Just a bunch of opinion, bravado, and pro-Linux spin and zealotry. How about we get some opinion pieces based on actual numbers. How many companies this year went to Linux en masse? Overexuberant ranting doesn't prove a damn thing. I'd like to see Linux take the momentum from Microsoft, but anyone seriously considering this kind of crap as proof need their head examined.
I'm in the Beverly/Salem area and at least the numbers I've been seeing for accumulation are all way too low. They're saying 7-14 inches total for the weekend on NECN for our area, and I personally walked through at least 7 inches of new undrifted snow that has fallen between 2:30 AM and 12:00PM. There's two foot of fall out there if there's an inch, and the snow plows STILL can't keep up with it. 4 foot plus drifts. There was 3 feet of snow on two of the three doors, and the other only a foot and a half.
7-14 inches overnight, I can believe. For the whole storm is utterly ridiculous. Don't know where these people are getting their figures, but someone around here isn't looking out the window, all I have to say.
Now, I haven't played the Xbox version of Halo, and I don't ever plan to, as even if I get an Xbox at some point, as I don't play FPSes on consoles (Metroid Prime being an exception, and it's not a true FPS...more FPS/platformer hybrid). I have played the PC version, and it's got to be one of the worst I've ever played for the PC. And they aren't even reducing the price for PC.
I have a high end, but not bleeding edge, PC and I had to run it at 800x600 resolution to avoid getting framerates so abyssmal it was unplayable. Even at 800x600 I would get some jagging. And the game itself just doesn't impress me. Multiplayer is decent, but the single player is useless. Take 4 or 5 room types, make large structures out of them in different arrangements, call it a game. Thanks but no thanks. And the story and character acting were awful. The plot twist almost made it worth it, the Flood was almost scary, until you had to face 10 billion of them. Then they just became annoying. It seems that anyone with actual game design skills has left Bungie since Myth II was released. It will take a lot before I even think of getting a Bungie game ever again.
> To all media distribution companies, big and small: You decided to go digital. Deal with it.
To all media consumers, big and small: You decided to buy digital. Deal with it. You demanded it, for goodness sake, you wanted this. Oh, maybe you ought to be careful what you wish for? Yeah. Yeah.
Just finished watching it, and it's damn awesome. The scary part is that even I can see places where it could have been done even faster. Can't wait to see how crazy the people who stand on the shoulders of this are.
Great job, and many, many thanks for going through the trouble of recording the whole thing.
...the only sure way to do it is to make people pay if they want to access your content.
Plain and simple. Advertising has always been and will forever be a inherently unstable way to earn money. If you want to be sure you'll make money, you have to actually charge for something.
ObStupidQuestion: So you think slashdot should just go pay only then? Depends on what the people running slashdot want to do. It's big enough on it's own, and part of a big enough family of properties, and the staff seems to be on the small end, so they can probably make do with ad-based stuff. And if this kind of ad blocking technology gets popular enough, the clever people that created the site are more than clever enough to get around ad blockers. And frankly, the quality index oof comments would jump through the roof if it was made pay only. Would I pay? Nope. I come here because it's free, and if it suddenly wasn't, I doubt my life would be any poorer for not surfing this place a few times a day.
Never ever update between version numbers. Back off your data and do a complete reinstall. Or, failing that do an archive and install. I've already had to fix several of my clients' machines when they did an update install of Panther that started screwing things up.
Well, that would probably get a lot more people to avail themselves of paid distribution services (which hopefully would omit the beg-ware), but the net effect would be me getting rid of my computers...
I have enough aggravation listening to the constant pledge drives of my local public radio station (I kid you not, a drive once every 3 months or less). I don't need more of it from my web browser or whatever else. I use open source stuff precisely because it tends to make it easier to avoid ads begging me for my money. For example, I use gaim on Windows and iChat on my Macs instead of the official AIM client because they allow me to avoid the advertisements (specifically, the godamned movie trailers that I saw recently). Not because of any superiority of design or operation.
