This is a sweet game. It eliminates a ton of little issues DiabloII has and its graphics and environments are gorgeous. But besides the eye candy, it has some decent gameplay, much less clickfest for one thing.
Multiplayer has some issues with what is saved and what isn't, it will take some getting used to after Bnet. But if you have the time to finish one little quest at a time (I've been averaging about 45 miniutes) you'll feel like you're making progress through their multiplyer world. Although they want you playing on the Zone, they aren't pulling a Blizzard and trying to tell you where you can and can't play, their internet games work just fine.
The forthcoming tools look like they'll be awesome. I'm even thinking of ressurecting some long dead ideas and doing something with them.
I was surprised to find out I didn't have to register with Passport, click through something on their website to download the product or even click through an installer license to get at the 'goods'.
From my brief review, it appears that they are primarily concerned with someone selling their code and patent problems. No mention of the GPL, although obviously several provisions in here are incompatible with any decent open source license.
So here it is:
MICROSOFT SHARED SOURCE CLI, C#, AND JSCRIPT LICENSE
This License governs use of the accompanying Software, and your use of
the Software constitutes acceptance of this license.
You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to
the restrictions in this license. Some purposes which can be
non-commercial are teaching, academic research, and personal
experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or
other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that
are intended to teach the use of the Software.
You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in
any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes
would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling
the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial
products.
You may modify this Software and distribute the modified Software for
non-commercial purposes, however, you may not grant rights to the
Software or derivative works that are broader than those provided by
this License. For example, you may not distribute modifications of
the Software under terms that would permit commercial use, or under
terms that purport to require the Software or derivative works to be
sublicensed to others.
You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after
accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a
license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you
might create using such information.
In return, we simply require that you agree:
1. Not to remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.
2. That if you distribute the Software in source or object form,
you will include a verbatim copy of this license.
3. That if you distribute derivative works of the Software in
source code form you do so only under a license that
includes all of the provisions of this License, and if you
distribute derivative works of the Software solely in object
form you do so only under a license that complies with this
License.
4. That if you have modified the Software or created derivative
works, and distribute such modifications or derivative
works, you will cause the modified files to carry prominent
notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving
the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that
you have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any
changes.
5. THAT THE SOFTWARE COMES "AS IS", WITH NO WARRANTIES. THIS
MEANS NO EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY, INCLUDING
WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS
FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR ANY WARRANTY OF TITLE OR
NON-INFRINGEMENT. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS DISCLAIMER ON
WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.
6. THAT MICROSOFT WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATED TO
THE SOFTWARE OR THIS LICENSE, INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT,
SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, TO THE MAXIMUM
EXTENT THE LAW PERMITS, NO MATTER WHAT LEGAL THEORY IT IS
BASED ON. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE
WORKS.
7. That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply
to the Software or anyone's use of the Software, your
license to the Software ends automatically.
8. That your rights under the License end automatically if you
breach it in any way.
9. Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in
this license.
Of note was this article (actually this.pdf) that benchmarks several Java JIT environments, a Java native compiler, Visual C++ and Intel's C++ compiler. The optimized hardware accelerated OpenGL benchmark was nearly identical to the C++ version. Don't forget to read the errata which addresses his Java bias and other issues.
Regarding your Quake comment, I'll point out that Java was implemented for mod development for Quake 2. Definately not the game itself, but still it exists as a another example of how Java can be used in game development.
Yeah that was it, 128 bit memory path to RAMDAC or some such thing. The early '90s, when graphics cards were measured in WinMarks or some such thing, some kind of benchmark on how much they accelerated the basic geometry features. I also remember the arguments over the card drivers that would return done even though the operation was queued, not completed. Gave insanely high 'WinMarks' or whatever, but some people didn't agree with the buffering concept.
I also remember the horrid Windows 3.1 drivers. S3 was known for the best drivers. My Trident card had lousy drivers as well. ATI was notorious for bad drivers, funny how that reputation lingers.
IBM is giving a classic demonstration in how NOT to handle a problem. It has been demonstrated time and time again that the tactic of denying everything does not work. It doesn't work for politicians, it doesn't work for accounting firms, and it doesn't work for electronics manufacturers.
I wasted a few hours the other day pushing the limits of What The Font, an automated type recognition engine. While it is better than my untrained eye, it still only hit around 50% on the samples I submitted.
SecurityFocus has an article on passwords, while it has a NT focus (Lanmanager myths and such) it touches on lots of the same thoughts. Of interest is the use of high ASCII and/or Unicode in passwords.
Opera is great, I've been pimping it to my friends for about a year now and use it as a primary browser on both win32 and linux.
While it has excellent standards support it's DOM support is less than perfect. That means that static pages render pretty good but the fancy DHTML stuff doesn't. While many are just as happy that way, there is a place for those kinds of things and Opera just doesn't cut it.
