This is a group of (or singular) kiddies who want to make Oracle look bad. That's fine, and Oracle is a big company that I'm sure can take care of itself (C&D paperwork is probably burning out toner cartriges by the gross at Oracle HQ as we speak). My concern is that folks that are good at security testing, but too young to know how to direct their efforts constructively are going to destroy their fledgling careers before they get started. Many such bright kids these days assume that they'll make a name for themselves, and then the consulting bucks will roll in. Problem is that the wrong kind of press can lead to SOME work, but far less than you would have gotten by building a reputation in the industry through the quality of your work and references.
As with security, in the job/consulting world social engineering is often a better approach than trying to pick the lock on the front-door.
hen the first raid group brought down Kel'thuzad...well, nothing at all changed. Instance reset, good game, let's do it again next week. Personally, I'd rather have BC than a trickle of new content. The game has reached a stage where some pretty major things have to happen, and those things are going to have to be planned out and executed over the course of months, and required serious beta testing.
As for Kel'thuzad... what did you expect? What game did you THINK you were playing, and why did you set your expectations the way you did? Kel'thuzad is an amazing fight according to anyone who has done it, and the reward is in the accomplishment. Do you get upset that the king is alive again in every new game of chess (electronic or otherwise) that you play? Do you get upset that there are still thousands of chess sets on the shelves for others to go buy and play the exact same game?
Tell me, how does respawning big bosses suit any storyline?
In a vacuum, it does not, however, when you consider that WoW is played by literally millions of people, it would be horribly unfair to remove an element from the game just because the most powerful group of people on a given server had defeated it. You might do that during a special event where everyone gets to share in the excitement, but if the static end-game bosses were toppled permanently by the 2 or three most powerful guilds on the server, then there would be no benefit in other guilds even exploring the end-game.
So, you do what the game does from level 1: you allow each character (with some exceptions for class, races, faction, reputation, etc.) to repeat the storyline that other characters before them have already experienced.
Now, as for a single guild repeating the same bosses over-and-over... that's a bit of MMORPGishness that I think will fade with time. It currently allows developers to spread their resources more efficiently, but as the content becomes more regular, and easier to build upon, I think there will be more of a tendancy to increase the number of encounters, rather than the number of times that an encounter needs to be repeated. Right now, it's simple logistics and economics.
All that said, I'm not doing the WoW end-game yet. I did the EQ end-game to a point, but quit when the customer service made it unbearable, and before getting to the end-end game. However, the tales I hear from my friends who do are quite promising. Encounters that involve "trash mobs" that can wipe the entire raid unless handled carefully and with a highly coordinated strategy make for the best sort of reward: the feeling of accomplishment that comes from overcoming difficult obstacles. That was always what I liked best about EQ in the raiding environment: you could read strat spoilers all you wanted, but when you got there, it was always exciting because everyone had to do their jobs just right. When it all came together, it was obvious, and a huge payoff. The gear was almost ignorable by comparison to the sense of accomplishment in having a group of 40-60 random strangers work together like a well-oiled machine.
WoW is a very, very rich game, but like most MMORPGs it requires a lot of time and effort (and some cooperation with others) to see that.
If you're looking for a good marathon 2-night game, you're correct. If you're looking for potentially years of quality game-play while interacting with others, then WoW is the game for you, IMHO.
I say this, having played EverQuest for about four years, and having been impressed with much of the world and the story, but ultimately cheated by a company that wanted to milk the game without adding to its depth or richness. In many ways the depth of story and complexity of gameplay in WoW out-strip even early EQ, and they have fixed much of what made EQ painful (tradeskills, quests that weren't worth doing, etc.)
Heck, it's even beautiful, which EQ never really was for some reason (ignoring the progress that graphics have made, I almost never found the sense of art to be satisfying in EQ). When I fly into Orgimmar and see the red rooves and watchfires, it's truly imposing, which none of the EQ cities were (though the dragon city in Velios came close).
Fun story: yesterday I ran into a quest for the first time that involved nothing more than leaping off a tall mesa, presumably to my death. It was kind of cheesy, but really fun as a one-off quest. They seem to be much more playful with quests/missions than any game I've played.