Building automated begging into open source software is the surest way to drive me away from open source software.
All I know is that I've had to turn off the vibration function for every game I own since about a year ago, because without that, after a few minutes of play my hands will hurt like hell. Makes it a real pain for some games where the vibration is an important component (Silent Hill 3, Mario Party 4), but most of the time, vibration doesn't impove the gameplay any, so I'm generally not missing a lot.
...just don't buy it. I mean seriously, can I get a witness from someone, anyone here?
If you can't handle the fact that you're not legally allowd to fiddle with a DVD to get around commericials that have been inserted in there, why are you buying DVDs? Yes, it's stupid, and it should be fought hard, but why are you people buying DVDs in the meantime?
I don't buy music on CDs because I don't care for the copy protection regime, and I'd rather not have some idiot corporate lawyer looking for a test case try to eat my life. It's easier, and they can't legally touch me for not buying stuff. I couldn't care less if anyone calls me unpatriotic. Whooptie doo. I can call them the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler, but just because it's personally insulting doesn't make it true, or worth more than the lungfull of air it took to spew it. I truly do not understand why people allow themselves to be railroaded into things, if they hate those things so much.
Just don't buy DVDs or CDs. Watch ones your simple minded sheep friends have at their house. Stops you from watching the idiot box all day, at worst. There is stuff that is released in a format that conforms to your wishes. Find it, use it, and patronize the people who produce it, and punish the big guys by, horror of horrors, NOT SPENDING YOUR MONEY ON THEIR STUFF.
Fixation on stuff you don't like is always a bad thing. Yeah, there are some absolutely hideously long and involved games out there, and every single one of them is an RPG. Dragon Warrior VII (with 100-150 hours of gameplay by some estimates, packed into two CDs), Morrowind (the original is the gods know how long, and then two more expansions to it? I doubt I have as many fingers as there are people who have gone through the entire game and expansions), Baldur's Gate 2 w/expansion, being the three "worst offenders" I can come up with off the top of my head. However, even in the long-ass world of RPGs, these around-100-hour titles are few and far between. More and more of the ones released Stateside are adopting models where there's a 20-30 hour main storyline, and then a whole truckload of other things you can do if you want to "beat it all". Games like Pokemon (you don't have to "collect them all" to win the game),.hack//Infection and it's myriad sequels, Legend of Mana, Valkrie Profile, etc.
Action games generally don't take near as long as even a midrange 35-40 hour RPG experience (even counting the save/reload treadmill in many action games). I wish more of these action games were longer than the 10 hour max play time I've been getting from just about every single player game (and the single player portion of many games with multiplayer) I've laid hands on recently. Hell, if more were 10 hours long, I'd be far more interested, but i'm sick to death of beating these things during a weekend of play time. Gungrave was gorgeous and fun, but I beat it in 3 hours with a friend. Devil May Cry was a pathetic waste of 5 hours, total, beginning to end. Onimusha was fun, but didn't amount to much more than 10 hours, if that, even making several attempts to go through the underworld to unlock the super keen sword. Few if any have worthwhile replay value.
At least 10 hours of play time is needed in order to get the pathetic costs back out of a game. MMORPGs, even paying every month, are a better cost/benefit ratio than 90% of the other games out there, which are play for a day, finish, chuck on shelf, pay $50 more for.
I used to scavenge the bargain bin an awful lot, and built up a sizable collection of stuff, but nowadays I'm not even finding most stuff worth $20. Saves a lot of money, I guess.
Way back when I was growing up, being a console gamer, more often than not, meant you were also something of a Nipponophile, either just for the games or anime freaks. All of the games that were worth beans came from Japan, because that's where the consoles came from. People who didn't want to buy a Japanese console had old Ataris or Intellivisions. The market for US developed console games was pretty much limited to sports titles, and crappy comic book/movie/TV licensed crapfests. No one who cast scorn on "cartoony" games bothered much. Now, the console market has evolved and grown WAY beyond the people who used to be the mainstays. We're still a force in the community, but at least in this country, we're getting pushed to more of a niche market.
