I'm doing a search now to test a theory:
The site is an.aspx page, which means that it's probably an IIS server back-ended by a MSSQL database. Given that they would want the text search to be case insensitive, it is quite possible that they were sloppy and used a SELECT * WHERE [last_name] LIKE @search_string (ok, they probably listed only the columns they wanted, you get the idea though). It is also possible that there is no limit defined for the number of records to return.
If all of the above is true, then the search I started should return everything between 1/1/1978 and 4/10/2006 in the database, assuming that their server survives the request. If this is true, this means that getting everything in their database is a trivial task, and that they are exposing a lot of people to identity theft, very easily. Further, even if they go through and redact the data later, it is probably too late, as the data would have been long since scraped. This is one time that I hope a slashdotting kills a server.
The environment needs to provide a consistent, but not necessarily high level of realism.
Ding! Give that man a cigar!
Realism isn't important per se, what is important is that the world is internally consistent. If I'm playing a D&D type game, I shouldn't find an uzi laying about. On the other hand, a person tossing a fireball at me would be expected.
The real money is in the dice. I buy those things like crack and I can't stop:(
A truer statement has never existed. I have way more dice than I'll truly ever use, but I just love getting more. Heck, I even picked up a novelty set of pewter dice, which actually roll rather nicely; but, considering that we tend to game on a glass table top(it's what we have), they don't get used.
Quick show of hands, how many people here own a D100 or D30? How many actually use them, other than as projectiles?
Honestly, everytime I played GURPS, I was struck with the over abundance of optional rules. I often stated, half seriously:
In order to play GURPS, you cut all of the sidebars off the main book and put them in a stack. Pick up the remaining book in one hand and the stack of sidebars in the other. Throw one way, which one doesn't matter.
Actually, a well run GURPS game, which doesn't get bogged down in the optional rule minutiae is a lot of fun. This is pretty much true of any system though. If you have a rules lawyer playing, or worse yet GMing, the game is going to have problems. If everyone is there to have fun and the GM knows the rules well enough to wing it as required, the game should be pretty fun.
Heck, I can even like the Palladium system as it applies to Rifts; it all depeneds on the GM though.
AT&tT pissing off customers isn't going to make a difference. In most areas they serve, they have a mandated monopoly, also, they own the phone lines in such areas. So, if they piss off a geek, who is currently an AT&T subscriber, all that will happen is that said geek will jump to $small_isp, who pays AT&T for the line. Sure, AT&T gets slightly less money, they are still making money off that geek.
...last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months.
The 1980's called, they want their tapes back.
Seriously, tapes last way longer than 18 months. Also, they store well. While a harddrive backup is nice for quick recovery, for long term storage it's a non-starter. First off, I can go over to Dell and buy a 20 pack of LTO-2 tapes for $1,000 or about $50/tape (we use a Dell tape library). Compare that to $88 for a Western Digital WD2000 (200GB ATA100) from Newegg (400GB drives are $180). Considering that I use 13 tapes for my weekly full backup we're already $430 more expensive for 1 week. Figure, I keep a rotating set of 4 weeks we're at $1720 in extra capital costs. Plus, we have the offsite sets (2) and quarterly archives. This is starting to get expensive in media fast. Then we start having to look at the reliability of the media. I can drop an LTO-2 tape and be reasonably certain that I'll still get my data back. If I drop a hard-dive, it's not quite as certain. Granted, you should avoid dropping either, but accidents happen.
This solution of yours sounds like a load that one of our vendors is trying to shanghai us into. It's a newtwork attached disk backup solution that runs around $100k. Considering that we recently paid about $140k for our SAN (including fiber switch and head-end server and CX500), I'm wondering why we don't just kick in a little bit extra and have a RAID 5+1 on our SAN (we're currently RAID 5). When you consider that we are using one tray of Fiber Chanel drives in our array, which we would only need ATA drives to backup, we might get the cost down to around $100k (We'd probably have to buy a second fiber switch for redundancy, but we could skip the server).