I have updated this information and put it on my wiki. See my World of Warcraft for Fedora Linux page if you have a Fedora Core 5 or later system that you are trying to get to work with World of Warcraft. Good luck!
You are correct... in part. Based on my experience, I would suggest that the only difference is that the online services are more sophisticated about address uniformity. They typically license software that can take any address and normalize it down to a canonical representation. What's more, they're likey comparing this to information that they get from several sources.
Good try, though;)
PS: Yeah, I did this too. Worked out nicely since, for a decade or so, I could reliably throw out any mail that had an "R" as my middle initial;-)
Well, it risks deadlocking the system if the Windows app would have deadlocked Windows. That's not really a risk that concerns me deeply, and as you point out, if it did, there's a kernel change that would allow me to do the right thing.
Sigh... I'm apparently a cowboy that moves too fast.... Slashdot, I love you for setting the typing speed bar so low:-/
The first part of the configure.ac change failed, but it was easy enough to add the header myself. The rest worked fine in the build, I'll test it out tonight when I'm at home.
No one that I've run into is seriously looking at Novell software. This is, after all... NOVELL. All they have going for them right now is that they bought two small companies that were very good at what they did, but you have to wonder how many of those people are left, and how long into the Microsoft dance of "good night Wesley, most likely kill you in the morning," they will put up with before seeking a company that suits their temperment (like Red Hat).
Keep in mind that those of us who have followed Red Hat with some hope (and even some investment dollars) over the years have specifically been waiting for this moment. We believed that one day, Red Hat would go toe-to-toe with the "big boys". If Oracle and Microsoft don't count, then I don't know what does, and I'm hopeful that through the combined strength of open source software and solid business wit, Red Hat will have a good chance of standing their ground.
None of these are "personal information." At no point was your mother's hair color revealed.
It was if she was shopping for hair dye. It was if she was a frequent poster to the "blondes have more fun after 50" message boards.
But that's not interesting. What's interesting is that she usually follows links that talk about hair, or that she spends over $50 only on sites that have distinctly senior-citizen pitch. This requires examination of her behavior in a larger context.
That information, when tied to a telephone number by your phone company, through records from your ISP are invaluable, even if limited to a zip-code's worth of demographics. I'm not actually comfortable with that kind of infromation being handed around freely by companies with which I do business. What's worse is the fact that it's usually not those companies that you KNOW you're interacting with that hand out this information (though it's only slightly less distasteful when it is). It's usually companies that offer them their advertising services or user-tracking, and they have very sophisticated ways of tracking usage, some of which don't even require cookies, and many of which abuse techniques that integrate with the company's own cookie scheme.
My browser has several security settings: Accept Cookies () Always, () Never, () Only from sites you navigate to
The default was the last one, which makes a fair amount of sense to me.
If you navigate to a site, YOU are sending THEM the cookie information. This is your problem/fault. You have the options to either () Not visit the site, () Disable Cookies, () Clear your cookies between visits.
First, there are ways to subvert your setup, and I guarantee that it's already being done without your knowledge. Handing off cookies between two sites that you visit, without issuing a cookie from a foreign site was a technology perfected in 1999 (maybe before, but that's when I first saw it in a technical document).
Second, even without handing off cookies, there are many abuses of your personal privacy that companies you deal with can engage in. All that is being said here is that there's a line you don't cross in terms of selling information about people's behavior. We're not even talking about going as far as the EU does (and boy, do they go to lengths to protect privacy!)
The solution is not a legal one, it is a technical one. It is available. It is easy. The law should not get involved, and if it does, it will simply drive web hosting to china.
Hosting doesn't matter. A US company that abuses the privacy of US citizens in a way that contradicts US law must answer for that abuse. The fact that they placed the servers in China has no brearing on that.
I should clarify one step in my installation. I built, but did not install the patched wine, with the install prefix set to/usr. When I run WoW, I run the binary from the source tree, and it happily uses the system-installed files for everything else. I do all of this from a Gnome icon on mydesktop that just makes startup a little bit easier. This works flawlessly, other than wine's penchant for asking if I want to reset to default settings since the hardware has "changed" on startup. I always say no to this.
