That is called Barratry. That's a fraudulent act and would be grounds for disbarrment for any attourney that participated in it. Look it up, and next time a company tries that tactic on YOU, take the bread and butter away from their attourney permantly. Then sue the living piss out of them.
Agreed, this sucks. I just got fluent with Graffiti after getting my Sonly SL 10. Guess that will be the last PalmOS handheld I buy. What else could they add to it that would make it worth re-learning how to write?
Not to mention, this sort of "required" certification would lock out a lot of entry postions. If I had been required to be "certified" before I got my first PC assembly position 15 or so years ago, I wouldn't be in the industry today. I was a minimum-wage learner, eventually took the Assembly position from my trainer when he moved on to bigger and better things, and got my start learning about computers the most timely, efficient way I know how. With my OWN HANDS AND EYES.
Curriculem in college back then was far behind the curve of the industry then. Only the people who learned how to get the knowledge on their OWN really were efficient.
The cheapskate boss I had never would have paid for my certification, and I KNOW I wouldn't be able to. IMHO, most professional certification is a way for current professionals to "close the door behind them" and make it prohibitive for those with low incomes to follow them to prosperity.
I'm a conservative by the way, so don't take that last comment as bleeding-heartish. I just happen to be a conservative that not only believes in people earning their own way up the ladder, but not taking the ladder away from them.
(actually I'm an Objectivist, but that's a bit more complex than I want to explain here:) )
I particularly like the concept of demonstrated abilities. I got my current position through a temp service that later tried to sell me A+ training. In my experience, it would not have been of use to me, because customers won't be able to see it, and managers know better.
Of course, we refer to MSCE's as "Microsoft Certified Solitaire Experts", so my work environment's opinion of "certification" might be a different one than your own.
No, actually, they can't. First, my windows box isn't "trusted" by my firewall. Two, the first time they ATTEMPT to configure security on my network, there will be an anthill's worth of FBI agents crawing through the Redmond campuses. My firewall isn't running an MS operating system, and they are specifically prohibited from attempting to change its configuration. See: Patriot Act, hacking and cybercrimes section.
I'm of two minds on the lighting. I think the set lighting was outstanding, the colored gels in the andorian complex gave a very good approximation of that sort of set in the TOS period.
I don't think principle lighting was that great, however. Most of the time the Captain (who bore a suspicious resemblance to Shane McMahon, of the WWE, only less fit) looked oddly pinkish compared to the rest of the cast. I can't really tell if that was lighting, or makeup, however.
I was impressed by the simulated set for the bridge. If I hadn't seen the chromakey Green in the web sites shots of the command chair, I might not have realized it was composited in the background.
I think a good deal of what you describe as blocky directing can be attributed to the limited cinematography options they had for the on-ship scenes, in particular. There are certain things that can be done with a full production rig and set that can't be done easily with mockups and compositing.
For what they had to work with, they did a marvelous job of covering up the deficiencies. I doubt someone who was a more casual viewer (I once went to school to do broadcast/film production before I started in the software industry, so I've tried to discount the things that stood out to me only because of my training) would have noticed most of the problems.
Funny I didn't think to google before. I mis-stated it as Scandanavian, when in fact, what I know know to be the "Kalevala" is the Finnish national epic. "the Day the Earth Froze" was an attempt to do for the Kalevala what the current films do for LoTR, I guess...
Interesting point. I recently saw a program on The History channel regarding the last living "teller" of a scandanavian ballad. I can't remember the name, but I do remember it involves a "Sampo". why do I remember this? because Mystery Science Theatre 3000 "Myst"ed a movie about the story a few years ago, and I remembered the word "Sampo" when I saw the piece. The story is apparently contemporary to Beowulf, more or less. Oral tradition is something that I'm afraid will not survive very much longer, apart from quoting TV sitcoms...
THe only time I have any trouble is when a show is preempted for basketball. Even then, with the show being relocated to Saturday afternoon, the Replay usually catches it.
I have no trouble finding shows either through browsing the listings, or by using the search function. I don't make much use of the Replay Channels feature, but I can see where it would be useful.
Very satisfied with it, over all.
Flea markets are notorious for this (counterfeits).
I would hope, however that if they go after legitimate used CD dealers that the court smacks the RIAA down hard.