Disk based backup sounds nice, but tapes are still cheaper and highly reliable. And let's not even get started on the question of automation. The library we use (Dell 132T) has 2 drives and shuffles 8 tapes for me. And, with luck we should be upgrading that by the end of the year, so I don't have to swap out tapes at all.
Having a gamer wife makes gaming much eaiser. My wife played video games long before I met her (Pen and paper games too), since we've been living together and then married, the only decresing in gaming has come from work. We both play WoW, and will often spend an hour or two a night playing together after dinner. And weekends where nothing else is going on have a way of slipping into that game as well.
If you are a gamer, and want to continue to be one, don't marry a non-gamer. Or, at the very least, make sure that your spouse to be understands that gaming is a hobby to you, much like watching TV probably is to them.
Just because I feel like bragging, my wife authored this about the whole gamer widow thing. I really am one of the luckiest geeks on Earth.
I often try to explain to people that I play video games like they watch TV. Where many of the baby boomers and thier kids will get home from work, eat dinner and watch and TV; I get home, eat dinner and play video games. It's escapism and entertainment, plain and simple. I just grew up playing video games insted of watching TV westerns.
No, it's not a threat, MS is comming out with server based versions of Office 12 (or whatever they call the next release). From what I've heard about the betas (one of our guys is betaing), the server based versions are damn close to the client based versions.
The mainfame idea isn't all bad, it just has to be used correctly. Many business users don't need a PC, they run Word, Excel, and Outlook and occasionally they will browse the web. Why do these people need a full blown PC? The problem is, when mainframes were big everyone was on it, even those people who should not be on one. A good example is a software developer. Eventually, that developer is going to hit complie, and if he is on a mainframe, the rest of the users get screwed. For this type of user you would want to have a full PC. The problem is, most places seem to be of an either/or mentality, when a well thought out combination of the two might be much better.
Of course, when in doubt give everyone a PC, they aren't expensive enough anymore to really care about.
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
Not my problem. If companies want to make money, they will find a way. People are simply using ad-blockers and the like to tell companies that the current method is not acceptable.
This is the reason I added this caveat (assuming that such are ever justified). Personally, I don't agree with allowing the government to determine what is "indecent". It looks far too much like a valid slippery slope to me, to want to have it. However, given the current state of US law, a nipple on primetime broadcast TV is not allowed. This is why I said that I saw some justification for the complaint.
Thanks for the link, it helps put this in context.
Having watched the clip, I could sort of see a complaint about indecency (assuming that such are ever justified). I just wouldn't accept that the indeceny is in depicting a rather wild party of underage people. Maybe it was just the resolution of the clip, but I would swear I saw some nipples at one point, which seems to fall under current indecency standards.
Whether the Parents Television Council cares to accept it or not, drunken underage parties happen. At said parties underage people often engage in sex. As this seems to have been part of the story, I can understand why it was depicted. Yes, it probably rubs many people the wrong way, since they wish to ignore reality; sorry, but the right to not be offended still isn't in the US Constitution anywhere.
What type of game are you looking for? My wife and I played the Baldur's Gate series on the PS2 and had a lot of fun. Since it is strictly co-op, it's easy to help her, without handicapping yourself unduly. Also, the game is simple enough that she should be able to catch on quickly.
We also play WoW together, and while I have a lot of UI mods and do some advanced stuff, she is a fairly basic user. Again, as long as she is willing to put some effort into it, it's easy enough to pick up and play.
If you're planning on an FPS or platform fighter, you're probably asking for trouble. Some platform fighters can be good, as they can handicap you, but even with that, you will still probably win a lot. Is she going to get frustrated and give up?
Only you will really know what she will stand for (you are her boyfriend, right). It's going to be a judgement call between what she will handle and you are willing to put up with. You're probably going to have to dumb down your play a bit for a while, I am guessing that you have been playing games most of your life and you are trying to introduce your girlfriend to your hobby.