Another problem is that it isn't free (as in speech). While there is a place for commercial software, there are many advantages to OS. As Mozilla reaches 1.0, I think you're going to see an expansion of the community like mozdev.org in creating and extending the software.
So, as someone else pointed out, I'm glad we've got choices. I'm glad someone has created Galeon and K-Meleon and even Konqueror and I'm even happy that IE 6 has come closer to proper standards support.
Although Photoshop is priced for businesses, Adobe would be smart to offer a cheaper version for non-commercial use; if it makes people only use Adobe products, then they win in the end.
Photoshop Elements. As far as I've seen from reading the box in the local CompUSA, its Photoshop without the nice print stuff like CMYK. Same interface, same core set of image tools and plugins.
Theres a program that does almost exactly what you describe. Unfortunately I can't remember the name or track it down. It has an interface somewhat similar to Flash and it outputs a.jar file. I don't know if it is open enough for a programmer to then extend the application generated.
Dynamic Tree widget for comments. Little + and - boxes to open up those comments below my threshold for the times I'd like to see what an AC wrote.
While I tend to agree with you overall, there are features that a dynamic page app could implement that would improve the way I use/. JavaScript, Java, NNTP and others could do it as well.
Some who would download the beta illegally might do it to 'check out the game'. These might be the ones that decide not to buy it based on problems they see with the beta. However, these might be the ones that would warez the game when it was released anyway.
A second class that would obtain the beta are the Blizzard fans, the ones that tried to get into the official Beta to begin with and when faced with a chance to take a look and play the game, eagerly jump at the chance. These would buy the final product no matter what they see in the beta.
I would bet there are a great deal more of the latter playing on bnetd server than the former.
Secondly, I am aware of no NDA affecting the use of the official beta. Certainly Blizzard and its fan sites are posting every detail imaginable regarding this game.
I like to annoy cheaters in Half-Life TFC. Most common (or most obvious) is the auto aim or auto trigger cheats that net a sniper a headshot every time. I'll switch teams and play something really spammy like a demoman or soldier and bounce my new cheating teammate all over the place. If he switches teams so do I. If he switches characters he's suddenly lost most of his advantage (auto aim does wonders with the shotgun but isn't the instant death that the sniper deals). I've run more cheaters off that way than any other.
Yeah now Blizzard gets to play WackAMole taking down sites one by one trying to stop things. The cats already out of the bag and Blizzard isn't going to be able to stuff it back in. Now BNetD is up on Morpheus, Gnutella, UseNet and of course IRC. Worse yet, they are curating a PR fiasco. Sure, boycots and negative PR aren't going to kill them or even hurt them much in the long run but they do manage to alienate a core group of very smart people.
to YRO, any bets whether it gets double posted to/. twice?
Seriously though, this only happened when someone warezed the WarcraftIII beta and modified it to work with BNetD, creating an 'open' beta test. This obviously infuriated Blizzard into having the BNetD project shut down. A shame too, since it doesn't cost them anything to have quite a few more of their fans playing the beta.
I ran IE 4 (the version that 'integrated' itself with the OS) on Windows 95 OSR2 without the Explorer enhancements and it ran just fine. IE 4 was a much better browser than IE 3, it wasn't the browser integration that made it so.
I think you're confusing the issues here, the browser integration stunt that MS pulled to try to avoid anti-trust legislation and the fact that they wrote a better browser with IE 4.
I'm quite convinced Opera is faster than IE. By faster I mean subjective page loading and rendering speed. Opera loads slightly slower, but that is a function of IE's component architecture.
Opera's primary problem is it's lack of a complete DOM for the scripting engine. Any page that wants to do anything interesting through the DOM is best off in Mozilla or IE6.
If you're going to take a look at Opera take a stroll through the preferences. The defaults were a bit strange for me, once I adjusted things I felt much more at home with it.
Agreed, in fact, the little information I had time to dig up left me with the impression that VIEWDATA was by BT and may have implemented the items in the patent. The link I posted hinted at another system that was similar, however, I couldn't find any other details on it in the quick searching I did at the time.
Of more interest are the early BBS systems. Wonder when the first menus came along to make things easier. Another poster also mentioned something called NOTES that would be nice to take a look at.
I, probably like many/.'ers, watched a few of those videos and thought something along the lines of "man, those guys were so far ahead of their time, they had everything already done back then! Screw BT and their specious patents!". But go back and watch the demo again. Then scan the patent again. Doublas Engelbart's demo kept referencing hypertext within the same information store (computer). I couldn't find a reference to a local reference to remote information. Networking and even remote sessions are mentioned but never the context of a local link to a remote chunk of data. BT's patent appears to focus on hyperlinking menus being included with each chunk of data to allow easy access to further information.