Unfortunately (from my viewpoint) dealers of bootleg concert tapes will also feel the bite here. Certain bands "condone" or at least do not object to the taping practice. I'm very much into Rush, myself, and would love to find a tape of a show I was at some day (I have purchased copies of every one of their actually albums in multiple formats over the years).
" In trying to present reasons why the popular desires for multiple characters per server aren't warrented, the one that is probably most popular was completely glossed over."
I agree, and this points out the major reason why I won't play anything Verant/SoE is involved in. They not only don't listen to their players, they actively disdain them.
The very concept that a company would be so arrogant as to effectively say "I know this is what you want, but you shouldnt. Here's the VISION" is laughable.
Now that there is competition in the market (DAoC being an excellent example, and the one I play) the EQ team has pretty much removed most of the anti-player aspects of Brad McQuaids "Vision", unfortunately, they've kept the piss-poor customer service, so even though I know they'll wind up doing multi player servers within about 4 months of the release, I aint touching this one.
Here's a nother example why this will have to change, as the former-Verant-now-SoE is in charge.
A friend of a friend who still plays EQ got her "main" character to level 60 recently. Except that as soon as she did, it reset to level 50.
Not suprisingly, they are less than pleased that they have had to wait over a month on Customer Service to resolve the issue. Upon asking for billing credit, since she can't play that character, she was told "well you have other characters on that account, so you can still play!"
With one character per account, they won't be able to use that excuse. I have absolutely no faith in their Customer Service's ability to bridge the gap, haveing experienced it first hand myself.
BR
Nope. not going to touch that stink-bomb, even if I win a freebie account. No company hates the people who play its games the way Verant/SoE does.
I think a lot of people do. I think that had a lot to do with their problem. Even though I knew better, I stayed away from them, because I figured this was going to happen sooner or later. There are enough people clued into the fact that Satellite Internet sucks. They should have called it DirectDSL...
Thanks, have one of their cards already. I've been doing a lot of shopping at palmdigitalmedia.com as well. BAMM is a good alternative, although their brick and mortar stores are starting to be a little weak in the service department.
.... of Preorders. I stopped doing business with Amazon just over a year ago, when 3 seperate pre-orders I had placed didn't ship on time.
One of my stronger Geek attributes is I like to have certain things on Release day. A year or so ago, I was even willing to order on line and pay next day shipping to do so. We're talking a few movies here and there, and a couple of games. Geek stuff.
Roughly 12 months ago, the formerly reliable Amazon completely lost the ability to ship these preorders on the release date (or in some cases to arrive on the release date). This was rare before that point. In the rare instance that they would slip up, they would comp the shipping (after all I'm not paying next day so I can get the item a week later). Once this chronic problem turned up, they stopped making any sort of amends whatsoever.
Amazon has not seen dime one from me since that time, and will not in the future. I spent a LARGE amount of money with them prior to that.
I'm a bit amused to see a buy.com banner as I type this, as they are one of the companies who have gotten business from me since I dropped Amazon from my list. I don't preorder from ANYONE anymore though.
I have a spare test box. I don't want Flash ads on the machine I actually use. no paranoia involved, I just don't want it. It's very rare that I would actually need to go to a flash enabled site. Because of what I do for a living, I have a method of actually doing so when necessary and sanitizing the machine later.
I don't actually HAVE to re-image immediately after going to a Flash site, btw. The machine is a general sandbox, for use whenever I don't trust an application, for whatever reason. It's just convenient that I can leave Flash off my main computer as a result
I'm sure the Leatherman site is pleasant to look at and very clever, but there is no reason it HAS to be done in Flash. Ecommerce can be done very successfully without the overhead. I'll take a look at it next time I'm using that rig though. Thanks for the heads up.
Flash will never be displayed on the browser I use for day to day work. There is absolutely NO CONTENT ANYWHERE that is so compelling I will install the Flash plugin to view it. The ads that use that technology are simply TOO intrusive, TOO annoying and TO destabilizing to the already unstable creature that is the web browser for me to introduce to my machine.
The only thing I ever see is a box with a broken puzzle piece.
One case where a nice normal banner would be more effective.
In the RARE case where a site uses flash for content that I can't feasibly ignore, I fire up another machine, do what needs to be done, and re-image that machine when I'm done.
