I have no bones to pick with the request itself or with your right to voice your opinion. The way you requested, and have subsequently responded, however, has nothing to do with your right to your opinion. Your tone is one of someone who thinks he is entitled and, frankly "holier than thou." Slashdot is a "free" site in that you do not have to pay for anything other than your internet connection and a computer to view it. Wanting better is one thing. Acting as if you are somehow entitled to it is another.
Constructive comments and suggestions, presented politely, are how change is brokered, at least moreso than petulent demands.
My understanding is that if a lawyer makes a concrete statement about law in public it can be taken, to a certain extent, as legal advice. He has a responsibility to only commit to facts which have been borne out in court cases and are clearly and concretely on the books.
As to the other half of your comment, yes, his answers were a little glib. Regardless of the merits of your point, your post is a flaming stinker that is inappropriate even for this forum, and does not further the discussion. You are clearly not willing to come to a middle ground. You don't want answers. You want an "I'm sorry, I was wrong," and nothing less, which you are unlikely to get. That's no longer a discussion or even an argument, but a petulent demand.
"I don't know if I'd go that far. OSX isn't 100% immune - it just has more common sense. "
This is, I think, the best summary I've ever read of OS X's inherent security advantage. No OS could really succeed and be 100% air-tight at the same time, IMO. And user- and developer-friendliness does often mean compromises that lead to security problems, but the article that this discussion refers to covers a lot of it well and MECC (parent) summarized succintly and effectively.
I'm not totally sure now newsworthy this article is. No, I am totally sure. It's not. As a personal anecdote it's an interesting read for the author's friends, I'm sure. As a pre-mortem eulogy for a company with a long and complicated history, marked with strange politics and even stranger bedfellows, this isn't news. It's almost entirely conjecture.
If you have not totally given up on diet drinks and you want some caffeine, I recommend Diet Sunkist. I have found Sunkist to be the sweetest, more orangy (least tartly acidic as well) of the diet orange beverages. The diet version is also quite nice. Tastes very similar. It has a nice, balanced flavor, is acceptably sweet, seems more citrus-like, and is caffeinated. Sounds like it meets your needs, assuming you're not turning away from sweet altogether.
Also, you can buy Minute Maid canned diet products. I recommend the Guava Mango. It's diet, not carbonated or caffeinated, but is quite tasty because it does include a smidgeon of real juice. Not 0 calories, but very few.
According to a press release, the theft was only part of the picture.
" Palladium suffered a crippling blow last year involving employee theft and embezzlement. We thought we could weather the storm, but the damage was deeper and more severe than we ever imagined.
Estimated damage and losses are at least one million dollars. It has been a struggle to stay afloat. "
Two things we needed to see in the post that make this Slashdot post misleading, all important items in the full article, are that:
1.) Palladium is close to going out of business, but not out just yet.
2.) Their primary reason for being on the brink appears to be embezzlement, or some related crime. Their real business isn't enough to overcome the loss incurred due to that legal trouble.
I'm not a big RIFTS fan, but I'm all for responsible reporting.
That $500,000 of studio equipment can largely be matched by a much smaller dollar amount of modern digital equipment. You can now equip a plush recording studio for far less that you used to. The RIAA member companies tend to charge bands for studio time based on outdated rates that are no longer competetive, but in your contract you have to pay them anyway. This is an especially big problem now considering that most of these expensive sound engineers in their expensive sound studios are being instructed by the RIAA member companies to up the recording volume intensity so the releases sound loud on crappy audio systems, thus sacrificing recorded audio fidelity for those of us with sound systems that can do the quality amplification without assistance.
He's not at all saying that nobody ever acts irrationally. He's saying that, irrational or not, it is still a conscious choice. If you are under the influence of alcohol when you make a decision are you not still responsible for that decision? However impaired your judgement is, you are still attempting to judge and make a decision. This is not to say at all that all actions are rational. But all actions are decisions made. And the individual is the only one who can make those decisions.
