Linux market) the cheese snack vendors just want you to avoid asking "why do I need a cheese snack?"
And the worst part of that? Harlan Ellison has already written an excellent screenplay for I, Robot, which you can buy in book form.
"alien abductions are anecdotal at best, while HSP is well-researched and documented"
Ok, and the connection is?
Sure, I've heard some accounts that match the scenario of HSP, and that might well be the explanation, but you need to draw a more credible link here. You have no outlined all of the possibilities, you've simply presented one alternative, and jumped to the conclusion that because it is a real phenomenon, it must be the correct interpretation.
Occam's Razor is a useful tool, and a guide when making decisions among seemingly equal choices, but when you artificially restrict the number of choices, you defeat any course of logic.
What *is* a bad thing is assuming that your average MCSE is capable of architecting a large network of machines to solve a complex problem. There are good Windows admins. They're expensive because complex Windows networks are very hard to administer. There are good Linux admins and they are expensive because large Linux networks are hard to administer (you can apply this function with the single paramter "OS Name" to any major OS like Solaris, MacOS/X, etc).
Now, what's bad is that Microsoft pushes the line that you can hire the dummy who knows how to mouse a Web server into existance and he will be able to solve complicated problems for you. He won't any more than the kid who knows how to run his own Web server and mailer on his home Linux box will. You're going to need seasoned professionals who understand the complexities of the task enough to hit the ground running with YOUR particular needs.
Once you get past all of that you get to tool selection. There are many factors: what special tools do you need? Do you have existing technical talent? What do they know? How critical is a single machine? How much can you distribute load?
These and many other questions get answered and you start to get a feel for what the right tool is (again, assuming that you have the experience to understand what those answers mean).
In the end, there probably won't be much debate. The right answer should be fairly obvious if you've don the right homework, and TCO is actually a fairly minimal concern in most cases.
Sony has the right to decide whether or not you can play on their servers or not. They're not stopping you from making any modifications to their product after purachse... merely setting rules and conditions for play on their servers.
They have that right. They can ban each an every one of us at a moment's notice. In fact, that trigger-happy attitude is likely the reason I'll stop playing EQ some day.
But the question still remains, what will we, the players make of ShowEQ. I don't really care about what Sony thinks. If they ban me, I'm free at last. If they don't I'll do what I want.
But I respect the opinions of many of my fellow players. Let's say for sake of argument that I don't use ShowEQ, but I'm thinking about it. How will my guild-mates feel? How will my RL friends who play feel? Will the benefits to myself and my friends be outweighed by the social pressure? Will I be a paraih?
Those are the issues that concern me, not Sony's silly rules.
Wow, good stuff. I think you've nailed down most of what we're talking about and summarized it well. Just one thing:
The big question is "Who is in the right?"
I don't agree that this is even a question worth asking in this context. Everyone comes to the table with their own morals and ethics and new ethics will be developed in-game (e.g. KSing is bad, but we all have a general "sense" for when it's just one of those things that happens, and you walk away).
The real question is how do we, as a player base, feel about ShowEQ? Do we approve of its use always? Are we ok with its use in certain circumstances? It's kind of like The Matrix. ShowEQ, in some respects, lets you be Neo. You can step behind the illusion and see what's really going on. I have no problem with the idea that someone in the zone with me is "a Neo", as long as they obey Crowley's 8 little words ("An it harm none, do what thou will").
The word "cheating" may be a red herring in this case, and you and I will simply have different takes on it.
I think Sony's real problem here is that they're thinking of this as a video game. They're absolutely stunned that people don't play it for the reasons that they want them to. You do want to get to the "end-game" right? You are playing this to see what's around the next corner, right?
Nope. Lots of people play to socialize. Lots play to get a sense of being helpful (e.g. the vast majority of clerics). Lots play the game specifically to find bugs and play with them (I know I've had fun running along the walls in Cabilis, looking at the mazes). There are even a huge number of people who play the game to make real-world money. All of the above I have no problem with, and would even encourage as long as it's not harming anyone. But, Sony is stuck on this idea of the traditional video game.
Oh well.
Wow, you obviously feel very strongly about this, and I'm glad. People should feel strongly about this sort of thing, because EQ is just the start. In 20-30 years, online societies will be the norm, and we should be discussing now what that means to us.