Also, the people who were playing the Japanese games in the US back then are programming the games of today, and the vast majority of them didn't move to Japan. Hell, even Japanese game giants are making games with an increasing number of non-Japanese companies. Silicon Knights is a Nintendo darling. Sony has a developer studio in San Diego that's produced Mark of Kri, which has some real innovation, and is just a damn great game.
eople license their code under the GPL because it protects their code from being commercialized. Nobody sells GPL code, and therefore anybody who uses it, must use it per the license.
Total, complete, and utter claptrap.
From the text of the General Public License: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
So, you could charge a fee for access to code on your website, as a charge "for the physical act of transferrance". You could even charge $1000/download for GPL licensed code. However, those that download the source code could go right back out and charge nothing for people to download the source code. It's perfectly legal to commercialize GPL source code.
You are also under no restriction to make it easy to download and use GPL source. For example. Red Hat offers free downloads of their complete "personal" distribution packaged very conveniently in ISO images. This makes it a matter of the downloading, loading up your favorite burner software, and burning the image to have a copy of Linux that you'd pay for if you wanted a boxed copy. Exact same things, but no manuals or support. SuSE on the other hand does not distribute the latest version particular version of Linux in ISO format for free . In fact, they have a whole lot of SuSE-proprietary code sitting in their system, YaST2 the biggest example of it. They distribute only the GPL code in source format only, in a big complicated directory structure that neophytes aren't going to understand. If you want SuSE Linux in a format that's usable by the average human being, you have to pay for it.
IANAL, however, I do know that Corporate speech IS protected. Not as much as other speech, but it is not without protection. Specifics, you'd have to ask someone with a law degree, or a paralegal you trust, or do the research yourself.
No, I believe someone at SCO in one of their rantings and ravings included HP on their own "Axis of Evil". The only consistent thing that's come out of the SCO crazy-machine is that Sun is the only non-target. Hell, they even mentioned Microsoft as an infringer once.
Many of you probably haven't heard of Captain Novolin, but if you read a lot of "worst game ever" threads, you've probably heard of it.
Captain Novolin was a NES game about diabetes. You played the good Captain on his quest to save the Earth from invading donuts, and other sugary foods that promote diabetes. In between levels, various poorly drawn doctors would pop up and give supposedly helpful messages to those with diabetes, telling them how to check their blood sugar, etc.
All in all, it's one of the worst games ever, but strangely hypnotizing, as some of the worst games ever do tend to be. I just pray, for the children's sake, that they didn't license this for the Glucoboy, or they're in for a ride through hell.
Well, technically nothing stops a government from saying "we're using this, and we're not paying you". Brasil has done that with AIDS drugs patents, and many other countries are considering it. At that point, it becomes completely a political chess, and it's a matter of how much hell the government where the company resides is willing to put the "offending" nation in, and how much hell the "offending" nation is willing to endure over it.
These days, a lot of smaller nations are feeling their oats in the globalized economy. Witness the recent shutdown of the WTO talks in Cancun. The G22 (the group of developing nations that formed their own block...I've seen several numbers for how many are actually in this block) basically collectively put their foot down and said they were not going forward unless the EU and US agreed to every one of their terms, and they stuck to it. Now, one can (and many have, on both sides) argue that shutting down the WTO Cancun talks was a lot worse thing for the developing nations than the EU or the US. I'm not an economist, not a prophet, so I'm not going to take a guess on that. However, if these developing nations can keep that kind of solidarity over the long term, and put it to more constructive uses than just being a roadblock for the US and EU getting what they want, then things might start to get different.