"An operating system would not produce a false positive, no.
"As I said we take enormous steps to ensure that those we remove from the game are specifically and properly confirmed as being in violation of our rules and agreements before doing so." -Blizzard
Now, I have two co-workers who were banned who I know don't run bot clients, cheat programs, or anything of the sort. They do run cedega though.
So we have two statements: One says that Blizzard is sure that these people broke the rules. One says that these people (some of them) didn't break the rules.
I know that I run wine (regular wine, not cedega) and I've never had a problem. Other than that, I have no way of evaluating the truth of these statements. It would really be better for Blizzard if they outright supported Linux, even if it was the somewhat crippled support that, for example, Neverwinter Nights offers. At least then, there would be an officially supported platform that people would feel safe running, and you wouldn't get these knee-jerk, "it must be wine!" sorts of responses.
Blizzard does not support Linux. It was great that some enterprising people got WoW working, but that doesn't mean you can complain when Blizzard does something that unintentionally breaks it.
No one that plays under Linux expects that kind of support right now. It would be nice, and we'd certainly feel better about the game if that were the case, but we're not expecting it. However, we are expecting that they will not treat us as abusers of their game. Overall, I suspect that this is a combination of true abuse, mis-set expectations and the kind of poor communication that happens when stories get churned through a fan-base. However, if they realy have made a mistake with respect to wine users, then I would expect them to rectify the mistake in their analysis for cheating. After all, they are incorrect if they identify a wine user as a cheater when said user hasn't been cheating.
That said, some people do some dumb stuff, and much of it deserves banning. I run World of Warcraft under wine, and I've never been banned or even warned, so you have to wonder exactly what's different in these cases.
My experience has been that Blizzard is extremely customer friendly. I've had a number of issues resolved cocerning game glitches, account errors and more in a timely and respectful manner.
Sure. Same experience here, and I'm a wine user.
When Blizzard releases an expansion for WoW which does nothing but raise the level cap by X and doesn't even feature new content but the promise of new content claiming "You'll buy it because it's WoW", when they discontinue the in game ticket system and shut down the forums, when they "have built a line of equity and we intend on spending it", then they will be about as customer-friendly as Sony. As it stands, I don't think you can claim that Blizzard's service is anywhere near as hellish as what SW:G and EQ players have had to deal with.
Ah... my years with EQ... yeah, Sony milked that cow to death. It was truly sad. I started playing just after Verant's customer service went from great to ok, and watched it slide during the transition to Sony over the course of 4 years. Very, very sad.
I play WoW under wine (wine itself, not one of the commercial spin-offs) on Linux. I've never been banned. I've never gotten a note calling me a "bot".
There is a long history of folks blaming wine for bannings in WoW, and I would wait to see exactly what happened here, before assuming that Blizzard has gone off the deep-end and started attacking those users who have clearly gone to great lengths to be able to run the game.
PS: If you want to run WoW under Wine, here's what I did on my Fedora Core 5 system using an NVidia card with the binary NVidia drivers:
Built the patched version in my homedir as described in the HOWTO, but did not install it.
Installed Mozilla and the ActiveX extensions as described in the HOWTO.
Installed WoW from CD under wine as described.
Copied patch files from a Windows system, just to save download time.
Ran WoW, and allowed it to patch.
Tweaked sound settings as described.
It now works fine. The only problems that I have are:
Sound pops from time to time when CPU is under load, especially if some other app competes for CPU against WoW. The suggested fixes on the HOWTO page failed to address this.
Some graphics glitches, mostly involving flashes in water that extends to the edge of the clip plane. This is mentioned in the HOWTO, I think, but there's no known fix for it that I'm aware of. Not a biggie for me.
Some key-combinations are not relinquished by the window manager even in non-windowed mode, and thus any WM-specific keys or mouse actions are not sent to the game. This is fixable, but I don't bother. I just avoid those keys, and I re-mapped the ones that I needed in the game.
