Problem is they're talking about Chinese servers. You can't even connect to the game without the CHINESE CLIENT, which most Americans can't understand, let along get their hands on. I would imagine that they may be under some kind of imposition from the Chinese government to stop anyone that isn't from a Chinese IP address from connecting.
...because that's really what RSS allows you to do, run your own newswire.
It isn't a brand new medium in the least. What it does that is new, is make it easier for individuals to access "press releases" (in quotes, because with RSS and the like the press is rarely the target, the whole idea is customers reading this crap themselves) that previously only appeared on the various business PR newswire services.
Ask Sony. EQ2 has much the same thing, with its "for sale" server, where you can sell characters and items and such. I don't think it's had any kind of massive collapse in membership since the sales allowed server was put in place. I know one person that sells characters to try and make a bit of cash.
This is pretty much inevitable. As it stands now, national boundaries mean very little on the Internet. If your server is illegal in France, but it is based in the United States where it is legal, as long as you don't care about never being able to go to France, you won't be prosecuted.
This kind of thing makes governments of any stripe, whether right or left wing, communist or capitalist, cringe in fear. Eventually information network interconnectivity is going to be by treaty. It's the only solution that any government is going to be able to live with in the end, now that they are getting up to speed on what the Internet really does.
I'm not a lawyer, if you want real legal advice don't ask here.
That said, as far as I know this kind of thing isn't illegal on its face. I know personally people that "rob Peter to pay Paul" like this, shifting credit card balances like a find the lady game to keep ahead of the game. I don't think you'd actually get a good credit rating out of it, but I know even less about how your credit rating works than the law.
What is does do is make people very suspicious. The activities people employ to launder money are not illegal on their own, but they make people that watch this kind of thing curious. Of course, you have to be making big enough waves doing this to get the attention of law enforcement in this day and age.
The moral of the story is that you cannot take anything anyone says about themselves to be true on their word alone. Check up on them. No it's not romantic, it's not sexy, it doesn't help getting your groove thing on, but it can damn well save your ass.
Isn't the "friend/foe" system in effect a user-specific blacklist?
You can set foes to be "sub-moderated" by slashdot for your eyes at -6. Since that effectively allows you to browse at 0 and never see a post by any of them, that acts pretty much the same way to me, far as I can tell.
I mean sure, the other person can tell if you don't like them, but I can't imagine that would really be of concern.
I do this kind of tech support work, but not as a primary source of business. The regular personal customers I do have running Windows I early and often tell them about Firefox and AdAware, and other such things, but approximately half of them regularly ignore my constant warnings about Internet Explorer. There are a couple customers I used to regularly visit and clean spyware off their computers because they couldn't be bothered with remembering not to use IE or run their spyware scanner. Most of the business customers catch on fairly quick, as my time in there not improving their systems is a noticable financial drain on their bottom line (especially since mose of my clients are small, 1-5 person businesses).
Interstingly enough, about a quarter of the people I've dealt with on in-home jobs have bought Macs (on my recommendation, most of our business clients are Mac-only shops) and are a lot happier with it. Their kids tend to be pissed off because this or that P2P app doesn't run on MacOS, or they can't play this or that game, but generally the parents don't care, because the computer doesn't get screwed up nearly as easily and kids are built to complain. That, and game consoles generally make up the difference.
Much the same thing was done with Matrix Reloaded, where the Enter the Matrix game "plugged into" certain sections of the movie, so you couldn't get the entire story unless you had both watched the movie and played the game.
Basically it's done for the allmighty dollar. A lot of words like "convergence" are thrown out there, but the only real thing that gets added to by all this extra shit is the bottom line figure for the licensing revenue.
Which is why if you REALLY want to work in IT, the best way to do it is to start your own company. If doing computer work is what you love to do, it's the only real option. Most people who I went to school with before I dropped out got their BS in Computer Science did it for love of and belief in the paycheck. Successful people love and believe in what they're doing. It doesn't insure that you will succeed in the least, but you've got a leg up on the rest of us that don't really like what we're doing at all.
I visit weather.com fairly regularly, and haven't opened Internet Explorer in any capacity other than Windows Explorer for...hell more than a year, maybe two. Never had weather.com crash on me once.
The U.S. Government Printing Office is working with the library community on a national digitization plan, with the goal of digitizing a complete legacy collection of tangible U.S. Government publications. The objective is to ensure that the digital collection is available, in the public domain, for no-fee permanent public access through the FDLP.