If, for example, the G22 decided they were going to start unilaterally invalidating key patents, or all patents owned by foreign companies (the vast majority of them, I'd expect) then the dice would really be rolled. Even if the US government would consider invading a country for something like this (and I don't completely dismiss the possibility, but I don't think it's a dead certainty as many US/US-government haters out there probably believe) there's no way it could invade 22 of them. It's having enough trouble keeping it's own house in order, along with the two other countries it's taken over.
It would certainly start, at minimum, a massive trade war, but it's one that the US and EU would lose, I believe. Costs of R&D in developing countries would probably drop like a stone, and you'd see skilled jobs flying out of the US and EU so fast you could feel the wind. Costs of production would probably drop even further (not that the workers would get paid more, just money saved on patent fees). Smuggling and the black/grey market would simply explode in the "developed" world.
Of course, this is all rank guesswork. Take it all with very large grains of salt. I doubt I'll ever be saying I told you so.
But to get back to the original point. National governmetns aren't dead. They're just sleeping. Just takes something to wake them up.
The point of Slashdot is to FILTER the most interesting news stories.
Yeah, and you've got this nice little "Preferences" section on the left, that lets you completely filter everything you might not want to see out completely, so you'll never even know it's there. I personally use it so I never have to see another story about Star Wars prequels, or John Katz's inanity.
Mythic does not control GOA's servers. GOA's servers, even if they run software that Mythic developed, are not Mythic's servers. Sandra never said GOA hadn't been hacked, she was referring to the US version of the game, which is obviously kept under far tighter control than GOA keeps their stuff.
She didn't lie, outright or otherwise. You're basing this accusation on wild speculation and a misreading, intentionally or otherwise, of the statements people have made. Not to mention the fact that you're completely obvlivious, or choose to appear so, to the plain facts of the situation. Get back to the VN Boards, troll. That's where your particular kind belongs. We've got plenty of our own kind of troll here.
The laws themselves are fine as far as they go, and I've heard many of them before, but the original author's fatal flaw lies in the fact that he, and many others, mistake Murphy's Law for a physical law, like gravity. Murphy's Law, as we know it today (anything that can go wrong, will) is fundamentally a law of humanity, and our propensity for planning and design in general.
Nature doesn't "go wrong". An asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out life may seem like a fine example of Murphy's Law, but only to those entities capable of making plans and designing things. Earth didn't plan to let dinosaurs evolve into a higher form of life, and have it's plans marred by that meddling asteroid hitting around the Yucatan. Nothing went wrong, on any kind of cosmic scale, though I imagine any dinosaurs capable of thought at the time might have come up with a simillar law, as their plans for dinner, having some offspring, and maybe surviving another few years, or even a few minutes, were pretty much ended right quick.
Bad things are only inevitable if you assume that good things are inevitable. That's Murphy's Law reworded, and it is the fundamental basis for Brandt's Laws. I think the original author missed the point.
As far as that goes, I agree. Sometimes the milking can seem far out of hand. But that said, I will probably keep buying any and every Mega Man game Capcom ever releases, because gods help me, I just can't get enough of Mega Man. No matter how many crazy bosses he has to fight, or wierd ass weapons I'm forced to collect, I love it. If I'm alive I'll be virtually jumping around and blasting crap in Mega Man 43, you can bank on it. And Capcom is apparently banking on it too.
A lot of game reviewers, as well as gamers in general, are starting to get very sick of having to deal with camera issues.
Every 3rd person 3D game I've played, save some survival horror games, let the player move the camera if the automated movement wasn't working right. I don't personally see the problem with having to move it around. In FPSes if you want to look around, you have to look around, I don't see why it should be all that different in third person. How is that screwing anyone over? It just doesn't make a bit of sense to me.
In Biohazard, the camera is like that because it's simulating film camera angles. If you encounter an enemy right after a camera switch, it's easy enough to run back to a more convenient area to see it and kill it. Again, I don't get the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Shame? Hardly. You're a lucky man, man.