On the other hand the benifits are huge:
It's faster under Linux than it was under Windows, but not by much.
Switching from WoW to a desktop app is amazingly fast and painless. Major difference from Windows.
Applications that contend for memory and/or CPU while I'm playing don't appear to harm application performance nearly as much as under Windows, which given that this is both my game system and work-from-home-at-night system, is a major win.
Overall, I love WoW under Linux. It's a joy compared to some made-for-linux games I've tried to run, and wine really seems to have come along.
In the words of a friend whose job really was to surf porn professionally, "no job should ever force you to do something that you would otherwise enjoy... it ruins a perfectly good hobby.";-)
No, you're hyperbolizing. Some people (myself included) won't be happy until the government sets limits on how personal information can be used by corporations. I don't like the fact, for example, that my mother's phone company shares personal information with her Internet provider who then buys information derived from cookies to develop a package that allows telemarketers to target her based on what Web sites she uses. This is not what the Internet is there for, and I personally want a stop put to it. Limiting abuse of cookies (especially cross-site hand-offs that are used specifically to track broad activity across disconnected sites) would be a good first step, and one that should have happened years ago when certain companies which NDAs prevent me from naming (not related to my current company, thankfully) started the practice.
Well, they probably do, but the main benefit, I'm sure, is being able to track who contributes what. Don't just censor history, censor the historians... it's an old trick, but a damn effective one.:-/
I suspect that the porn content of the Net is highly underrated. Having done such surveys in my life for businesses, I can say that any metric that you're looking for can be skewed drastically by looking at the numbers differently. For example, if you many porn sites want only a handful of pages to be indexed, so if you go by page count, porn will be very low. If you go by machine or domain names, then porn will rank fairly high, since many porn sites use domains to isolate different types of content for the same service.
If you discount auto-generated pages, you willl also eliminate a huge fraction of the Web.
There's an awful lot of play in these numbers, so don't be too shocked if they're just dead wrong from most points of view.
I don't think it took all that long to warm up to... at least not by today's standards. I was halfway through the first season before I knew I was hooked on B5. It was (aptly enough) Signs and Portents in the middle of the first season that knocked my socks off. I was halfway through the episode when I said, "wow, that was great... can't wait to see the next one!" When the person I was watching it with pointed out that it was only half over, I couldn't believe it. More happens in that one episode than anything I had ever seen on TV... but that didn't last. Chrysalis, the season finale for the first season did the same thing all over again, but seemed to pack even more into one episode. The Coming of Shadows and The Fall of Night in the second season served the same roles, and in the third season there was Severed Dreams which I got to see in LA at a tiny con where JMS presented it 10 minutes before the sat. uplink.
Some (I'm no longer recalling which) of these episodes earned awards, but I always thought that they existed on a level above simple annual awards. These were episodes that moved the bar in terms of TV show-writing. They made the episodic noise coming from the Star Trek folks seem rather dull and uninteresting (though I will note that even through the terrible filter of the Star Trek machine, Ron Moore's work on DS9 shown through).
Sit down and watch B5 in small chunks (1-2 episodes at a time, with a day or two between at least). Talk to people about the episodes you've seen. Invariably, people who "marathon" the seasons don't enjoy them nearly as much... I think that, much as there is an arc, there is a pacing that's uniquely aimed at serial viewing with plenty of time between to think about what's going on, and what the last episode did to the story. Once you get to Signs, if you still think the series takes a while to warm up to (compared to something like BSG which I was still iffy about up to the end of season 1, and into season 2, but now love), then I guess you and I just appreciate different things in our SF, and cheers to you.
Yes, Babylon 5's time has come and gone. That's why it's one of the highest grossing DVD series of all time.... oh wait;-)
Seriously, Babylon 5 is in part horribly dated and in part timeless. The horribly dated parts are certainly related to the changes in the industry since the mid-90s. The first season of B5 was rendered on Amigas. That's right Commodore Amiga home computers. They were all the rage among the 3D rendering crowd at the time, and B5 looked flawless to the untrained eye of the average viewer at the time, but we've become jaded now. The static backdrops and blocky textures leave the average viewer lacking a suspension of disbelief from the first second now. We're also not shocked to see people in full facial/head makeup all the time now, but B5 pioneered a lot of that work.