There is no legitimate reason for a website to be completely dependant on FLASH for navigation...use HTML, that's what its for.
Because, apparently they actually think there's a market to be had in per-view charges for all programming. A certain portion of the movie industry (and all of the cable industry) would really rather you not be able to have your library of DVDs there to watch whenever you want.
Keeps you from ordering the Pay Per View, ya know. Gotta have that "Guaranteed" income stream.
Well that certainly puts me farther away from considering ATI in the future. Nvidia's 3d support is excellent.
NVidia's drivers work with Stereoscopic LCD shutter, and Red/blue (can't remember the technical name). Red/blue doesn't cause the headaches, but takes a long time to get used to, and is like playing on a computer indoors with heavily tinted sunglasses on (which is essentially what the glasses used for the effect are). After a while, you do adjust color perception to ignore the tint, but it still makes things far too dark for my tastes.
The major problem with shutter-based glasses is that most monitors don't support a refresh rate high enough for the trick to work without perceived flickering (which causes the headaches). A minimum of 120 hz is required to get a somewhat reasonable 60 frames/sec/eye. Unfornately most current displays don't support that high a rate at anything much over 800x600, which isn't really all that great for game play.
Given the choice between high-res, high quality graphics, and comparitively low-res stereoscopic displays, I'll take quality over stereo every time. Hope this improves soon.
Disclaimer: These appear to be the same glasses I already have, but since I can't get past the first page of the article, I can't tell if there has been some new breakthrough with them that I'm unaware of. Can't see how the glasses, being shutter based, can get around the Display Refresh issue, though)
Indeed. And this is the way the industry SHOULD be handling piracy. Deliver sufficient value for the money to make piracy impracticle. I'm quite certain that the profit margins are still sufficiently obscene to make the hollywood suits happy. Of course they would be happier if they could somehow squeeze $60 out of the same purchase...
Slashdot Mirror
That is called Barratry. That's a fraudulent act and would be grounds for disbarrment for any attourney that participated in it. Look it up, and next time a company tries that tactic on YOU, take the bread and butter away from their attourney permantly. Then sue the living piss out of them.
Agreed, this sucks. I just got fluent with Graffiti after getting my Sonly SL 10. Guess that will be the last PalmOS handheld I buy. What else could they add to it that would make it worth re-learning how to write?
Not to mention, this sort of "required" certification would lock out a lot of entry postions. If I had been required to be "certified" before I got my first PC assembly position 15 or so years ago, I wouldn't be in the industry today. I was a minimum-wage learner, eventually took the Assembly position from my trainer when he moved on to bigger and better things, and got my start learning about computers the most timely, efficient way I know how. With my OWN HANDS AND EYES.
:) )
Curriculem in college back then was far behind the curve of the industry then. Only the people who learned how to get the knowledge on their OWN really were efficient.
The cheapskate boss I had never would have paid for my certification, and I KNOW I wouldn't be able to. IMHO, most professional certification is a way for current professionals to "close the door behind them" and make it prohibitive for those with low incomes to follow them to prosperity.
I'm a conservative by the way, so don't take that last comment as bleeding-heartish. I just happen to be a conservative that not only believes in people earning their own way up the ladder, but not taking the ladder away from them.
(actually I'm an Objectivist, but that's a bit more complex than I want to explain here
I particularly like the concept of demonstrated abilities. I got my current position through a temp service that later tried to sell me A+ training. In my experience, it would not have been of use to me, because customers won't be able to see it, and managers know better.
Of course, we refer to MSCE's as "Microsoft Certified Solitaire Experts", so my work environment's opinion of "certification" might be a different one than your own.
Erm, just noticed you were talking about the "personal firewall" software... the rest of what I said stands though...
No, actually, they can't. First, my windows box isn't "trusted" by my firewall. Two, the first time they ATTEMPT to configure security on my network, there will be an anthill's worth of FBI agents crawing through the Redmond campuses. My firewall isn't running an MS operating system, and they are specifically prohibited from attempting to change its configuration. See: Patriot Act, hacking and cybercrimes section.
Gah, back to plain text for me... I can never remember to insert
in html...