Just a bunch of opinion, bravado, and pro-Linux spin and zealotry. How about we get some opinion pieces based on actual numbers. How many companies this year went to Linux en masse? Overexuberant ranting doesn't prove a damn thing. I'd like to see Linux take the momentum from Microsoft, but anyone seriously considering this kind of crap as proof need their head examined.
I'm in the Beverly/Salem area and at least the numbers I've been seeing for accumulation are all way too low. They're saying 7-14 inches total for the weekend on NECN for our area, and I personally walked through at least 7 inches of new undrifted snow that has fallen between 2:30 AM and 12:00PM. There's two foot of fall out there if there's an inch, and the snow plows STILL can't keep up with it. 4 foot plus drifts. There was 3 feet of snow on two of the three doors, and the other only a foot and a half.
7-14 inches overnight, I can believe. For the whole storm is utterly ridiculous. Don't know where these people are getting their figures, but someone around here isn't looking out the window, all I have to say.
Gamespy and IGN independent?
Shirly, you jest.
If you don't submit to Palladium / TCPA / whatever, then you will be denied any internet connection at all.
Good enough excuse to stop wasting time browsing the web.
That got your attention, didn't it?
Now, I haven't played the Xbox version of Halo, and I don't ever plan to, as even if I get an Xbox at some point, as I don't play FPSes on consoles (Metroid Prime being an exception, and it's not a true FPS...more FPS/platformer hybrid). I have played the PC version, and it's got to be one of the worst I've ever played for the PC. And they aren't even reducing the price for PC.
I have a high end, but not bleeding edge, PC and I had to run it at 800x600 resolution to avoid getting framerates so abyssmal it was unplayable. Even at 800x600 I would get some jagging. And the game itself just doesn't impress me. Multiplayer is decent, but the single player is useless. Take 4 or 5 room types, make large structures out of them in different arrangements, call it a game. Thanks but no thanks. And the story and character acting were awful. The plot twist almost made it worth it, the Flood was almost scary, until you had to face 10 billion of them. Then they just became annoying. It seems that anyone with actual game design skills has left Bungie since Myth II was released. It will take a lot before I even think of getting a Bungie game ever again.
> To all media distribution companies, big and small: You decided to go digital. Deal with it.
To all media consumers, big and small: You decided to buy digital. Deal with it. You demanded it, for goodness sake, you wanted this. Oh, maybe you ought to be careful what you wish for? Yeah. Yeah.
Just finished watching it, and it's damn awesome. The scary part is that even I can see places where it could have been done even faster. Can't wait to see how crazy the people who stand on the shoulders of this are.
Great job, and many, many thanks for going through the trouble of recording the whole thing.
...the only sure way to do it is to make people pay if they want to access your content.
Plain and simple. Advertising has always been and will forever be a inherently unstable way to earn money. If you want to be sure you'll make money, you have to actually charge for something.
ObStupidQuestion: So you think slashdot should just go pay only then? Depends on what the people running slashdot want to do. It's big enough on it's own, and part of a big enough family of properties, and the staff seems to be on the small end, so they can probably make do with ad-based stuff. And if this kind of ad blocking technology gets popular enough, the clever people that created the site are more than clever enough to get around ad blockers. And frankly, the quality index oof comments would jump through the roof if it was made pay only. Would I pay? Nope. I come here because it's free, and if it suddenly wasn't, I doubt my life would be any poorer for not surfing this place a few times a day.
Never ever update between version numbers. Back off your data and do a complete reinstall. Or, failing that do an archive and install. I've already had to fix several of my clients' machines when they did an update install of Panther that started screwing things up.
Well, that would probably get a lot more people to avail themselves of paid distribution services (which hopefully would omit the beg-ware), but the net effect would be me getting rid of my computers...
I have enough aggravation listening to the constant pledge drives of my local public radio station (I kid you not, a drive once every 3 months or less). I don't need more of it from my web browser or whatever else. I use open source stuff precisely because it tends to make it easier to avoid ads begging me for my money. For example, I use gaim on Windows and iChat on my Macs instead of the official AIM client because they allow me to avoid the advertisements (specifically, the godamned movie trailers that I saw recently). Not because of any superiority of design or operation.