Unless of course any of that information would be useful in questioning the current Presidential administration's actions, pointing out where they are wrong, or alerting citizens about the potential dangers that are around them (faulty power facilities, insecure water factilities, etc). that information only helps the terrorists, so that "permanent public access" idea conveniently will be shuffled aside.
Their biggest problem was not getting Quark to OS X fast enough.
No, their biggest problem was that when they finally released it for OS X, it was (and still is) a horrendously buggy piece of crap, not to mention the awfully implemented product activation system. I am not a Quark user, but I do IT work for a lot of small design and print houses, and there hasn't been one Quark 6 install that has ever happened cleanly. Hours worth of clients time and money wasted on us calling India to get the damn thing activated because they shipped activation keys that just plain didn't work, or some major bug required us to reinstall, which required a class for reactivation until someone figured out how to get around the reactivation nightmare fairly easily.
While none of our clients are throwing Quark out the door, they are moving more and more toward InDesign, or asking us to back them up to Quark 4.11 from all the ridiculous trouble 6 causes them.
Maybe EA and other publishers (sorry to pick on EA, but they're the most egregious example I know), if the voice actors get their way, will be faced with developers saying "Holy fucking shit - where's my piece of the pie then?.
No, they'll fire all the highly paid "western" programmers and hire them all in India and China to make back the money they're forced to give up to the voice actors.
And cedega, if you haven't tried it, is fantastic for running Windows Games on Linux. Not 100%, mind you, but it handles a lot of games extremely well. In some cases, with better-than-windows performance.
I can tell you've never actually run Cedega. I "subscribed" for the minimum 3 months, and it was the biggest waste of 15 dollars I have ever spent. Even on the "supported" games, I was plagued with constant slowdowns. I'm talking Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2. Stuff that should not slow down a microsecond under a 2ghz Athlon, with a 6600GT on it.
I can't see this as anything but Apple throwing in the towel as far as the desktop market is concerned. Allowing Tiger to run on x86 is basically ceding the desktop market to the Dells, HPs, and Gateways, and home/small time desktop builders.
The laptop business they probably can keep a handle on. I can't go down to my local computer supply depot and buy laptop parts and build it from scratch, or upgrade the motherboard or video card on the cheapass Dell laptop. Laptop buyers are generally willing to pay more for features because of the general non-upgradability. However, this still feels more than a bit like Gateway and Dell selling branded big-screen TVs.
Apple is most definitely now a software company. iTunes software, iLife, and the operating system itself are now the only differentiators of Apple from Microsoft and the Linux vendors. We'll see if they can survive as a software company, that happens to make quality laptops and high quality, expensive MP3 players.
If you're going to be forced to make the same painful transition regardless, it should behoove anyone to take a look at all of the options available to you.
If I worked in the game industry, I'd be looking elsewhere really damn fast. There is no reason to believe that Indian or Chinese coders can't write quality game software just as rarely as American, British, or Aussie coders do, and they can produce the buggy, barely playable crap far cheaper.
Complaining that you want more money is only going to make the slide to outsourcing that much faster. You chose to work in this industry, you knew all the bullshit that game companies do to their employees. The kind of ridiculous hours for comparatively crap pay that you would be forced to do. You knew all of it and you signed on the dotted line because you were blinded by the fantasy of making games being the coolest thing ever. Why in the world should I feel sympathy for you?
...Alice was the last really jump-happy game that instantly comes to my mind.
Alice was a 3rd person platformer with action elements. Comparing it to an FPS at all is pretty much wasting your breath. You could see your feet, for starts. The most annoying part of the game was not the jumping. The need to go check gamefaqs in order to find out how to beat some of the bosses was.
.NET is the most advanced RAD environment on the market today.
What kind of complete moron uses "Rapid Application Development" to implement something as dangerous as a national ID system?
How about not wasting my money on any of them...
on
The Xbox 360 Unveiled
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· Score: 1
There are so many good and allright games released for the PS2, GameCube, and even possibly the Xbox, that I can't for the life of me think of a single good reason to spend wads of cash on a next generation system. PS3, Revolution, Xbox, what have you.
There are already more games in the used section of my local Gamestop for GameCube and PS2 alone than I'd ever be able to finish if I did nothing but play video games for the rest of my life. And even after that I can buy a original Xbox and spend another half a lifetime with those old games.
I'm getting out of this rat race right now. Check please?
Welcome to "how does my government pay for social programs".
I wish we had taxes like this in the US on cars, but it would never fly. Perhaps taxes like that on gas guzzlers might get through in this day and age. Who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is they're talking about Chinese servers. You can't even connect to the game without the CHINESE CLIENT, which most Americans can't understand, let along get their hands on. I would imagine that they may be under some kind of imposition from the Chinese government to stop anyone that isn't from a Chinese IP address from connecting.