I'm of two minds on the lighting. I think the set lighting was outstanding, the colored gels in the andorian complex gave a very good approximation of that sort of set in the TOS period. I don't think principle lighting was that great, however. Most of the time the Captain (who bore a suspicious resemblance to Shane McMahon, of the WWE, only less fit) looked oddly pinkish compared to the rest of the cast. I can't really tell if that was lighting, or makeup, however. I was impressed by the simulated set for the bridge. If I hadn't seen the chromakey Green in the web sites shots of the command chair, I might not have realized it was composited in the background. I think a good deal of what you describe as blocky directing can be attributed to the limited cinematography options they had for the on-ship scenes, in particular. There are certain things that can be done with a full production rig and set that can't be done easily with mockups and compositing. For what they had to work with, they did a marvelous job of covering up the deficiencies. I doubt someone who was a more casual viewer (I once went to school to do broadcast/film production before I started in the software industry, so I've tried to discount the things that stood out to me only because of my training) would have noticed most of the problems.
Funny I didn't think to google before. I mis-stated it as Scandanavian, when in fact, what I know know to be the "Kalevala" is the Finnish national epic. "the Day the Earth Froze" was an attempt to do for the Kalevala what the current films do for LoTR, I guess...
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kalevala.htm
thanks to the Painstick link btw.
Interesting point. I recently saw a program on The History channel regarding the last living "teller" of a scandanavian ballad. I can't remember the name, but I do remember it involves a "Sampo". why do I remember this? because Mystery Science Theatre 3000 "Myst"ed a movie about the story a few years ago, and I remembered the word "Sampo" when I saw the piece. The story is apparently contemporary to Beowulf, more or less. Oral tradition is something that I'm afraid will not survive very much longer, apart from quoting TV sitcoms...
The type of ad you're referring to are "shoskeles", and they are the primary reason that I do not allow Flash to reside on my computer.
THe only time I have any trouble is when a show is preempted for basketball. Even then, with the show being relocated to Saturday afternoon, the Replay usually catches it. I have no trouble finding shows either through browsing the listings, or by using the search function. I don't make much use of the Replay Channels feature, but I can see where it would be useful. Very satisfied with it, over all.
I've never had a problem with my ReplayTV. Perhaps you've had incredibly back luck?
Flea markets are notorious for this (counterfeits). I would hope, however that if they go after legitimate used CD dealers that the court smacks the RIAA down hard. Unfortunately (from my viewpoint) dealers of bootleg concert tapes will also feel the bite here. Certain bands "condone" or at least do not object to the taping practice. I'm very much into Rush, myself, and would love to find a tape of a show I was at some day (I have purchased copies of every one of their actually albums in multiple formats over the years).
Then my existing DVD collection will have to do. I can live with that.
And those are all people who will learn the hard way how much Sony/Verant HATES their players.
if people have fun playing at masochism, fine. I've had enough of it, myself. I won't be paying those bastards another dime.
" In trying to present reasons why the popular desires for multiple characters per server aren't warrented, the one that is probably most popular was completely glossed over."
I agree, and this points out the major reason why I won't play anything Verant/SoE is involved in. They not only don't listen to their players, they actively disdain them.
The very concept that a company would be so arrogant as to effectively say "I know this is what you want, but you shouldnt. Here's the VISION" is laughable.
Now that there is competition in the market (DAoC being an excellent example, and the one I play) the EQ team has pretty much removed most of the anti-player aspects of Brad McQuaids "Vision", unfortunately, they've kept the piss-poor customer service, so even though I know they'll wind up doing multi player servers within about 4 months of the release, I aint touching this one.
Here's a nother example why this will have to change, as the former-Verant-now-SoE is in charge.
A friend of a friend who still plays EQ got her "main" character to level 60 recently. Except that as soon as she did, it reset to level 50.
Not suprisingly, they are less than pleased that they have had to wait over a month on Customer Service to resolve the issue. Upon asking for billing credit, since she can't play that character, she was told "well you have other characters on that account, so you can still play!"
With one character per account, they won't be able to use that excuse. I have absolutely no faith in their Customer Service's ability to bridge the gap, haveing experienced it first hand myself.
BR Nope. not going to touch that stink-bomb, even if I win a freebie account. No company hates the people who play its games the way Verant/SoE does.
I think a lot of people do. I think that had a lot to do with their problem. Even though I knew better, I stayed away from them, because I figured this was going to happen sooner or later. There are enough people clued into the fact that Satellite Internet sucks. They should have called it DirectDSL...