Meaning, if you are screwed up in the head and you make a decision that is, in retrospect, against your own best interest, it is only against your own best interest in retrospect. At the time, given your altered state, that decision made perfect sense and seemed, by all twisted logic, to be in your best interest.
The argument you make seems to be that people who act in panic or intoxication are somehow not responsible for their actions, but I take the opposite view. No matter how messed up you are, either because you took some substance or simply because the circumstances are so immediate or bizarre, you are still responsible for your decisions. While society makes certain allowances, for example killing in self-defense and evading criminal prosecution due to mental insanity, there are other things we do not allow. If someone is drunk and hurts someone or drives under the influence and kills someone the penalties are, and if they aren't, should be, stiffer than doing so when not under the influence. People choose to alter their judgement in many cases, which means that they are responsible for even the most poor decisions they make.
So, keep in mind that the best interest of the decision-maker changes moment to moment, as does the perception thereof.
The answer is give up on mainstream eBook products.
I have several gripes with eBooks.
The first is that many are just PDF conversions of regular books, and you have to have a large, high-resolution screen to view everything in full detail. I want something that fits on a small screen.
Second, paper is much easier to read. If I stare at a computer screen, intently focused as I tend to be when I'm reading for absorption and retention, for the amount of time it takes to read that in a paper book, not only have I wasted more time with scrolling and futzing with controls and commands, but I also have a lot more eye strain. With a book, minor adjustments are innate motor functions, and there's no refresh rate to contend with and no strain from backlighting.
Third, books are much more durable than any eReader device will ever be able to claim to be. Stuff it in the front pocket of your bag or backpack and the eReader will have a broken screen in a few weeks. The book will simply develop some dents or curvature.
This is the most competent and complete description of how this "gold farming" can affect the game. Thanks for the explanation. As I have stated before, the nature of gold farming as cheating has to do with the Blizzard mandate, not the "out of game" nature of the involvement, since there are other, more "legit" ways to involve out of game involvement.
Sounds like people on the servers just need to be really quick to report instances that might be gold farming. A GM in the game should easily be able to check activity records and logs on players and thus have access to enough evidence to drop these farmers from the game.
"You should not be able to get metric asstons of epic items until you have proven yourself."
But if the point of the game is to have fun, why should you feel pressured to prove yourself? Does it detract from your enjoyment of the game if they play that way? Possibly, depending on how easily offended you are, but if there are special "Role Playing" servers, I assume those would be more pristine.
I mean, if Blizzard has said "NO, this is BAD!" and punishes for it, sure, it's cheating, it's against the rules, it's bad. But at the same time, to insist that people "earn their keep" by your standard attemps to redefine the game in YOUR terms.
Hrm... I take issue with this conclusion. Is something that is "not within the spirit or the intent of the game" automatically cheating? I would argue the heavily abbreviated, almost l33t, shorthand used in chat is also not within the spirit or intent of the game, as it detracts from the atmosphere. Does that make it cheating?
As a GAME, the point is to be fun. If people like some aspects of the game but have found a way to get around the money treadmill does that necessarily affect you? Sure, there's the whole issue of more money entering the economy, but if someone bought the money from someone else, the money was already in the economy, it's just changed hands.
One of the reasons I don't, and won't, play MMORPGs is because of that extended treadmill experience.
I say that something is cheating if it is synonymous with something that is illegal or is simply blatantly against the rules. If Blizzard has declared that it is against the rules and transgressors will be punished, that's great. That is enough to make it cheating. It's Blizzard's world and they make the rules. However, if this is a gray area where they've not said much, it's not cheating unless it somehow operates completely outside of the game's mechanics, as in generating money from thin air or something.
Dude, the numbers are from 1999. The numbers from many other nations are more recent. Aside from the suicide surge listed in the article, I believe Japanese suicide rates dropped after 1999 (I was taking a sociology class at Waseda in 1998/1999 and we talked about the increase over previous years). 1999 was a bad year for Japan. Their economy is still shakey, but a little less unpredictable than it was then, with all the banking scandals and collapses. Hell, friends had account at some of the collapsing banks, and they were very worried. Mitsubishi, my bank at the time, held out, however.