Good luck!
I admit it is far fetched, but say I wanted to frame you for a murder. I would commit said crime, deposit a huge chunk of money (cash) in your account, and then send an anonymous tip from a pay phone to the police about your involvement in the crime as a contract killer. The police would pull your financial information, see the deposit and then start investigating you. In the end, you would probably be able to clear your name, but it would create hell for you for a while; and, if the press found out (let's just say I call them too) you might have a hell of a time getting rid of all suspicion.
Yes, it's far fetched, but is's what I can come up with off the top of my head. Also, having an account open to any deposit might also be useful to a money launderer, who isn't you.
My father actually has a good way around this, have a canned, made up, number to give out. Very few companies will ever check, which means they don't really need your real SSN. If they catch you, do an, "oops, sorry made a mistake" and then sort it out.
I may just be backwards, but I don't like the idea of downloading my music, I like the CD, the case and the booklet with the lyrics. Granted, I only buy 1 CD or so in any given year, and even then I won't pay the $15 they are trying to pump out of me for it. Still, when I do buy music, I want the full CD with all of the stuff which goes with it.
I don't mind blowing up, burning down or melting sideways the billboards inside the gaming world...
Unless the game doesn't let you. For those that haven't seen it yet, Rainbow six:Lockdown on the PC had in game advertisements. Actually it only had one, which was repeated over and over and over again. It was for a movie, The Hills Have Eyes which I will never see, partly due to the ad, also partly due to the movie looking like it is going to suck.
While just about everything else in the game took damage, or at least spawned bullet holes when I shot them, the ads did not. No matter what you did to the posters, the looked good as new. This was tested quite often since the ad had a picture of the main actress on it, which was often mistaken for a taget for a second, and shot. In the end, I'm looking to find a way to replace the image with something a bit more interesting, say porn, before the next LAN (which is how I play the R6 games).
This was bad enough in a game I just paid $50 for, getting that along with the StarForce crap was a real slap in the face. But, the idea of paying for a game subscription and then getting ads as well, just seems like too much to me. Yes, I realize that I'm getting shafted in the same way by the cable company; and that I will probably end up with no choice when it comes to my games; I still don't have to like it.
Similar enough of a thought: A few friends and I get together on occasion and play Rainbow 6. We played through all of Ravenshield, plus the Athena Sword expansion, and played quite a few community made maps. We recently played R6:Lockdown, and I'm seriously considering going back to user made maps in RvS for the next LAN. That said, we are looking forward to the release of GR:AW, but we are somewhat concerned that, like R6:Lcokdown, it will be a consolified version of a tactical shooter (read as: it sucks).
It's the lack of co-op that drives me nuts too. When Doom 3 realeased without it, I though, how stupid is that? Then Star Wars: Republic Commando came out, again without co-op support, and I just couldn't understand how companies can miss the bleedingly obvious: you've got network playability, you have all these nice maps, why won't you let me play them with my fiends, insted of some dumb bots?
While the storlines in WoW are nice, they suffer from the same problem all persistent worlds suffer from, they are persistent, a.k.a. static. No matter how many people raid the Scarley Monestary Cathedral, no matter how many times I personally kill Scarlet Commander Mograine, he's still standing there the next time I walk into the cathedral, the Scarlet Crusade suffers no setback. If I complete a quest, I get some text talking about what is happening as a result, but that result is completly ficticious, nothing ever changes.
Of course, you can't expect the world to actually change for every quest, it would be unmanagable. This was tried with Ultima Online with rather poor results. Origin would have a would event occur and a few high-level players would do it so fast, few other people had heard about it before it was done. So, unless you were one of the hard-core players, and powerful enough to get involved, the quests might as well have not existed.
So, while the writing that went into WoW is very good, it still is not a story driven game. The backstory is there to provide a framework to hang the "go here, kill X number of Y monster quests" on.
The problem is, when you put companies in the driving seat for a push to a single Linux distribution, you get crap like RPM being made part of the standard.