The arc-driven story that is a staple in TV now is directly a consequence of Straczynski's work on B5. Before him, it was unheard of in US TV science fiction (though the original BSG had a very loose arc). Even for TV in general, only Hill Street Blues had really done an arc for TV in the US. Now, many others have done it. We compare B5 to BSG, but understand that BSG would never have been greenlighted without the success of B5.
So, was Straczynski just stuborn enough to be the first one to do these things, or is he a true visionary who can change the world of TV SF once again? There are already rumblings from the likes of Warren Ellis over the idea of direct-to-DVD science fiction being the next outlet for creative storytelling.... we'll see.
My prediction: a new game is expected in late 2007 or early to mid 2008 with the movie (and a new studio to back it) coming out in late 2008 or early 2009 after recent delays. I don't follow Halo, so they may even have announced it, but that's what I'm betting on. Some details of said game:
It will probably contain some concepts based on the design for the movie
It will probably contain voice acting from some major stars who are probably TBA right now
The case is entirely bogus, but they're going to base it, I presume, on the concept (and pardon me for not recalling the legal term) that leading someone to believe that your software is free (as in really free) for the taking implies that you are waiving your rights to that software. That would presumably come down to a question of how the licensing was portrayed. Were the authors clear that this software was placed under the GPL? Were the people using it made aware of that fact? Was there a paper trail kept documenting that fact?
Simply shipping a copy of the COPYING file with your code doesn't really fulfill all of your obligations as licensor. You really need to make users aware of the terms under which the license the software.
Then again, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm just reciting from my poor memory the concepts that have been given to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there you have your answer... I don't think this was a particular low for Fox... heck, it probably wasn't even a low for that day!
It does make sense, but it's just not very smart.
This is a group of (or singular) kiddies who want to make Oracle look bad. That's fine, and Oracle is a big company that I'm sure can take care of itself (C&D paperwork is probably burning out toner cartriges by the gross at Oracle HQ as we speak). My concern is that folks that are good at security testing, but too young to know how to direct their efforts constructively are going to destroy their fledgling careers before they get started. Many such bright kids these days assume that they'll make a name for themselves, and then the consulting bucks will roll in. Problem is that the wrong kind of press can lead to SOME work, but far less than you would have gotten by building a reputation in the industry through the quality of your work and references.
As with security, in the job/consulting world social engineering is often a better approach than trying to pick the lock on the front-door.
Have you ever watched Fox?!
They make the best little chocolate donuts!
In a vacuum, it does not, however, when you consider that WoW is played by literally millions of people, it would be horribly unfair to remove an element from the game just because the most powerful group of people on a given server had defeated it. You might do that during a special event where everyone gets to share in the excitement, but if the static end-game bosses were toppled permanently by the 2 or three most powerful guilds on the server, then there would be no benefit in other guilds even exploring the end-game.
So, you do what the game does from level 1: you allow each character (with some exceptions for class, races, faction, reputation, etc.) to repeat the storyline that other characters before them have already experienced.
Now, as for a single guild repeating the same bosses over-and-over... that's a bit of MMORPGishness that I think will fade with time. It currently allows developers to spread their resources more efficiently, but as the content becomes more regular, and easier to build upon, I think there will be more of a tendancy to increase the number of encounters, rather than the number of times that an encounter needs to be repeated. Right now, it's simple logistics and economics.
All that said, I'm not doing the WoW end-game yet. I did the EQ end-game to a point, but quit when the customer service made it unbearable, and before getting to the end-end game. However, the tales I hear from my friends who do are quite promising. Encounters that involve "trash mobs" that can wipe the entire raid unless handled carefully and with a highly coordinated strategy make for the best sort of reward: the feeling of accomplishment that comes from overcoming difficult obstacles. That was always what I liked best about EQ in the raiding environment: you could read strat spoilers all you wanted, but when you got there, it was always exciting because everyone had to do their jobs just right. When it all came together, it was obvious, and a huge payoff. The gear was almost ignorable by comparison to the sense of accomplishment in having a group of 40-60 random strangers work together like a well-oiled machine.