You set up your permissions in advance. All I'm saying is that Apple provides all the software to do, in some way or another, everything Deep Freeze does. And chances are the price of "included" is better than some kind of per seat licensing scheme for 3rd party software. Not to mention there are many free tools to also assist in achieving parity.
http://www.macenterprise.org/ is a site that has developed over the years from the roots of macosxlabs.org into something with all sorts of advice on how to manage Mac OS X in different environments. For a lab take, look back to their archives. http://archive.macosxlabs.org/
You could always take note of the "or" in that sentence you quote. But I guess some posts are AC for a reason...
You can simply take an OS CD on-site with you. For the restores you don't need another computer or HD involved other than your network image store and the machine you're bringing back up.
Dude, you don't need a portable hard drive (wow, redundancy)! You just need an install CD from 10.3.x or 10.4.x.
First, create an image for your Macs (one image per model type is safest). Boot your ideal Mac that you will be imaging in Target Disk mode (hold the T key at boot) and connect it to another Mac with a Firewire cable. The Mac you will be imaging will show up as a hard drive on the other Mac. Open Disk Utility and create a new disk image from a folder. This allows it to be dynamic and resizeable in case your restore machines have different hard disk sizes. Make sure you are creating a compressed image. Save the image to the Mac that is not being imaged. This will take a while and, even with compression, create a large file.
Once you've created the image, use Disk Utility's Scan Image for Restore function. Just browse the menus until you find it. This will take as long as actually creating the image. Just be patient. Once you're done you have an image that can be used to restore any compatible Mac.
Now, take this image and host it from a web server. A Mac using personal web sharing will work great, but any other Apache server with the correct MIME type set for.dmg files will work fine. You can even store it https and password protected if you like.
When you want to restore a Mac, boot it from a 10.3.x or 10.4.x CD OR in Target Disk Mode and connect it to another Mac. Either the Mac being booted from CD or the Mac to which you are connecting the Target Disk booted Mac must have a network connection. Run Disk Utility from the Install CD or on the other Mac. Select the HD you wish to restore to. Click on the Restore tab on the right in Disk Utility and drag the icon of the hard disk/volume from the sidebar on the left to the Target field in the restore area. You'll notice there's an area above the Target that specifies source. You could browse for a local image, or... you could type in the http/https path to your hosted image on the network
Click restore and it will restore the Mac using the contents of the prepared image file as hosted on your network.
I'm sorry if my description is a little rough. I'm going from memory and I can't find the page on-line that so long ago made me aware of this technique. Either way, it should save you from having to lug around an external HD to service Macs. Just have an install CD handy or a laptop with spare HD space and a firewire cable.
I did find them at wp before you informed me, but the problem is that, with the sources listed at the bottom, I still couldn't find that information anywhere else. I can find the consoles shipped information, but nowhere can I find consoles sold outside of that wp article. Without some kind of corroborating evidence I can't assume it's correct, particularly with the difference in numbers between consoles shipped compared to the consoles sold. I guess I will have to do more searching for the truth, or corroboration thereof.
Sega Japan was in the red but not just because of the Dreamcast. They had other questionable financials hanging over their head as well. Trimming needed to occur. But the Dreamcast was still quite profitable in the US. 3rd parties were making money off the Dreamcast and Sega America was healthily in the black. CRI (Sega's parent company) made the decision to kill the Dreamcast when it went on a trimming rampage. CRI is much more financially conservative and there is no doubt the Dreamcast was not selling well enough in Japan.
Still, outside of Japan the Dreamcast could be considered a moderate success. Maybe not on the level of the Genesis, but a success still. Much in the same way the Saturn was a moderate success in Japan but a failure outside Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no bones to pick with the request itself or with your right to voice your opinion. The way you requested, and have subsequently responded, however, has nothing to do with your right to your opinion. Your tone is one of someone who thinks he is entitled and, frankly "holier than thou." Slashdot is a "free" site in that you do not have to pay for anything other than your internet connection and a computer to view it. Wanting better is one thing. Acting as if you are somehow entitled to it is another.