And thus we have the disconnect betweem many of the hardcore Linux users and people like me who manage systems. RPM/APT is a godsend for setting up systems. Yes, when I setup a system, I could do the make, make install, frak missed a dependency, download, make, make install; ok, back to the first one, make, make install. Why in the world would I want to? I would much rather do apt-get install apache; oh, it has those dependencies, yes, very nice, go ahead and take care of them for me. Do I know every in and out of what it is doing? No. Do I care? No. What I care about is that I have a functional web server at the end.
That is why when companies get involved, you get "crap" like RPM. Yes, it disconnect the users from the system a little bit, that's OK. The goal of an IT department is to provide the company with the tools it needs to do it's real business. The faster and eaiser it is for me to do that, the more productive I can be.
It becomes near impossibnle for them to troubleshoot hardware problems over the phone if there's no software consistency to base any questions on. If the customer calls up and says "I can't get this thing working", what is the tech supposed to do if you are running Fred's OS? How can you even start to figure out what any potential problem is unless there's release of magic smoke involved?
Actually, on a Dell machine, this is fairly simple. You just require the user to boot to the Dell diagnostic partition (that little FAT partition at the front of the first drive). Now, if they wiped that out, they're boned, but it could be put on a CD/Floppy and run from there. That little diagnostic setup is actually very nice for running down hardware problems on a Dell machine, and once it gives you an error code the Dell tech support people usually stop fighting you (YMMV, I have access to the Gold Level support).
Also, their second level techs seem to have a bit of a clue. The last time I called in I was dealing with a sound issue. After blowing the first level tech out of the water, I explained the error to the second level tech, along with the fact that it shows up in both Windows XP and if I boot off a Knoppix CD (first level tech couldn't quite seem to grasp the idea that I was using Knoppix as a testing tool, and not installing Linux). He had me do one or two more tests, because he is required to get that info for his record, but knowing full well it was a hardware issue. He was rather apologetic for having to go through the other stuff, but that is just something he was required to do.
I think Dell should just pick one or two distributions, and go with them. They did this on the servers, why not the workstations? Yes, people are going to moan about the choice, too bad. No matter what you do, you are going to have people whining about stuff (This seems to be a constant in the Linux community). Dell seems to like Ubuntu, go that way. Or, make a Dellux OS and just support that. If people want to wipe it and install their own choice, just don't support that OS. This is how they do it on Windows anyhow. If I buy a Windows box, and then install Debian on it, they won't support me.
I do understand the constantly growing applications, I've watched it happen a couple times. Still, for stuff that I am going to use once or twice, and no one else is going to see, I still prefer to do quick one-off apps. And they stay that way. If it's something that might get out of my hands, I make a programmer do it (I am not, never have been, and have absolutly no desire to be, a programmer). This is why I pointed out the difference in mindset, I actually do have one-off applications lying around. This is because I use them, and then delete them, and no one knows but me. Actually, I do tend to keep the source code on my drive, so I can go back and re-use bits when I need to. Still, they never get past the one-off nature. When a project comes up, which is similar to what I have done, I will voluteer bits, but never the application as a whole; as I know it's not going to be a good solution.
One of the differences is that I don't have a customer for my applications. I write them and use them myself, I don't write stuff for other people. This means that I inherently know what I want the application to do, and I don't get caught up in the feature creep cycle. If it's something which is going to be deployed, I either buy a pre-made package or have our in-house development guy write it. He is actually a programmer, with a good understanding of things like garbage collection, memory management, and a number of other bits of programming theory which I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn. Despite what many on Slashdot seem to think, IT and programming really are seperate realms. Yes, some overlap exists, but they really are separate fields.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm doing a search now to test a theory: .aspx page, which means that it's probably an IIS server back-ended by a MSSQL database. Given that they would want the text search to be case insensitive, it is quite possible that they were sloppy and used a SELECT * WHERE [last_name] LIKE @search_string (ok, they probably listed only the columns they wanted, you get the idea though). It is also possible that there is no limit defined for the number of records to return.