Building automated begging into open source software is the surest way to drive me away from open source software.
All I know is that I've had to turn off the vibration function for every game I own since about a year ago, because without that, after a few minutes of play my hands will hurt like hell. Makes it a real pain for some games where the vibration is an important component (Silent Hill 3, Mario Party 4), but most of the time, vibration doesn't impove the gameplay any, so I'm generally not missing a lot.
...just don't buy it. I mean seriously, can I get a witness from someone, anyone here?
If you can't handle the fact that you're not legally allowd to fiddle with a DVD to get around commericials that have been inserted in there, why are you buying DVDs? Yes, it's stupid, and it should be fought hard, but why are you people buying DVDs in the meantime?
I don't buy music on CDs because I don't care for the copy protection regime, and I'd rather not have some idiot corporate lawyer looking for a test case try to eat my life. It's easier, and they can't legally touch me for not buying stuff. I couldn't care less if anyone calls me unpatriotic. Whooptie doo. I can call them the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler, but just because it's personally insulting doesn't make it true, or worth more than the lungfull of air it took to spew it. I truly do not understand why people allow themselves to be railroaded into things, if they hate those things so much.
Just don't buy DVDs or CDs. Watch ones your simple minded sheep friends have at their house. Stops you from watching the idiot box all day, at worst. There is stuff that is released in a format that conforms to your wishes. Find it, use it, and patronize the people who produce it, and punish the big guys by, horror of horrors, NOT SPENDING YOUR MONEY ON THEIR STUFF.
Fixation on stuff you don't like is always a bad thing. Yeah, there are some absolutely hideously long and involved games out there, and every single one of them is an RPG. Dragon Warrior VII (with 100-150 hours of gameplay by some estimates, packed into two CDs), Morrowind (the original is the gods know how long, and then two more expansions to it? I doubt I have as many fingers as there are people who have gone through the entire game and expansions), Baldur's Gate 2 w/expansion, being the three "worst offenders" I can come up with off the top of my head. However, even in the long-ass world of RPGs, these around-100-hour titles are few and far between. More and more of the ones released Stateside are adopting models where there's a 20-30 hour main storyline, and then a whole truckload of other things you can do if you want to "beat it all". Games like Pokemon (you don't have to "collect them all" to win the game), .hack//Infection and it's myriad sequels, Legend of Mana, Valkrie Profile, etc.
Action games generally don't take near as long as even a midrange 35-40 hour RPG experience (even counting the save/reload treadmill in many action games). I wish more of these action games were longer than the 10 hour max play time I've been getting from just about every single player game (and the single player portion of many games with multiplayer) I've laid hands on recently. Hell, if more were 10 hours long, I'd be far more interested, but i'm sick to death of beating these things during a weekend of play time. Gungrave was gorgeous and fun, but I beat it in 3 hours with a friend. Devil May Cry was a pathetic waste of 5 hours, total, beginning to end. Onimusha was fun, but didn't amount to much more than 10 hours, if that, even making several attempts to go through the underworld to unlock the super keen sword. Few if any have worthwhile replay value.
At least 10 hours of play time is needed in order to get the pathetic costs back out of a game. MMORPGs, even paying every month, are a better cost/benefit ratio than 90% of the other games out there, which are play for a day, finish, chuck on shelf, pay $50 more for.
I used to scavenge the bargain bin an awful lot, and built up a sizable collection of stuff, but nowadays I'm not even finding most stuff worth $20. Saves a lot of money, I guess.