WoW is a very, very rich game, but like most MMORPGs it requires a lot of time and effort (and some cooperation with others) to see that.
If you're looking for a good marathon 2-night game, you're correct. If you're looking for potentially years of quality game-play while interacting with others, then WoW is the game for you, IMHO.
I say this, having played EverQuest for about four years, and having been impressed with much of the world and the story, but ultimately cheated by a company that wanted to milk the game without adding to its depth or richness. In many ways the depth of story and complexity of gameplay in WoW out-strip even early EQ, and they have fixed much of what made EQ painful (tradeskills, quests that weren't worth doing, etc.)
Heck, it's even beautiful, which EQ never really was for some reason (ignoring the progress that graphics have made, I almost never found the sense of art to be satisfying in EQ). When I fly into Orgimmar and see the red rooves and watchfires, it's truly imposing, which none of the EQ cities were (though the dragon city in Velios came close).
Fun story: yesterday I ran into a quest for the first time that involved nothing more than leaping off a tall mesa, presumably to my death. It was kind of cheesy, but really fun as a one-off quest. They seem to be much more playful with quests/missions than any game I've played.
I have updated this information and put it on my wiki. See my World of Warcraft for Fedora Linux page if you have a Fedora Core 5 or later system that you are trying to get to work with World of Warcraft. Good luck!
You are correct... in part. Based on my experience, I would suggest that the only difference is that the online services are more sophisticated about address uniformity. They typically license software that can take any address and normalize it down to a canonical representation. What's more, they're likey comparing this to information that they get from several sources.
;)
;-)
Good try, though
PS: Yeah, I did this too. Worked out nicely since, for a decade or so, I could reliably throw out any mail that had an "R" as my middle initial
Well, it risks deadlocking the system if the Windows app would have deadlocked Windows. That's not really a risk that concerns me deeply, and as you point out, if it did, there's a kernel change that would allow me to do the right thing.
:-/
Sigh... I'm apparently a cowboy that moves too fast.... Slashdot, I love you for setting the typing speed bar so low
The first part of the configure.ac change failed, but it was easy enough to add the header myself. The rest worked fine in the build, I'll test it out tonight when I'm at home.
Thanks!
No one that I've run into is seriously looking at Novell software. This is, after all... NOVELL. All they have going for them right now is that they bought two small companies that were very good at what they did, but you have to wonder how many of those people are left, and how long into the Microsoft dance of "good night Wesley, most likely kill you in the morning," they will put up with before seeking a company that suits their temperment (like Red Hat).
Keep in mind that those of us who have followed Red Hat with some hope (and even some investment dollars) over the years have specifically been waiting for this moment. We believed that one day, Red Hat would go toe-to-toe with the "big boys". If Oracle and Microsoft don't count, then I don't know what does, and I'm hopeful that through the combined strength of open source software and solid business wit, Red Hat will have a good chance of standing their ground.
It was if she was shopping for hair dye. It was if she was a frequent poster to the "blondes have more fun after 50" message boards.
But that's not interesting. What's interesting is that she usually follows links that talk about hair, or that she spends over $50 only on sites that have distinctly senior-citizen pitch. This requires examination of her behavior in a larger context.
That information, when tied to a telephone number by your phone company, through records from your ISP are invaluable, even if limited to a zip-code's worth of demographics. I'm not actually comfortable with that kind of infromation being handed around freely by companies with which I do business. What's worse is the fact that it's usually not those companies that you KNOW you're interacting with that hand out this information (though it's only slightly less distasteful when it is). It's usually companies that offer them their advertising services or user-tracking, and they have very sophisticated ways of tracking usage, some of which don't even require cookies, and many of which abuse techniques that integrate with the company's own cookie scheme.
First, there are ways to subvert your setup, and I guarantee that it's already being done without your knowledge. Handing off cookies between two sites that you visit, without issuing a cookie from a foreign site was a technology perfected in 1999 (maybe before, but that's when I first saw it in a technical document).