...because that's really what RSS allows you to do, run your own newswire.
It isn't a brand new medium in the least. What it does that is new, is make it easier for individuals to access "press releases" (in quotes, because with RSS and the like the press is rarely the target, the whole idea is customers reading this crap themselves) that previously only appeared on the various business PR newswire services.
Ask Sony. EQ2 has much the same thing, with its "for sale" server, where you can sell characters and items and such. I don't think it's had any kind of massive collapse in membership since the sales allowed server was put in place. I know one person that sells characters to try and make a bit of cash.
This is pretty much inevitable. As it stands now, national boundaries mean very little on the Internet. If your server is illegal in France, but it is based in the United States where it is legal, as long as you don't care about never being able to go to France, you won't be prosecuted.
This kind of thing makes governments of any stripe, whether right or left wing, communist or capitalist, cringe in fear. Eventually information network interconnectivity is going to be by treaty. It's the only solution that any government is going to be able to live with in the end, now that they are getting up to speed on what the Internet really does.
I'm not a lawyer, if you want real legal advice don't ask here.
That said, as far as I know this kind of thing isn't illegal on its face. I know personally people that "rob Peter to pay Paul" like this, shifting credit card balances like a find the lady game to keep ahead of the game. I don't think you'd actually get a good credit rating out of it, but I know even less about how your credit rating works than the law.
What is does do is make people very suspicious. The activities people employ to launder money are not illegal on their own, but they make people that watch this kind of thing curious. Of course, you have to be making big enough waves doing this to get the attention of law enforcement in this day and age.
The moral of the story is that you cannot take anything anyone says about themselves to be true on their word alone. Check up on them. No it's not romantic, it's not sexy, it doesn't help getting your groove thing on, but it can damn well save your ass.
User-specific blacklists might help, too.
Isn't the "friend/foe" system in effect a user-specific blacklist?
You can set foes to be "sub-moderated" by slashdot for your eyes at -6. Since that effectively allows you to browse at 0 and never see a post by any of them, that acts pretty much the same way to me, far as I can tell.
I mean sure, the other person can tell if you don't like them, but I can't imagine that would really be of concern.
I do this kind of tech support work, but not as a primary source of business. The regular personal customers I do have running Windows I early and often tell them about Firefox and AdAware, and other such things, but approximately half of them regularly ignore my constant warnings about Internet Explorer. There are a couple customers I used to regularly visit and clean spyware off their computers because they couldn't be bothered with remembering not to use IE or run their spyware scanner. Most of the business customers catch on fairly quick, as my time in there not improving their systems is a noticable financial drain on their bottom line (especially since mose of my clients are small, 1-5 person businesses).
Interstingly enough, about a quarter of the people I've dealt with on in-home jobs have bought Macs (on my recommendation, most of our business clients are Mac-only shops) and are a lot happier with it. Their kids tend to be pissed off because this or that P2P app doesn't run on MacOS, or they can't play this or that game, but generally the parents don't care, because the computer doesn't get screwed up nearly as easily and kids are built to complain. That, and game consoles generally make up the difference.
Much the same thing was done with Matrix Reloaded, where the Enter the Matrix game "plugged into" certain sections of the movie, so you couldn't get the entire story unless you had both watched the movie and played the game.
Basically it's done for the allmighty dollar. A lot of words like "convergence" are thrown out there, but the only real thing that gets added to by all this extra shit is the bottom line figure for the licensing revenue.
Which is why if you REALLY want to work in IT, the best way to do it is to start your own company. If doing computer work is what you love to do, it's the only real option. Most people who I went to school with before I dropped out got their BS in Computer Science did it for love of and belief in the paycheck. Successful people love and believe in what they're doing. It doesn't insure that you will succeed in the least, but you've got a leg up on the rest of us that don't really like what we're doing at all.
I visit weather.com fairly regularly, and haven't opened Internet Explorer in any capacity other than Windows Explorer for...hell more than a year, maybe two. Never had weather.com crash on me once.
The U.S. Government Printing Office is working with the library community on a national digitization plan, with the goal of digitizing a complete legacy collection of tangible U.S. Government publications. The objective is to ensure that the digital collection is available, in the public domain, for no-fee permanent public access through the FDLP.
Unless of course any of that information would be useful in questioning the current Presidential administration's actions, pointing out where they are wrong, or alerting citizens about the potential dangers that are around them (faulty power facilities, insecure water factilities, etc). that information only helps the terrorists, so that "permanent public access" idea conveniently will be shuffled aside.