The site is an
If all of the above is true, then the search I started should return everything between 1/1/1978 and 4/10/2006 in the database, assuming that their server survives the request. If this is true, this means that getting everything in their database is a trivial task, and that they are exposing a lot of people to identity theft, very easily. Further, even if they go through and redact the data later, it is probably too late, as the data would have been long since scraped. This is one time that I hope a slashdotting kills a server.
The environment needs to provide a consistent, but not necessarily high level of realism.
Ding! Give that man a cigar!
Realism isn't important per se, what is important is that the world is internally consistent. If I'm playing a D&D type game, I shouldn't find an uzi laying about. On the other hand, a person tossing a fireball at me would be expected.
The real money is in the dice. I buy those things like crack and I can't stop :(
A truer statement has never existed. I have way more dice than I'll truly ever use, but I just love getting more. Heck, I even picked up a novelty set of pewter dice, which actually roll rather nicely; but, considering that we tend to game on a glass table top(it's what we have), they don't get used.
Quick show of hands, how many people here own a D100 or D30? How many actually use them, other than as projectiles?
Honestly, everytime I played GURPS, I was struck with the over abundance of optional rules. I often stated, half seriously:
In order to play GURPS, you cut all of the sidebars off the main book and put them in a stack. Pick up the remaining book in one hand and the stack of sidebars in the other. Throw one way, which one doesn't matter.
Actually, a well run GURPS game, which doesn't get bogged down in the optional rule minutiae is a lot of fun. This is pretty much true of any system though. If you have a rules lawyer playing, or worse yet GMing, the game is going to have problems. If everyone is there to have fun and the GM knows the rules well enough to wing it as required, the game should be pretty fun.
Heck, I can even like the Palladium system as it applies to Rifts; it all depeneds on the GM though.
So, it's 4:30pm local, been fighting with an Exchange issue all day. Get a few moments and click on the Slashdot link on my tool bar.
fuck me!
Wasn't expecting that. Bloody April Fools, thank god it's on a weekend this year.
AT&tT pissing off customers isn't going to make a difference. In most areas they serve, they have a mandated monopoly, also, they own the phone lines in such areas. So, if they piss off a geek, who is currently an AT&T subscriber, all that will happen is that said geek will jump to $small_isp, who pays AT&T for the line. Sure, AT&T gets slightly less money, they are still making money off that geek.
...last time I checked, the shelf life of a tape is not much more than 18 months.
The 1980's called, they want their tapes back.
Seriously, tapes last way longer than 18 months. Also, they store well. While a harddrive backup is nice for quick recovery, for long term storage it's a non-starter. First off, I can go over to Dell and buy a 20 pack of LTO-2 tapes for $1,000 or about $50/tape (we use a Dell tape library). Compare that to $88 for a Western Digital WD2000 (200GB ATA100) from Newegg (400GB drives are $180). Considering that I use 13 tapes for my weekly full backup we're already $430 more expensive for 1 week. Figure, I keep a rotating set of 4 weeks we're at $1720 in extra capital costs. Plus, we have the offsite sets (2) and quarterly archives. This is starting to get expensive in media fast. Then we start having to look at the reliability of the media. I can drop an LTO-2 tape and be reasonably certain that I'll still get my data back. If I drop a hard-dive, it's not quite as certain. Granted, you should avoid dropping either, but accidents happen.
This solution of yours sounds like a load that one of our vendors is trying to shanghai us into. It's a newtwork attached disk backup solution that runs around $100k. Considering that we recently paid about $140k for our SAN (including fiber switch and head-end server and CX500), I'm wondering why we don't just kick in a little bit extra and have a RAID 5+1 on our SAN (we're currently RAID 5). When you consider that we are using one tray of Fiber Chanel drives in our array, which we would only need ATA drives to backup, we might get the cost down to around $100k (We'd probably have to buy a second fiber switch for redundancy, but we could skip the server).