Constructive comments and suggestions, presented politely, are how change is brokered, at least moreso than petulent demands.
And that is my opinion.
My understanding is that if a lawyer makes a concrete statement about law in public it can be taken, to a certain extent, as legal advice. He has a responsibility to only commit to facts which have been borne out in court cases and are clearly and concretely on the books.
As to the other half of your comment, yes, his answers were a little glib. Regardless of the merits of your point, your post is a flaming stinker that is inappropriate even for this forum, and does not further the discussion. You are clearly not willing to come to a middle ground. You don't want answers. You want an "I'm sorry, I was wrong," and nothing less, which you are unlikely to get. That's no longer a discussion or even an argument, but a petulent demand.
"I don't know if I'd go that far. OSX isn't 100% immune - it just has more common sense. "
This is, I think, the best summary I've ever read of OS X's inherent security advantage. No OS could really succeed and be 100% air-tight at the same time, IMO. And user- and developer-friendliness does often mean compromises that lead to security problems, but the article that this discussion refers to covers a lot of it well and MECC (parent) summarized succintly and effectively.
OS X, as an OS, has more common sense built-in.
The technology from Xerox PARC was licensed and paid for, not "looted".
I don't really know. I'm not sure I'm qualified to discern the difference.
We can assume he is gay, or...
We can not bother because it's irrelevant to the question. Ask Slashdot isn't really a forum on sexual choices.
I'm not totally sure now newsworthy this article is. No, I am totally sure. It's not. As a personal anecdote it's an interesting read for the author's friends, I'm sure. As a pre-mortem eulogy for a company with a long and complicated history, marked with strange politics and even stranger bedfellows, this isn't news. It's almost entirely conjecture.
If you have not totally given up on diet drinks and you want some caffeine, I recommend Diet Sunkist. I have found Sunkist to be the sweetest, more orangy (least tartly acidic as well) of the diet orange beverages. The diet version is also quite nice. Tastes very similar. It has a nice, balanced flavor, is acceptably sweet, seems more citrus-like, and is caffeinated. Sounds like it meets your needs, assuming you're not turning away from sweet altogether.
Also, you can buy Minute Maid canned diet products. I recommend the Guava Mango. It's diet, not carbonated or caffeinated, but is quite tasty because it does include a smidgeon of real juice. Not 0 calories, but very few.
According to a press release, the theft was only part of the picture.
h tml
" Palladium suffered a crippling blow last year involving employee theft and embezzlement. We thought we could weather the storm, but the damage was deeper and more severe than we ever imagined.
Estimated damage and losses are at least one million dollars. It has been a struggle to stay afloat. "
This from http://www.palladiumbooks.com/press/press2006-04.
Two things we needed to see in the post that make this Slashdot post misleading, all important items in the full article, are that:
1.) Palladium is close to going out of business, but not out just yet.
2.) Their primary reason for being on the brink appears to be embezzlement, or some related crime. Their real business isn't enough to overcome the loss incurred due to that legal trouble.
I'm not a big RIFTS fan, but I'm all for responsible reporting.
That $500,000 of studio equipment can largely be matched by a much smaller dollar amount of modern digital equipment. You can now equip a plush recording studio for far less that you used to. The RIAA member companies tend to charge bands for studio time based on outdated rates that are no longer competetive, but in your contract you have to pay them anyway. This is an especially big problem now considering that most of these expensive sound engineers in their expensive sound studios are being instructed by the RIAA member companies to up the recording volume intensity so the releases sound loud on crappy audio systems, thus sacrificing recorded audio fidelity for those of us with sound systems that can do the quality amplification without assistance.
He's not at all saying that nobody ever acts irrationally. He's saying that, irrational or not, it is still a conscious choice. If you are under the influence of alcohol when you make a decision are you not still responsible for that decision? However impaired your judgement is, you are still attempting to judge and make a decision. This is not to say at all that all actions are rational. But all actions are decisions made. And the individual is the only one who can make those decisions.
Meaning, if you are screwed up in the head and you make a decision that is, in retrospect, against your own best interest, it is only against your own best interest in retrospect. At the time, given your altered state, that decision made perfect sense and seemed, by all twisted logic, to be in your best interest.