Their biggest problem was not getting Quark to OS X fast enough.
No, their biggest problem was that when they finally released it for OS X, it was (and still is) a horrendously buggy piece of crap, not to mention the awfully implemented product activation system. I am not a Quark user, but I do IT work for a lot of small design and print houses, and there hasn't been one Quark 6 install that has ever happened cleanly. Hours worth of clients time and money wasted on us calling India to get the damn thing activated because they shipped activation keys that just plain didn't work, or some major bug required us to reinstall, which required a class for reactivation until someone figured out how to get around the reactivation nightmare fairly easily.
While none of our clients are throwing Quark out the door, they are moving more and more toward InDesign, or asking us to back them up to Quark 4.11 from all the ridiculous trouble 6 causes them.
This will only happen if Blizzard forces people in China off the US servers.
This is completely impossible. Proxy server in the US. Next stupid idea?
I agree. My girlfriend doesn't have the latest graphics, but her gameplay is quite good.
Maybe EA and other publishers (sorry to pick on EA, but they're the most egregious example I know), if the voice actors get their way, will be faced with developers saying "Holy fucking shit - where's my piece of the pie then?.
No, they'll fire all the highly paid "western" programmers and hire them all in India and China to make back the money they're forced to give up to the voice actors.
And cedega, if you haven't tried it, is fantastic for running Windows Games on Linux. Not 100%, mind you, but it handles a lot of games extremely well. In some cases, with better-than-windows performance.
I can tell you've never actually run Cedega. I "subscribed" for the minimum 3 months, and it was the biggest waste of 15 dollars I have ever spent. Even on the "supported" games, I was plagued with constant slowdowns. I'm talking Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2. Stuff that should not slow down a microsecond under a 2ghz Athlon, with a 6600GT on it.
I can't see this as anything but Apple throwing in the towel as far as the desktop market is concerned. Allowing Tiger to run on x86 is basically ceding the desktop market to the Dells, HPs, and Gateways, and home/small time desktop builders.
The laptop business they probably can keep a handle on. I can't go down to my local computer supply depot and buy laptop parts and build it from scratch, or upgrade the motherboard or video card on the cheapass Dell laptop. Laptop buyers are generally willing to pay more for features because of the general non-upgradability. However, this still feels more than a bit like Gateway and Dell selling branded big-screen TVs.
Apple is most definitely now a software company. iTunes software, iLife, and the operating system itself are now the only differentiators of Apple from Microsoft and the Linux vendors. We'll see if they can survive as a software company, that happens to make quality laptops and high quality, expensive MP3 players.
If you're going to be forced to make the same painful transition regardless, it should behoove anyone to take a look at all of the options available to you.
If I worked in the game industry, I'd be looking elsewhere really damn fast. There is no reason to believe that Indian or Chinese coders can't write quality game software just as rarely as American, British, or Aussie coders do, and they can produce the buggy, barely playable crap far cheaper.
Complaining that you want more money is only going to make the slide to outsourcing that much faster. You chose to work in this industry, you knew all the bullshit that game companies do to their employees. The kind of ridiculous hours for comparatively crap pay that you would be forced to do. You knew all of it and you signed on the dotted line because you were blinded by the fantasy of making games being the coolest thing ever. Why in the world should I feel sympathy for you?
I look forward to the 20-year running gag that will be the legal battle over "sex.xxx".
...Alice was the last really jump-happy game that instantly comes to my mind.
Alice was a 3rd person platformer with action elements. Comparing it to an FPS at all is pretty much wasting your breath. You could see your feet, for starts. The most annoying part of the game was not the jumping. The need to go check gamefaqs in order to find out how to beat some of the bosses was.
What kind of complete moron uses "Rapid Application Development" to implement something as dangerous as a national ID system?
There are so many good and allright games released for the PS2, GameCube, and even possibly the Xbox, that I can't for the life of me think of a single good reason to spend wads of cash on a next generation system. PS3, Revolution, Xbox, what have you.
There are already more games in the used section of my local Gamestop for GameCube and PS2 alone than I'd ever be able to finish if I did nothing but play video games for the rest of my life. And even after that I can buy a original Xbox and spend another half a lifetime with those old games.
I'm getting out of this rat race right now. Check please?
Welcome to "how does my government pay for social programs".
I wish we had taxes like this in the US on cars, but it would never fly. Perhaps taxes like that on gas guzzlers might get through in this day and age. Who knows.