Way back when I was growing up, being a console gamer, more often than not, meant you were also something of a Nipponophile, either just for the games or anime freaks. All of the games that were worth beans came from Japan, because that's where the consoles came from. People who didn't want to buy a Japanese console had old Ataris or Intellivisions. The market for US developed console games was pretty much limited to sports titles, and crappy comic book/movie/TV licensed crapfests. No one who cast scorn on "cartoony" games bothered much. Now, the console market has evolved and grown WAY beyond the people who used to be the mainstays. We're still a force in the community, but at least in this country, we're getting pushed to more of a niche market.
Also, the people who were playing the Japanese games in the US back then are programming the games of today, and the vast majority of them didn't move to Japan. Hell, even Japanese game giants are making games with an increasing number of non-Japanese companies. Silicon Knights is a Nintendo darling. Sony has a developer studio in San Diego that's produced Mark of Kri, which has some real innovation, and is just a damn great game.
eople license their code under the GPL because it protects their code from being commercialized. Nobody sells GPL code, and therefore anybody who uses it, must use it per the license.
Total, complete, and utter claptrap.
From the text of the General Public License:
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and
you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
So, you could charge a fee for access to code on your website, as a charge "for the physical act of transferrance". You could even charge $1000/download for GPL licensed code. However, those that download the source code could go right back out and charge nothing for people to download the source code. It's perfectly legal to commercialize GPL source code.
You are also under no restriction to make it easy to download and use GPL source. For example. Red Hat offers free downloads of their complete "personal" distribution packaged very conveniently in ISO images. This makes it a matter of the downloading, loading up your favorite burner software, and burning the image to have a copy of Linux that you'd pay for if you wanted a boxed copy. Exact same things, but no manuals or support. SuSE on the other hand does not distribute the latest version particular version of Linux in ISO format for free . In fact, they have a whole lot of SuSE-proprietary code sitting in their system, YaST2 the biggest example of it. They distribute only the GPL code in source format only, in a big complicated directory structure that neophytes aren't going to understand. If you want SuSE Linux in a format that's usable by the average human being, you have to pay for it.
IANAL, however, I do know that Corporate speech IS protected. Not as much as other speech, but it is not without protection. Specifics, you'd have to ask someone with a law degree, or a paralegal you trust, or do the research yourself.
No, I believe someone at SCO in one of their rantings and ravings included HP on their own "Axis of Evil". The only consistent thing that's come out of the SCO crazy-machine is that Sun is the only non-target. Hell, they even mentioned Microsoft as an infringer once.
Many of you probably haven't heard of Captain Novolin, but if you read a lot of "worst game ever" threads, you've probably heard of it.
Captain Novolin was a NES game about diabetes. You played the good Captain on his quest to save the Earth from invading donuts, and other sugary foods that promote diabetes. In between levels, various poorly drawn doctors would pop up and give supposedly helpful messages to those with diabetes, telling them how to check their blood sugar, etc.
All in all, it's one of the worst games ever, but strangely hypnotizing, as some of the worst games ever do tend to be. I just pray, for the children's sake, that they didn't license this for the Glucoboy, or they're in for a ride through hell.
Even foreign governments.
Well, technically nothing stops a government from saying "we're using this, and we're not paying you". Brasil has done that with AIDS drugs patents, and many other countries are considering it. At that point, it becomes completely a political chess, and it's a matter of how much hell the government where the company resides is willing to put the "offending" nation in, and how much hell the "offending" nation is willing to endure over it.
These days, a lot of smaller nations are feeling their oats in the globalized economy. Witness the recent shutdown of the WTO talks in Cancun. The G22 (the group of developing nations that formed their own block...I've seen several numbers for how many are actually in this block) basically collectively put their foot down and said they were not going forward unless the EU and US agreed to every one of their terms, and they stuck to it. Now, one can (and many have, on both sides) argue that shutting down the WTO Cancun talks was a lot worse thing for the developing nations than the EU or the US. I'm not an economist, not a prophet, so I'm not going to take a guess on that. However, if these developing nations can keep that kind of solidarity over the long term, and put it to more constructive uses than just being a roadblock for the US and EU getting what they want, then things might start to get different.