:-)
As for your comments, well, I disagree but you knew that
Specifically, you say, "You shall not cheat (as defined by what the game developers decide is cheating)" and much of your comments are shades of this statement. If you are happy with that, then I invite you to go play the game that way. I'm not taking a stand either way, I'm just saying that the people who use ShowEQ will continue to do so, and Sony can never stop that. They don't "own" the world in the sense that they cannot take their ball and go home with it. If they do, they have no players and there is no "ball". They must negotiate the behavior of the world with the players, and they do. If they simply banned all users of ShowEQ (assuming they could tell who they were) their profits would take a huge hit (some estimates put ShowEQ use at 10% of the user-base).
So, in the end your notions of a dictatorship of the developers falls flat. ShowEQ is not cheating because nothing is cheating in a complex society.
Let's take another angle and see if that becomes more clear.
Sony has introduced a very poor pathing model into the game. Mobs behave stupidly with respect to following other mobs (including players), and this leads to all manner of problems. One of those problems is that there are places where certain tactics become more favorable. One example: on the sixth floor of ToFS, there is a place where the mobs will get lost, running back-and forth. If you don't know about it, it can lead to trains that can wipe out your party. If you do know about it, it can be used to great advantage. According to Verant, you're supposed to suffer the first run-in with this bug and get wiped out, but while you may wish to avoid that wipe-out a second time you cannot use this new knowledge to your advantage. You must simply ignore it, and fight elsewhere.
Of course, this is not what people do. Necromancers fear-kite there all the time because it's easy. I have not done this, so I feel fairly safe in pointing it out, but I play a high-level necro, so I've come across it in a number of forums and discussions in-game.
Is this cheating? According to Verant, yes. But according to necromancers, no. Gaining an understanding of a zone and how it will interact with your primary soloing strategy is one of the most important things for a necro to do. Why on earth would you NOT do that? And when you discover a mob that you can kill and a place that is safe for you to do it, why would you not? Because Verant/Sony says you should not? Why does creating a bad pathing system give you the right to tell people how to use it? This is not a competition between Sony and I. I just want to kill the mob so I can gain a level and try out new abilities. Sony can bite my shiny new spell-slots.
Now, if I was using ShowEQ to gain an edge in PvP, *that* is cheating. Why? Because there is a direct competition between you and me, and I'm violating the rules of our competition. THIS is what cheating is. Cheating is not violating some tyrant's decree, it's violating the rules of a competition.
ShowEQ is a tool. It can be used for good (I've seen people help others get their corpses when no necros would stop to help, and I know they're using ShowEQ); it can be used in ways that no one should care about (locating groups, etc); and it can be used to cheat (as above). Does it give you an edge? Sure. So does having a fast machine, a fast connection and a guide on initial character creation. So does using pathing to your advantage. So does tracking. So does using fear in PvP (which Sony finally got around to disallowing).
Everyone has access to that edge, and IMHO, everyone should use it. Sony says no now, but what happens when EVERY SINGLE PLAYER uses it? Then it's a non-issue. They'll fix the protocol so that the stuff they don't want to get out won't and ShowEQ will just be another sort of UI-mod.
incorrect on one point. All the same information is still sent except for one thing. The game is now smarter about not sending updates when nothing changes. This means that your location and health are sent once (along with other details like visible armor and weapons) but it's not updated if you just sit still, so how much you heal may not get shown unless someone is right next to you.
All of this discussion of ShowEQ, but I'm amazed that on Slashdot we're not discussing things like the difficulties with the encryption, the ability to create and hold a long-term playerbase, etc. Oh well, I guess debating the morality of ShowEQ sounds more fun :)
1) you assume there is a universal "spirit of the game". There is not. There are quests in this game that are nearly unsolvable (even given detailed descriptions) without ShowEQ. There are players who simply would not play if they couldn't tell where the group that just invited them was (I'm paraphrasing another poster).