The argument you make seems to be that people who act in panic or intoxication are somehow not responsible for their actions, but I take the opposite view. No matter how messed up you are, either because you took some substance or simply because the circumstances are so immediate or bizarre, you are still responsible for your decisions. While society makes certain allowances, for example killing in self-defense and evading criminal prosecution due to mental insanity, there are other things we do not allow. If someone is drunk and hurts someone or drives under the influence and kills someone the penalties are, and if they aren't, should be, stiffer than doing so when not under the influence. People choose to alter their judgement in many cases, which means that they are responsible for even the most poor decisions they make.
So, keep in mind that the best interest of the decision-maker changes moment to moment, as does the perception thereof.
The answer is give up on mainstream eBook products.
I have several gripes with eBooks.
The first is that many are just PDF conversions of regular books, and you have to have a large, high-resolution screen to view everything in full detail. I want something that fits on a small screen.
Second, paper is much easier to read. If I stare at a computer screen, intently focused as I tend to be when I'm reading for absorption and retention, for the amount of time it takes to read that in a paper book, not only have I wasted more time with scrolling and futzing with controls and commands, but I also have a lot more eye strain. With a book, minor adjustments are innate motor functions, and there's no refresh rate to contend with and no strain from backlighting.
Third, books are much more durable than any eReader device will ever be able to claim to be. Stuff it in the front pocket of your bag or backpack and the eReader will have a broken screen in a few weeks. The book will simply develop some dents or curvature.
This is the most competent and complete description of how this "gold farming" can affect the game. Thanks for the explanation. As I have stated before, the nature of gold farming as cheating has to do with the Blizzard mandate, not the "out of game" nature of the involvement, since there are other, more "legit" ways to involve out of game involvement.
Sounds like people on the servers just need to be really quick to report instances that might be gold farming. A GM in the game should easily be able to check activity records and logs on players and thus have access to enough evidence to drop these farmers from the game.
"You should not be able to get metric asstons of epic items until you have proven yourself."
But if the point of the game is to have fun, why should you feel pressured to prove yourself? Does it detract from your enjoyment of the game if they play that way? Possibly, depending on how easily offended you are, but if there are special "Role Playing" servers, I assume those would be more pristine.
I mean, if Blizzard has said "NO, this is BAD!" and punishes for it, sure, it's cheating, it's against the rules, it's bad. But at the same time, to insist that people "earn their keep" by your standard attemps to redefine the game in YOUR terms.
Hrm... I take issue with this conclusion. Is something that is "not within the spirit or the intent of the game" automatically cheating? I would argue the heavily abbreviated, almost l33t, shorthand used in chat is also not within the spirit or intent of the game, as it detracts from the atmosphere. Does that make it cheating?
As a GAME, the point is to be fun. If people like some aspects of the game but have found a way to get around the money treadmill does that necessarily affect you? Sure, there's the whole issue of more money entering the economy, but if someone bought the money from someone else, the money was already in the economy, it's just changed hands.
One of the reasons I don't, and won't, play MMORPGs is because of that extended treadmill experience.
I say that something is cheating if it is synonymous with something that is illegal or is simply blatantly against the rules. If Blizzard has declared that it is against the rules and transgressors will be punished, that's great. That is enough to make it cheating. It's Blizzard's world and they make the rules. However, if this is a gray area where they've not said much, it's not cheating unless it somehow operates completely outside of the game's mechanics, as in generating money from thin air or something.
Dude, the numbers are from 1999. The numbers from many other nations are more recent. Aside from the suicide surge listed in the article, I believe Japanese suicide rates dropped after 1999 (I was taking a sociology class at Waseda in 1998/1999 and we talked about the increase over previous years). 1999 was a bad year for Japan. Their economy is still shakey, but a little less unpredictable than it was then, with all the banking scandals and collapses. Hell, friends had account at some of the collapsing banks, and they were very worried. Mitsubishi, my bank at the time, held out, however.