Disk based backup sounds nice, but tapes are still cheaper and highly reliable. And let's not even get started on the question of automation. The library we use (Dell 132T) has 2 drives and shuffles 8 tapes for me. And, with luck we should be upgrading that by the end of the year, so I don't have to swap out tapes at all.
Having a gamer wife makes gaming much eaiser. My wife played video games long before I met her (Pen and paper games too), since we've been living together and then married, the only decresing in gaming has come from work. We both play WoW, and will often spend an hour or two a night playing together after dinner. And weekends where nothing else is going on have a way of slipping into that game as well.
If you are a gamer, and want to continue to be one, don't marry a non-gamer. Or, at the very least, make sure that your spouse to be understands that gaming is a hobby to you, much like watching TV probably is to them.
Just because I feel like bragging, my wife authored this about the whole gamer widow thing. I really am one of the luckiest geeks on Earth.
I often try to explain to people that I play video games like they watch TV. Where many of the baby boomers and thier kids will get home from work, eat dinner and watch and TV; I get home, eat dinner and play video games. It's escapism and entertainment, plain and simple. I just grew up playing video games insted of watching TV westerns.
Why not just download OpenOffice?
No, it's not a threat, MS is comming out with server based versions of Office 12 (or whatever they call the next release). From what I've heard about the betas (one of our guys is betaing), the server based versions are damn close to the client based versions.
The mainfame idea isn't all bad, it just has to be used correctly. Many business users don't need a PC, they run Word, Excel, and Outlook and occasionally they will browse the web. Why do these people need a full blown PC? The problem is, when mainframes were big everyone was on it, even those people who should not be on one. A good example is a software developer. Eventually, that developer is going to hit complie, and if he is on a mainframe, the rest of the users get screwed. For this type of user you would want to have a full PC. The problem is, most places seem to be of an either/or mentality, when a well thought out combination of the two might be much better.
Of course, when in doubt give everyone a PC, they aren't expensive enough anymore to really care about.
Then what do you propose as a way the companies that deliver the websites you visit and block ads from should cover the costs they have for serving their content to you, plus a little profit ?
Not my problem. If companies want to make money, they will find a way. People are simply using ad-blockers and the like to tell companies that the current method is not acceptable.
And God forbid anyone should see one of those!
This is the reason I added this caveat (assuming that such are ever justified). Personally, I don't agree with allowing the government to determine what is "indecent". It looks far too much like a valid slippery slope to me, to want to have it. However, given the current state of US law, a nipple on primetime broadcast TV is not allowed. This is why I said that I saw some justification for the complaint.
Thanks for the link, it helps put this in context.
Having watched the clip, I could sort of see a complaint about indecency (assuming that such are ever justified). I just wouldn't accept that the indeceny is in depicting a rather wild party of underage people. Maybe it was just the resolution of the clip, but I would swear I saw some nipples at one point, which seems to fall under current indecency standards.
Whether the Parents Television Council cares to accept it or not, drunken underage parties happen. At said parties underage people often engage in sex. As this seems to have been part of the story, I can understand why it was depicted. Yes, it probably rubs many people the wrong way, since they wish to ignore reality; sorry, but the right to not be offended still isn't in the US Constitution anywhere.
What type of game are you looking for? My wife and I played the Baldur's Gate series on the PS2 and had a lot of fun. Since it is strictly co-op, it's easy to help her, without handicapping yourself unduly. Also, the game is simple enough that she should be able to catch on quickly.
We also play WoW together, and while I have a lot of UI mods and do some advanced stuff, she is a fairly basic user. Again, as long as she is willing to put some effort into it, it's easy enough to pick up and play.
If you're planning on an FPS or platform fighter, you're probably asking for trouble. Some platform fighters can be good, as they can handicap you, but even with that, you will still probably win a lot. Is she going to get frustrated and give up?