2) I'm not playing semantic games. If you're playing chess with another person, you two agree on rules and violating those is cheating. If you and I take part in a larger social group and we things that the people who organized the group do not want, that's just how humans work in large groups. Not everyone follows the same code, and much as Sony wants to think of EQ as subscription donkey-kong, they're dead wrong. They've created a world, and catch-phrases asside, it's not theirs anymore, it belongs to the nebies and the ubers, the ebayers and the showeqers, the guides and the pvpers. They can shut off the servers and refund everyone's money, but that's about the extent of the "ownership" that they have over what people do. Beyond that, there's enforcement. Notice that in the real world we have enforcement too. *That* is the key. The guides and GMs will arbitrate what is and isn't an abuse, and since I know that many guides use ShowEQ, I'm confident that *that* arbitration will be somewhat even-handed. The only way it could get better is if we elected the guides in the first place.
As for UI-mod mapping. I can get a map on a piece of paper too, and it's about as useful (read: not). Real games have maps. So does EQ, Sony just dosn't like it. Tough nuts, I guess.
The problem is not the users of ShowEQ, here. It's the game. Sony should not be sending your location and health to everyone in the zone and then saying "please, please, please don't read this yet". Don't blame the kiddies who abuse ShowEQ for stupid reasons like this any more than those who used to (ab)use the spells that are now banned in pvp. It's Sony's fault for making the game so easily abused and then placing no checks in the game for such abuse.
Sony can accept ShowEQ or not. It will impact *how much* but not *if* it is used.
You can jump up and down until you are red in the face, but EVERY GAME will have this kind of program written for it. In the end, what is the real harm of ShowEQ? To my eyes it seems to have improved the game. I honestly think that ring events were a direct result of ShowEQ, and they're one of the things players have enjoyed most about EQ in the past year or so.
If Verant was willing to add the features the players ask for like mapping and better tracking for the classes that get it, then I'd feel that there was some doubt as to the validity of ShowEQ, but that's not the case.
ShowEQ is not cheating.
Sony thinks of it as cheating because they think of EverQuest as a game. However, there are thousands of people who play EverQuest to whom it is not a game, but a social venue. Now, EQ breaks the local laws of that venue, but to call it cheating is like calling MP3-swapping cheating.
Now on to the impact. There are several kinds of ShowEQ users. One is the "I just want a damn map" sort. For them, even post-new-encryption, ShowEQ works just as well as it always has. If Sony would add a map to the game, most of them would probably stop using ShowEQ. But the last thing Sony wants is after-market tools for EQ (they've banned people for using MP3 players that cat attach to DirectX for the controls).
There are also the people who use ShowEQ as an edge. IMHO, when the people who play that game spend cumulative weeks of their lives playing, I don't see running a program that tells you where the nearest creature of your level is as a terribly bad thing. The fact that it's available to all and not horded by a select few is a bonus, since most information in the game *is* horded.
Then there are the people who use ShowEQ for things like guild raids and the like. These people are just a different kind of mage, IMHO. You have your warriors, your damage-mages, your healers and the clairsentient who can tell when your target has spawned. Some people get very upset about this latter class of player because they give an engtire guild an edge. Me, I'm neutral. I'd be upset if that guild pushed it too far, but honestly when Sony comes out with an entire expansion and 90% of it is beyond the capabilities of 99% of the player-base I have to ask who THEY are trying to convince that the game is good enough as delivered....
It's even worse. They worked so hard at the encryption and the net result is that the client will now be ported to windows so that EVERYONE can run it. Their encryption doesn't stop anyone of course, since as soon as the key is generated it can be read from memory :)
Every patch can change the license. How often am I expected to read it all. No, I click a button that for all intents and purposes reads "get me the f**k into EverQuest".
If you are using Phoenix, you are using Mozilla. Remember that Mozilla is two things, a browser and a development platform. Netscape, Mozilla the browser, Galeon, Phoenix, and the many other browsers based on it as well as the non-browsers like Komodo are all the same familly of application.
It's not like X/Emacs and GNU/Emacs where there really was a code fork. These browsers all use the Mozilla code-base in the way that it was meant to be used.
I was never a fan of Michael O'Hare's or Claudia Christian's acting, but you have to admit that Mira Furlan, Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik did an amazing job, even through all of the makeup and given the occasionally bad dialog that plagued the "off" episodes of the first season.
Take a look at Signs and Portents, Chrysalis and The Coming of Shadows for examples of just how good television can be when the likes of these actors team up with the likes of JMS at his writing peak.