Second, even without handing off cookies, there are many abuses of your personal privacy that companies you deal with can engage in. All that is being said here is that there's a line you don't cross in terms of selling information about people's behavior. We're not even talking about going as far as the EU does (and boy, do they go to lengths to protect privacy!)
Hosting doesn't matter. A US company that abuses the privacy of US citizens in a way that contradicts US law must answer for that abuse. The fact that they placed the servers in China has no brearing on that.
I should clarify one step in my installation. I built, but did not install the patched wine, with the install prefix set to /usr. When I run WoW, I run the binary from the source tree, and it happily uses the system-installed files for everything else. I do all of this from a Gnome icon on mydesktop that just makes startup a little bit easier. This works flawlessly, other than wine's penchant for asking if I want to reset to default settings since the hardware has "changed" on startup. I always say no to this.
So we have two statements: One says that Blizzard is sure that these people broke the rules. One says that these people (some of them) didn't break the rules.
I know that I run wine (regular wine, not cedega) and I've never had a problem. Other than that, I have no way of evaluating the truth of these statements. It would really be better for Blizzard if they outright supported Linux, even if it was the somewhat crippled support that, for example, Neverwinter Nights offers. At least then, there would be an officially supported platform that people would feel safe running, and you wouldn't get these knee-jerk, "it must be wine!" sorts of responses.
No one that plays under Linux expects that kind of support right now. It would be nice, and we'd certainly feel better about the game if that were the case, but we're not expecting it. However, we are expecting that they will not treat us as abusers of their game. Overall, I suspect that this is a combination of true abuse, mis-set expectations and the kind of poor communication that happens when stories get churned through a fan-base. However, if they realy have made a mistake with respect to wine users, then I would expect them to rectify the mistake in their analysis for cheating. After all, they are incorrect if they identify a wine user as a cheater when said user hasn't been cheating.
That said, some people do some dumb stuff, and much of it deserves banning. I run World of Warcraft under wine, and I've never been banned or even warned, so you have to wonder exactly what's different in these cases.
Sure. Same experience here, and I'm a wine user.
Ah... my years with EQ... yeah, Sony milked that cow to death. It was truly sad. I started playing just after Verant's customer service went from great to ok, and watched it slide during the transition to Sony over the course of 4 years. Very, very sad.
There is a long history of folks blaming wine for bannings in WoW, and I would wait to see exactly what happened here, before assuming that Blizzard has gone off the deep-end and started attacking those users who have clearly gone to great lengths to be able to run the game.
PS: If you want to run WoW under Wine, here's what I did on my Fedora Core 5 system using an NVidia card with the binary NVidia drivers:
It now works fine. The only problems that I have are:
On the other hand the benifits are huge:
Overall, I love WoW under Linux. It's a joy compared to some made-for-linux games I've tried to run, and wine really seems to have come along.
In the words of a friend whose job really was to surf porn professionally, "no job should ever force you to do something that you would otherwise enjoy... it ruins a perfectly good hobby." ;-)
No, you're hyperbolizing. Some people (myself included) won't be happy until the government sets limits on how personal information can be used by corporations. I don't like the fact, for example, that my mother's phone company shares personal information with her Internet provider who then buys information derived from cookies to develop a package that allows telemarketers to target her based on what Web sites she uses. This is not what the Internet is there for, and I personally want a stop put to it. Limiting abuse of cookies (especially cross-site hand-offs that are used specifically to track broad activity across disconnected sites) would be a good first step, and one that should have happened years ago when certain companies which NDAs prevent me from naming (not related to my current company, thankfully) started the practice.
Well, they probably do, but the main benefit, I'm sure, is being able to track who contributes what. Don't just censor history, censor the historians... it's an old trick, but a damn effective one. :-/
I suspect that the porn content of the Net is highly underrated. Having done such surveys in my life for businesses, I can say that any metric that you're looking for can be skewed drastically by looking at the numbers differently. For example, if you many porn sites want only a handful of pages to be indexed, so if you go by page count, porn will be very low. If you go by machine or domain names, then porn will rank fairly high, since many porn sites use domains to isolate different types of content for the same service.