Now, having said that, there are some key differences between the hyperlinks we know and love today and the system described in BT's patent. Links in the form of http://, ftp://, etc are known as URLs because they abstract away the differences in local and network locations and various protocols used for transmitting the data. It may be argued that hyperlinks are abstractions of a local data store, not a remote menuing system. Also of interest in BT's patent is the reference to the VIEWDATA system, some quick internet searching reveals systems that used color coded links that may qualify as prior art. Another major factor is the use of a mouse. BT's patent doesn't seem to mention anything besides keypad input methods while today's interaction with hypertext is primarily with some sort of pointing device.
Another thing to consider is BT's first major target in this. While other reports mention up to 17 ISPs being asked to pay royalties, Prodigy has gotten the majority of the attention. Wasn't Prodigy one of the larger online services back in the '80s? Might they have had an early interface system that consisted of numeric menus linking to additional information? Is BT going after one of the only true violators of the patent, hoping to scare the rest of the world into paying royalties? Are they deliberately setting up smokescreens, hoping to distract from the real issues in the case?
So, after a closer look, I still think that Mr. Englebart and his peers were way ahead of their time and I still say "Screw BT and their specious patents!", just for slightly different reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Multiplayer has some issues with what is saved and what isn't, it will take some getting used to after Bnet. But if you have the time to finish one little quest at a time (I've been averaging about 45 miniutes) you'll feel like you're making progress through their multiplyer world. Although they want you playing on the Zone, they aren't pulling a Blizzard and trying to tell you where you can and can't play, their internet games work just fine.
The forthcoming tools look like they'll be awesome. I'm even thinking of ressurecting some long dead ideas and doing something with them.
Washington Post article. I think they're from the east coast, not CA.
The proverbial cat isn't so easy to put back in the bag, is it Sony?
From my brief review, it appears that they are primarily concerned with someone selling their code and patent problems. No mention of the GPL, although obviously several provisions in here are incompatible with any decent open source license.
So here it is:
MICROSOFT SHARED SOURCE CLI, C#, AND JSCRIPT LICENSE
This License governs use of the accompanying Software, and your use of the Software constitutes acceptance of this license.
You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to the restrictions in this license. Some purposes which can be non-commercial are teaching, academic research, and personal experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that are intended to teach the use of the Software.
You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial products.
You may modify this Software and distribute the modified Software for non-commercial purposes, however, you may not grant rights to the Software or derivative works that are broader than those provided by this License. For example, you may not distribute modifications of the Software under terms that would permit commercial use, or under terms that purport to require the Software or derivative works to be sublicensed to others.
You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.
In return, we simply require that you agree:
1. Not to remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.
2. That if you distribute the Software in source or object form, you will include a verbatim copy of this license.
3. That if you distribute derivative works of the Software in source code form you do so only under a license that includes all of the provisions of this License, and if you distribute derivative works of the Software solely in object form you do so only under a license that complies with this License.
4. That if you have modified the Software or created derivative works, and distribute such modifications or derivative works, you will cause the modified files to carry prominent notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that you have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any changes.
5. THAT THE SOFTWARE COMES "AS IS", WITH NO WARRANTIES. THIS MEANS NO EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR ANY WARRANTY OF TITLE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS DISCLAIMER ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.
6. THAT MICROSOFT WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATED TO THE SOFTWARE OR THIS LICENSE, INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT THE LAW PERMITS, NO MATTER WHAT LEGAL THEORY IT IS BASED ON. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.
7. That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software or anyone's use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically.
8. That your rights under the License end automatically if you breach it in any way.
9. Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in this license.
Of note was this article (actually this .pdf) that benchmarks several Java JIT environments, a Java native compiler, Visual C++ and Intel's C++ compiler. The optimized hardware accelerated OpenGL benchmark was nearly identical to the C++ version. Don't forget to read the errata which addresses his Java bias and other issues.
Regarding your Quake comment, I'll point out that Java was implemented for mod development for Quake 2. Definately not the game itself, but still it exists as a another example of how Java can be used in game development.
I also remember the horrid Windows 3.1 drivers. S3 was known for the best drivers. My Trident card had lousy drivers as well. ATI was notorious for bad drivers, funny how that reputation lingers.
I wasted a few hours the other day pushing the limits of What The Font, an automated type recognition engine. While it is better than my untrained eye, it still only hit around 50% on the samples I submitted.
SecurityFocus has an article on passwords, while it has a NT focus (Lanmanager myths and such) it touches on lots of the same thoughts. Of interest is the use of high ASCII and/or Unicode in passwords.
AnFX. Doesn't look like it is as powerful as I'd like, I don't see any hooks to do anything really powerful.
While it has excellent standards support it's DOM support is less than perfect. That means that static pages render pretty good but the fancy DHTML stuff doesn't. While many are just as happy that way, there is a place for those kinds of things and Opera just doesn't cut it.