He wasn't referring specifically to the US. Do you know the cultural circumstances of other countries and the life insurance policies there?
;)
So, wait, what was YOUR point, again?
You set up your permissions in advance. All I'm saying is that Apple provides all the software to do, in some way or another, everything Deep Freeze does. And chances are the price of "included" is better than some kind of per seat licensing scheme for 3rd party software. Not to mention there are many free tools to also assist in achieving parity.
http://www.macenterprise.org/ is a site that has developed over the years from the roots of macosxlabs.org into something with all sorts of advice on how to manage Mac OS X in different environments. For a lab take, look back to their archives. http://archive.macosxlabs.org/
You could always take note of the "or" in that sentence you quote. But I guess some posts are AC for a reason...
You can simply take an OS CD on-site with you. For the restores you don't need another computer or HD involved other than your network image store and the machine you're bringing back up.
Why, when Apple provides you the ability to do basically the same thing with tools built into the OS?
Dude, you don't need a portable hard drive (wow, redundancy)! You just need an install CD from 10.3.x or 10.4.x.
.dmg files will work fine. You can even store it https and password protected if you like.
t op.dmg
First, create an image for your Macs (one image per model type is safest). Boot your ideal Mac that you will be imaging in Target Disk mode (hold the T key at boot) and connect it to another Mac with a Firewire cable. The Mac you will be imaging will show up as a hard drive on the other Mac. Open Disk Utility and create a new disk image from a folder. This allows it to be dynamic and resizeable in case your restore machines have different hard disk sizes. Make sure you are creating a compressed image. Save the image to the Mac that is not being imaged. This will take a while and, even with compression, create a large file.
Once you've created the image, use Disk Utility's Scan Image for Restore function. Just browse the menus until you find it. This will take as long as actually creating the image. Just be patient. Once you're done you have an image that can be used to restore any compatible Mac.
Now, take this image and host it from a web server. A Mac using personal web sharing will work great, but any other Apache server with the correct MIME type set for
When you want to restore a Mac, boot it from a 10.3.x or 10.4.x CD OR in Target Disk Mode and connect it to another Mac. Either the Mac being booted from CD or the Mac to which you are connecting the Target Disk booted Mac must have a network connection. Run Disk Utility from the Install CD or on the other Mac. Select the HD you wish to restore to. Click on the Restore tab on the right in Disk Utility and drag the icon of the hard disk/volume from the sidebar on the left to the Target field in the restore area. You'll notice there's an area above the Target that specifies source. You could browse for a local image, or... you could type in the http/https path to your hosted image on the network
https://yourserver.wherever.ugh/images/103xG4Desk
Click restore and it will restore the Mac using the contents of the prepared image file as hosted on your network.
I'm sorry if my description is a little rough. I'm going from memory and I can't find the page on-line that so long ago made me aware of this technique. Either way, it should save you from having to lug around an external HD to service Macs. Just have an install CD handy or a laptop with spare HD space and a firewire cable.
Have fun!
I did find them at wp before you informed me, but the problem is that, with the sources listed at the bottom, I still couldn't find that information anywhere else. I can find the consoles shipped information, but nowhere can I find consoles sold outside of that wp article. Without some kind of corroborating evidence I can't assume it's correct, particularly with the difference in numbers between consoles shipped compared to the consoles sold. I guess I will have to do more searching for the truth, or corroboration thereof.
Have you a source for these numbers you'd like to quote to us so we can look into this further?
Sega Japan was in the red but not just because of the Dreamcast. They had other questionable financials hanging over their head as well. Trimming needed to occur. But the Dreamcast was still quite profitable in the US. 3rd parties were making money off the Dreamcast and Sega America was healthily in the black. CRI (Sega's parent company) made the decision to kill the Dreamcast when it went on a trimming rampage. CRI is much more financially conservative and there is no doubt the Dreamcast was not selling well enough in Japan.
Still, outside of Japan the Dreamcast could be considered a moderate success. Maybe not on the level of the Genesis, but a success still. Much in the same way the Saturn was a moderate success in Japan but a failure outside Japan.