If you discount auto-generated pages, you willl also eliminate a huge fraction of the Web.
There's an awful lot of play in these numbers, so don't be too shocked if they're just dead wrong from most points of view.
I don't think it took all that long to warm up to... at least not by today's standards. I was halfway through the first season before I knew I was hooked on B5. It was (aptly enough) Signs and Portents in the middle of the first season that knocked my socks off. I was halfway through the episode when I said, "wow, that was great... can't wait to see the next one!" When the person I was watching it with pointed out that it was only half over, I couldn't believe it. More happens in that one episode than anything I had ever seen on TV... but that didn't last. Chrysalis, the season finale for the first season did the same thing all over again, but seemed to pack even more into one episode. The Coming of Shadows and The Fall of Night in the second season served the same roles, and in the third season there was Severed Dreams which I got to see in LA at a tiny con where JMS presented it 10 minutes before the sat. uplink.
Some (I'm no longer recalling which) of these episodes earned awards, but I always thought that they existed on a level above simple annual awards. These were episodes that moved the bar in terms of TV show-writing. They made the episodic noise coming from the Star Trek folks seem rather dull and uninteresting (though I will note that even through the terrible filter of the Star Trek machine, Ron Moore's work on DS9 shown through).
Sit down and watch B5 in small chunks (1-2 episodes at a time, with a day or two between at least). Talk to people about the episodes you've seen. Invariably, people who "marathon" the seasons don't enjoy them nearly as much... I think that, much as there is an arc, there is a pacing that's uniquely aimed at serial viewing with plenty of time between to think about what's going on, and what the last episode did to the story. Once you get to Signs, if you still think the series takes a while to warm up to (compared to something like BSG which I was still iffy about up to the end of season 1, and into season 2, but now love), then I guess you and I just appreciate different things in our SF, and cheers to you.
Yes, Babylon 5's time has come and gone. That's why it's one of the highest grossing DVD series of all time.... oh wait ;-)
Seriously, Babylon 5 is in part horribly dated and in part timeless. The horribly dated parts are certainly related to the changes in the industry since the mid-90s. The first season of B5 was rendered on Amigas. That's right Commodore Amiga home computers. They were all the rage among the 3D rendering crowd at the time, and B5 looked flawless to the untrained eye of the average viewer at the time, but we've become jaded now. The static backdrops and blocky textures leave the average viewer lacking a suspension of disbelief from the first second now. We're also not shocked to see people in full facial/head makeup all the time now, but B5 pioneered a lot of that work.
The arc-driven story that is a staple in TV now is directly a consequence of Straczynski's work on B5. Before him, it was unheard of in US TV science fiction (though the original BSG had a very loose arc). Even for TV in general, only Hill Street Blues had really done an arc for TV in the US. Now, many others have done it. We compare B5 to BSG, but understand that BSG would never have been greenlighted without the success of B5.
So, was Straczynski just stuborn enough to be the first one to do these things, or is he a true visionary who can change the world of TV SF once again? There are already rumblings from the likes of Warren Ellis over the idea of direct-to-DVD science fiction being the next outlet for creative storytelling.... we'll see.
Why do I think this? It's all based on the fact that the Peter Jackson-produced (not directed) Halo movie which was in trouble when two studios pulled out, was being shopped around, and previously Bungie said it's all good....
These are all guesses based only on what I've read over at Ain't It Cool News and other places.
The case is entirely bogus, but they're going to base it, I presume, on the concept (and pardon me for not recalling the legal term) that leading someone to believe that your software is free (as in really free) for the taking implies that you are waiving your rights to that software. That would presumably come down to a question of how the licensing was portrayed. Were the authors clear that this software was placed under the GPL? Were the people using it made aware of that fact? Was there a paper trail kept documenting that fact?
Simply shipping a copy of the COPYING file with your code doesn't really fulfill all of your obligations as licensor. You really need to make users aware of the terms under which the license the software.
Then again, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm just reciting from my poor memory the concepts that have been given to me.