Also of note, now that I think of it is the negative reinforcement. If your TiVo makes too broad an assumption, don't just hang your head and go back to surfing, rub it's nose in the carpet. You can thumbs down every one of those shows that it recorded and you didn't like.
;-)
Think of it like a conversation:
You: I like Battle Bots and Junkyard Wars
TiVo: Oh, so you like game shows. There's a bunch of those: Price is Right, Jeopardy, Beat the Geeks....
You: Oh, well I'm not really into generic game shows like Price is Right or Jeopardy, but Beat the Geeks can be fun once in a while.
TiVO: Oh, you have no life!
See, it can work.
I'm not interested in a language war, but your take on what CGI.pm is for is a little off. If you want to "talk CGI" (which is a very simple protocol for communicating with the Web server and ultimately with a client), you use CGI.pm to do so.
If you want to dynamically generate content for the Web, you use Bricolage, Slash or any of the other fine packages out there. Bricolage is especially nice, as it is based on HTML::Mason, a very nice templating system for HTML. Slash, you may know from some of the sites that were built with it....
You can find a nice bit of discussion on the topic, here.
Of course, if you just want to give up on Perl because you ran across CGI.pm and thought it was ugly, that's fine too.
Sometimes the TiVo suggestion feature is stupid, but on the other hand, it's far superior to surfing channels. If you're out of "scheduled items" to record, and you want to surf, you're far more likely to find something interesting in the suggestions. What you ran into was probably before the most recent upgrade. It seems to have been a bug, and I ran into it too (I gave a thumbs up to something that was vaguely western, and TiVo couldn't get enough of recording old Westerns).
I recommend trying it again. Give an explicit two-thumbs up to anything that you really like and three thumbs up to the two things you think are the best shows/movies on. Leave the default on-thumb for everything that you set up to record, but set anything to neutral that you record on speculation.
I find that 50-60% of the stuff it records for me is junk, which is a much better rate than surfing channels, at least in my experience.
The thing was, we'd gotten the story we wanted. Farscape could go on for decades and never end. B5 was designed to be a single story, and while it was initially 5-years long, Straczynski cut it down to 4 mid-season 4 because of the chance that it would get cancelled. One of the reasons that so many fans are *not* fans of the 5th season is that it has very little in the way of story left to tell. He'd filmed the final episode of Season 5 during season 4, and all that was left was tell the story of how we got there.
I ranted to my local station at the time, but I never bothered to get involved when it came to season 5. I was happy with what I'd gotten and there were rumors of a big-screen movie to keep me happy.
Of course, the landscape has changed a lot. If you want good, continuity-based storytelling, you can watch Aaron Sorkin's shows, Joss Whedons or even Straczynski's on Showtime. Back then, B5 was it, and while it was sad to see it go, I think season 4 would have been a more graceful exit.
Babylon 5's fan base was quite active and vocal, but there was no need for the sort of attention-getting that one has to go through to get a show put back on the air. For the most part, with Babylon 5 the largest problem fans had was getting syndicators to show it in a stable time-slot, and that was done market-by-market.
:)
So, I think you're comparing apples-to-oranges when you say, "Even Babylon 5 didn't inspire loyalty on the same level".
Speaking of which, I just got my B5 DVDs in the mail for season 1. I'm going to see if I can get some decent video-editing software and create that 3-hour "all you need to know about season 1" tape that I've been threatening. It's basically:
Midnight on the Firing Line -- Large chunks
Soul Hunter -- A bit, mostly intro
Born to the Purple, Infection, The Parliament of Dreams -- A few scenes
Mind War -- Intro of bester
The War Prayer -- Bits
And The Sky Full Of Stars -- Some of the war
Deathwalker -- Ending
Believers -- Bits
Survivors -- Bits
By Any Means Necessary -- None, I think
Signs and Portents -- 30 min or so
TKO, Grail, Eyes, Legacies -- None, I think
A Voice in the Wilderness part 1 & 2 -- Bits
Babylon Squared -- Bits about B4
The Quality of Mercy -- Bits
Chrysalis -- 30 min or so
I can edit that down to 5 hours easily, 3 hours if I'm very, very harsh about cutting out stuff that is amazingly cool and interesting, but not part of the B5 story arc.
When I do, I'm going to get all of my friends who keep saying "I'd love to watch, but I don't have time" and strap them to chairs for 3 hours