Another problem is that it isn't free (as in speech). While there is a place for commercial software, there are many advantages to OS. As Mozilla reaches 1.0, I think you're going to see an expansion of the community like mozdev.org in creating and extending the software.
So, as someone else pointed out, I'm glad we've got choices. I'm glad someone has created Galeon and K-Meleon and even Konqueror and I'm even happy that IE 6 has come closer to proper standards support.
Any way to get that with NO UI elements on screen? A true kiosk mode?
Photoshop Elements. As far as I've seen from reading the box in the local CompUSA, its Photoshop without the nice print stuff like CMYK. Same interface, same core set of image tools and plugins.
I'll dig more when I get home from work...
Dynamic Tree widget for comments. Little + and - boxes to open up those comments below my threshold for the times I'd like to see what an AC wrote. While I tend to agree with you overall, there are features that a dynamic page app could implement that would improve the way I use /. JavaScript, Java, NNTP and others could do it as well.
Some who would download the beta illegally might do it to 'check out the game'. These might be the ones that decide not to buy it based on problems they see with the beta. However, these might be the ones that would warez the game when it was released anyway.
A second class that would obtain the beta are the Blizzard fans, the ones that tried to get into the official Beta to begin with and when faced with a chance to take a look and play the game, eagerly jump at the chance. These would buy the final product no matter what they see in the beta.
I would bet there are a great deal more of the latter playing on bnetd server than the former.
Secondly, I am aware of no NDA affecting the use of the official beta. Certainly Blizzard and its fan sites are posting every detail imaginable regarding this game.
still ruins the game though.
Yeah now Blizzard gets to play WackAMole taking down sites one by one trying to stop things. The cats already out of the bag and Blizzard isn't going to be able to stuff it back in. Now BNetD is up on Morpheus, Gnutella, UseNet and of course IRC. Worse yet, they are curating a PR fiasco. Sure, boycots and negative PR aren't going to kill them or even hurt them much in the long run but they do manage to alienate a core group of very smart people.
shame I didn't notice the 'double twice' when I previewed...
Seriously though, this only happened when someone warezed the WarcraftIII beta and modified it to work with BNetD, creating an 'open' beta test. This obviously infuriated Blizzard into having the BNetD project shut down. A shame too, since it doesn't cost them anything to have quite a few more of their fans playing the beta.
I think you're confusing the issues here, the browser integration stunt that MS pulled to try to avoid anti-trust legislation and the fact that they wrote a better browser with IE 4.
Opera's primary problem is it's lack of a complete DOM for the scripting engine. Any page that wants to do anything interesting through the DOM is best off in Mozilla or IE6.
If you're going to take a look at Opera take a stroll through the preferences. The defaults were a bit strange for me, once I adjusted things I felt much more at home with it.
Agreed, in fact, the little information I had time to dig up left me with the impression that VIEWDATA was by BT and may have implemented the items in the patent. The link I posted hinted at another system that was similar, however, I couldn't find any other details on it in the quick searching I did at the time.
Of more interest are the early BBS systems. Wonder when the first menus came along to make things easier. Another poster also mentioned something called NOTES that would be nice to take a look at.
I, probably like many /.'ers, watched a few of those videos and thought something along the lines of "man, those guys were so far ahead of their time, they had everything already done back then! Screw BT and their specious patents!". But go back and watch the demo again. Then scan the patent again. Doublas Engelbart's demo kept referencing hypertext within the same information store (computer). I couldn't find a reference to a local reference to remote information. Networking and even remote sessions are mentioned but never the context of a local link to a remote chunk of data. BT's patent appears to focus on hyperlinking menus being included with each chunk of data to allow easy access to further information.
Now, having said that, there are some key differences between the hyperlinks we know and love today and the system described in BT's patent. Links in the form of http://, ftp://, etc are known as URLs because they abstract away the differences in local and network locations and various protocols used for transmitting the data. It may be argued that hyperlinks are abstractions of a local data store, not a remote menuing system. Also of interest in BT's patent is the reference to the VIEWDATA system, some quick internet searching reveals systems that used color coded links that may qualify as prior art. Another major factor is the use of a mouse. BT's patent doesn't seem to mention anything besides keypad input methods while today's interaction with hypertext is primarily with some sort of pointing device.
Another thing to consider is BT's first major target in this. While other reports mention up to 17 ISPs being asked to pay royalties, Prodigy has gotten the majority of the attention. Wasn't Prodigy one of the larger online services back in the '80s? Might they have had an early interface system that consisted of numeric menus linking to additional information? Is BT going after one of the only true violators of the patent, hoping to scare the rest of the world into paying royalties? Are they deliberately setting up smokescreens, hoping to distract from the real issues in the case?
So, after a closer look, I still think that Mr. Englebart and his peers were way ahead of their time and I still say "Screw BT and their specious patents!", just for slightly different reasons.