Only you will really know what she will stand for (you are her boyfriend, right). It's going to be a judgement call between what she will handle and you are willing to put up with. You're probably going to have to dumb down your play a bit for a while, I am guessing that you have been playing games most of your life and you are trying to introduce your girlfriend to your hobby.
Good luck!
I admit it is far fetched, but say I wanted to frame you for a murder. I would commit said crime, deposit a huge chunk of money (cash) in your account, and then send an anonymous tip from a pay phone to the police about your involvement in the crime as a contract killer. The police would pull your financial information, see the deposit and then start investigating you. In the end, you would probably be able to clear your name, but it would create hell for you for a while; and, if the press found out (let's just say I call them too) you might have a hell of a time getting rid of all suspicion.
Yes, it's far fetched, but is's what I can come up with off the top of my head. Also, having an account open to any deposit might also be useful to a money launderer, who isn't you.
My father actually has a good way around this, have a canned, made up, number to give out. Very few companies will ever check, which means they don't really need your real SSN. If they catch you, do an, "oops, sorry made a mistake" and then sort it out.
I may just be backwards, but I don't like the idea of downloading my music, I like the CD, the case and the booklet with the lyrics. Granted, I only buy 1 CD or so in any given year, and even then I won't pay the $15 they are trying to pump out of me for it. Still, when I do buy music, I want the full CD with all of the stuff which goes with it.
I don't mind blowing up, burning down or melting sideways the billboards inside the gaming world...
Unless the game doesn't let you. For those that haven't seen it yet, Rainbow six:Lockdown on the PC had in game advertisements. Actually it only had one, which was repeated over and over and over again. It was for a movie, The Hills Have Eyes which I will never see, partly due to the ad, also partly due to the movie looking like it is going to suck.
While just about everything else in the game took damage, or at least spawned bullet holes when I shot them, the ads did not. No matter what you did to the posters, the looked good as new. This was tested quite often since the ad had a picture of the main actress on it, which was often mistaken for a taget for a second, and shot. In the end, I'm looking to find a way to replace the image with something a bit more interesting, say porn, before the next LAN (which is how I play the R6 games).
This was bad enough in a game I just paid $50 for, getting that along with the StarForce crap was a real slap in the face. But, the idea of paying for a game subscription and then getting ads as well, just seems like too much to me. Yes, I realize that I'm getting shafted in the same way by the cable company; and that I will probably end up with no choice when it comes to my games; I still don't have to like it.
Similar enough of a thought: A few friends and I get together on occasion and play Rainbow 6. We played through all of Ravenshield, plus the Athena Sword expansion, and played quite a few community made maps. We recently played R6:Lockdown, and I'm seriously considering going back to user made maps in RvS for the next LAN. That said, we are looking forward to the release of GR:AW, but we are somewhat concerned that, like R6:Lcokdown, it will be a consolified version of a tactical shooter (read as: it sucks).
It's the lack of co-op that drives me nuts too. When Doom 3 realeased without it, I though, how stupid is that? Then Star Wars: Republic Commando came out, again without co-op support, and I just couldn't understand how companies can miss the bleedingly obvious: you've got network playability, you have all these nice maps, why won't you let me play them with my fiends, insted of some dumb bots?
While the storlines in WoW are nice, they suffer from the same problem all persistent worlds suffer from, they are persistent, a.k.a. static. No matter how many people raid the Scarley Monestary Cathedral, no matter how many times I personally kill Scarlet Commander Mograine, he's still standing there the next time I walk into the cathedral, the Scarlet Crusade suffers no setback. If I complete a quest, I get some text talking about what is happening as a result, but that result is completly ficticious, nothing ever changes.
Of course, you can't expect the world to actually change for every quest, it would be unmanagable. This was tried with Ultima Online with rather poor results. Origin would have a would event occur and a few high-level players would do it so fast, few other people had heard about it before it was done. So, unless you were one of the hard-core players, and powerful enough to get involved, the quests might as well have not existed.