Thanks, have one of their cards already. I've been doing a lot of shopping at palmdigitalmedia.com as well. BAMM is a good alternative, although their brick and mortar stores are starting to be a little weak in the service department.
.... of Preorders. I stopped doing business with Amazon just over a year ago, when 3 seperate pre-orders I had placed didn't ship on time.
One of my stronger Geek attributes is I like to have certain things on Release day. A year or so ago, I was even willing to order on line and pay next day shipping to do so. We're talking a few movies here and there, and a couple of games. Geek stuff.
Roughly 12 months ago, the formerly reliable Amazon completely lost the ability to ship these preorders on the release date (or in some cases to arrive on the release date). This was rare before that point. In the rare instance that they would slip up, they would comp the shipping (after all I'm not paying next day so I can get the item a week later). Once this chronic problem turned up, they stopped making any sort of amends whatsoever.
Amazon has not seen dime one from me since that time, and will not in the future. I spent a LARGE amount of money with them prior to that.
I'm a bit amused to see a buy.com banner as I type this, as they are one of the companies who have gotten business from me since I dropped Amazon from my list. I don't preorder from ANYONE anymore though.
I have a spare test box. I don't want Flash ads on the machine I actually use. no paranoia involved, I just don't want it. It's very rare that I would actually need to go to a flash enabled site. Because of what I do for a living, I have a method of actually doing so when necessary and sanitizing the machine later.
I don't actually HAVE to re-image immediately after going to a Flash site, btw. The machine is a general sandbox, for use whenever I don't trust an application, for whatever reason. It's just convenient that I can leave Flash off my main computer as a result
I'm sure the Leatherman site is pleasant to look at and very clever, but there is no reason it HAS to be done in Flash. Ecommerce can be done very successfully without the overhead. I'll take a look at it next time I'm using that rig though. Thanks for the heads up.
Flash will never be displayed on the browser I use for day to day work. There is absolutely NO CONTENT ANYWHERE that is so compelling I will install the Flash plugin to view it. The ads that use that technology are simply TOO intrusive, TOO annoying and TO destabilizing to the already unstable creature that is the web browser for me to introduce to my machine.
The only thing I ever see is a box with a broken puzzle piece.
One case where a nice normal banner would be more effective.
In the RARE case where a site uses flash for content that I can't feasibly ignore, I fire up another machine, do what needs to be done, and re-image that machine when I'm done. There is no legitimate reason for a website to be completely dependant on FLASH for navigation...use HTML, that's what its for.
Because, apparently they actually think there's a market to be had in per-view charges for all programming. A certain portion of the movie industry (and all of the cable industry) would really rather you not be able to have your library of DVDs there to watch whenever you want.
Keeps you from ordering the Pay Per View, ya know. Gotta have that "Guaranteed" income stream.
Well that certainly puts me farther away from considering ATI in the future. Nvidia's 3d support is excellent.
NVidia's drivers work with Stereoscopic LCD shutter, and Red/blue (can't remember the technical name). Red/blue doesn't cause the headaches, but takes a long time to get used to, and is like playing on a computer indoors with heavily tinted sunglasses on (which is essentially what the glasses used for the effect are). After a while, you do adjust color perception to ignore the tint, but it still makes things far too dark for my tastes.
The major problem with shutter-based glasses is that most monitors don't support a refresh rate high enough for the trick to work without perceived flickering (which causes the headaches). A minimum of 120 hz is required to get a somewhat reasonable 60 frames/sec/eye. Unfornately most current displays don't support that high a rate at anything much over 800x600, which isn't really all that great for game play.
Given the choice between high-res, high quality graphics, and comparitively low-res stereoscopic displays, I'll take quality over stereo every time. Hope this improves soon.
Disclaimer: These appear to be the same glasses I already have, but since I can't get past the first page of the article, I can't tell if there has been some new breakthrough with them that I'm unaware of. Can't see how the glasses, being shutter based, can get around the Display Refresh issue, though)
Indeed. And this is the way the industry SHOULD be handling piracy. Deliver sufficient value for the money to make piracy impracticle. I'm quite certain that the profit margins are still sufficiently obscene to make the hollywood suits happy. Of course they would be happier if they could somehow squeeze $60 out of the same purchase...