If, for example, the G22 decided they were going to start unilaterally invalidating key patents, or all patents owned by foreign companies (the vast majority of them, I'd expect) then the dice would really be rolled. Even if the US government would consider invading a country for something like this (and I don't completely dismiss the possibility, but I don't think it's a dead certainty as many US/US-government haters out there probably believe) there's no way it could invade 22 of them. It's having enough trouble keeping it's own house in order, along with the two other countries it's taken over.
It would certainly start, at minimum, a massive trade war, but it's one that the US and EU would lose, I believe. Costs of R&D in developing countries would probably drop like a stone, and you'd see skilled jobs flying out of the US and EU so fast you could feel the wind. Costs of production would probably drop even further (not that the workers would get paid more, just money saved on patent fees). Smuggling and the black/grey market would simply explode in the "developed" world.
Of course, this is all rank guesswork. Take it all with very large grains of salt. I doubt I'll ever be saying I told you so.
But to get back to the original point. National governmetns aren't dead. They're just sleeping. Just takes something to wake them up.
The point of Slashdot is to FILTER the most interesting news stories.
Yeah, and you've got this nice little "Preferences" section on the left, that lets you completely filter everything you might not want to see out completely, so you'll never even know it's there. I personally use it so I never have to see another story about Star Wars prequels, or John Katz's inanity.
Mythic does not control GOA's servers. GOA's servers, even if they run software that Mythic developed, are not Mythic's servers. Sandra never said GOA hadn't been hacked, she was referring to the US version of the game, which is obviously kept under far tighter control than GOA keeps their stuff.
She didn't lie, outright or otherwise. You're basing this accusation on wild speculation and a misreading, intentionally or otherwise, of the statements people have made. Not to mention the fact that you're completely obvlivious, or choose to appear so, to the plain facts of the situation. Get back to the VN Boards, troll. That's where your particular kind belongs. We've got plenty of our own kind of troll here.
The laws themselves are fine as far as they go, and I've heard many of them before, but the original author's fatal flaw lies in the fact that he, and many others, mistake Murphy's Law for a physical law, like gravity. Murphy's Law, as we know it today (anything that can go wrong, will) is fundamentally a law of humanity, and our propensity for planning and design in general.
Nature doesn't "go wrong". An asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out life may seem like a fine example of Murphy's Law, but only to those entities capable of making plans and designing things. Earth didn't plan to let dinosaurs evolve into a higher form of life, and have it's plans marred by that meddling asteroid hitting around the Yucatan. Nothing went wrong, on any kind of cosmic scale, though I imagine any dinosaurs capable of thought at the time might have come up with a simillar law, as their plans for dinner, having some offspring, and maybe surviving another few years, or even a few minutes, were pretty much ended right quick.
Bad things are only inevitable if you assume that good things are inevitable. That's Murphy's Law reworded, and it is the fundamental basis for Brandt's Laws. I think the original author missed the point.
As far as that goes, I agree. Sometimes the milking can seem far out of hand. But that said, I will probably keep buying any and every Mega Man game Capcom ever releases, because gods help me, I just can't get enough of Mega Man. No matter how many crazy bosses he has to fight, or wierd ass weapons I'm forced to collect, I love it. If I'm alive I'll be virtually jumping around and blasting crap in Mega Man 43, you can bank on it. And Capcom is apparently banking on it too.
A lot of game reviewers, as well as gamers in general, are starting to get very sick of having to deal with camera issues.
Every 3rd person 3D game I've played, save some survival horror games, let the player move the camera if the automated movement wasn't working right. I don't personally see the problem with having to move it around. In FPSes if you want to look around, you have to look around, I don't see why it should be all that different in third person. How is that screwing anyone over? It just doesn't make a bit of sense to me.
In Biohazard, the camera is like that because it's simulating film camera angles. If you encounter an enemy right after a camera switch, it's easy enough to run back to a more convenient area to see it and kill it. Again, I don't get the problem.