So, while the writing that went into WoW is very good, it still is not a story driven game. The backstory is there to provide a framework to hang the "go here, kill X number of Y monster quests" on.
The problem is, when you put companies in the driving seat for a push to a single Linux distribution, you get crap like RPM being made part of the standard.
And thus we have the disconnect betweem many of the hardcore Linux users and people like me who manage systems. RPM/APT is a godsend for setting up systems. Yes, when I setup a system, I could do the make, make install, frak missed a dependency, download, make, make install; ok, back to the first one, make, make install. Why in the world would I want to? I would much rather do apt-get install apache; oh, it has those dependencies, yes, very nice, go ahead and take care of them for me. Do I know every in and out of what it is doing? No. Do I care? No. What I care about is that I have a functional web server at the end.
That is why when companies get involved, you get "crap" like RPM. Yes, it disconnect the users from the system a little bit, that's OK. The goal of an IT department is to provide the company with the tools it needs to do it's real business. The faster and eaiser it is for me to do that, the more productive I can be.
It becomes near impossibnle for them to troubleshoot hardware problems over the phone if there's no software consistency to base any questions on. If the customer calls up and says "I can't get this thing working", what is the tech supposed to do if you are running Fred's OS? How can you even start to figure out what any potential problem is unless there's release of magic smoke involved?
Actually, on a Dell machine, this is fairly simple. You just require the user to boot to the Dell diagnostic partition (that little FAT partition at the front of the first drive). Now, if they wiped that out, they're boned, but it could be put on a CD/Floppy and run from there. That little diagnostic setup is actually very nice for running down hardware problems on a Dell machine, and once it gives you an error code the Dell tech support people usually stop fighting you (YMMV, I have access to the Gold Level support).
Also, their second level techs seem to have a bit of a clue. The last time I called in I was dealing with a sound issue. After blowing the first level tech out of the water, I explained the error to the second level tech, along with the fact that it shows up in both Windows XP and if I boot off a Knoppix CD (first level tech couldn't quite seem to grasp the idea that I was using Knoppix as a testing tool, and not installing Linux). He had me do one or two more tests, because he is required to get that info for his record, but knowing full well it was a hardware issue. He was rather apologetic for having to go through the other stuff, but that is just something he was required to do.
I think Dell should just pick one or two distributions, and go with them. They did this on the servers, why not the workstations? Yes, people are going to moan about the choice, too bad. No matter what you do, you are going to have people whining about stuff (This seems to be a constant in the Linux community). Dell seems to like Ubuntu, go that way. Or, make a Dellux OS and just support that. If people want to wipe it and install their own choice, just don't support that OS. This is how they do it on Windows anyhow. If I buy a Windows box, and then install Debian on it, they won't support me.
I do understand the constantly growing applications, I've watched it happen a couple times. Still, for stuff that I am going to use once or twice, and no one else is going to see, I still prefer to do quick one-off apps. And they stay that way. If it's something that might get out of my hands, I make a programmer do it (I am not, never have been, and have absolutly no desire to be, a programmer). This is why I pointed out the difference in mindset, I actually do have one-off applications lying around. This is because I use them, and then delete them, and no one knows but me. Actually, I do tend to keep the source code on my drive, so I can go back and re-use bits when I need to. Still, they never get past the one-off nature. When a project comes up, which is similar to what I have done, I will voluteer bits, but never the application as a whole; as I know it's not going to be a good solution.
One of the differences is that I don't have a customer for my applications. I write them and use them myself, I don't write stuff for other people. This means that I inherently know what I want the application to do, and I don't get caught up in the feature creep cycle. If it's something which is going to be deployed, I either buy a pre-made package or have our in-house development guy write it. He is actually a programmer, with a good understanding of things like garbage collection, memory management, and a number of other bits of programming theory which I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn. Despite what many on Slashdot seem to think, IT and programming really are seperate realms. Yes, some overlap exists, but they really are separate fields.