I am also a long time Diablo II fan (and intend to get back to playing with my Barbarian sometime in the future) and have played both single player and direct-connect online with friends (and lan in the days when I used to go to lan parties).
What Blizzard SHOULD have done for this game is made 2 different setups, one where you connect through battle.net and play on their server with all the anti-cheat and real-money-trading and good economy and etc. This would be playable with one player in a single "instance" of the game world or with multiple players in the same "instance".
Then they could have a normal Diablo 2 style offline/lan/direct connect setup without the need to be always online and without real-money-trading etc.
I suspect the REAL reason not to have the offline stuff is because its become essentially impossible to prevent piracy of pc games without some kind of phone home/always online setup.
I have learned to ignore anything about new medical discoveries until the drug in question is available from my local doctor, hospital or chemist.
Just because "drug x" does good things in rats or labs or even monkey/human trials doesn't mean its going to be available for normal people any time soon, if ever (think about all the instances where a promising drug came about and then never made it to market because of side effects)
In America Nokia does not dominate. I cant find a single Nokia phone (dumb or smart) listed on the web page for Tracfone, Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint. The AT&T page lists ONE, the Nokia 6350. Thats ONE nokia phone across all 4 major carriers plus the largest seller of prepaid dumbphones.
Nowhere does it say Nokia is killing off the dumbphones in those markets where Nokia dumbphones actually make money...
Find me an Android phone that provides a fully functioning GPU including OpenGL without using a single binary blob to do it... Even the Nexus S (supposedly the most open of the android handsets) has a binary userspace blob for the GPU, a binary userspace blob for WiFi/bluetooth/GPS, a binary userspace blob for the NFC support and a binary userspace blob for the cell modem.
If you read the pdf linked for the earlier case (which involved a hotel that had a bank of VCRs with movies in them and a system where you would pick a movie and then a switch would feed the output from that VCR to your room (and only your room, i.e. one viewing of the film at once) it makes it clear that the the "Transmit Clause"
(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.
was specifically modified to cover exactly the kind of system that On Command (and now Zediva) are producing.
I suspect that its going to be very hard for Zediva to win this given the clear precedent of the On Command case (although IANAL so I dont know for sure what arguments Zediva are going to use to argue that they are different to On Command)
Elder Scrolls Oblivion on PC is exactly like this. Why the hell cant I click my mouse button to open the chest that I am pointing at instead of needing to reach over and press the "open chest" button. Or the "pick up item" button.
Another pet beef is games that dont let me assign controls to all the buttons on my mouse. My mouse has left & right buttons, clickable wheel (which acts as the middle button when pressed) plus left and right side buttons. Why cant games let me assign things like reload or "drink potion" to these left and right side buttons so I dont have to reach for as many keyboard keys all the time.
Triple DES can be cracked by anyone with a sufficiently fast computer (even faster if you have special custom made chips for it) and should be avoided for anything unless you have to talk to something that's already using triple DES.
These days the best choice is a well tested open implementation of AES that has been peer-reviewed. And then you ideally review it yourself for back-doors. Short of bugs in the encryption code that make it weak, 256 bit AES is as good as unbreakable with today's technology (I bet even the NSA cant read AES)
Everyone says video game movies suck but that's usually because: A.The video games they pick to make into movies are crap in the first place (or are unsuitable for filming) and B.The people they pick to make the films are idiots.
The Resident Evil films aren't high art but they are no worse than any number of other action flicks like Die Hard.
Plenty of video games that could be turned into good films by the right people. Command & Conquer for one would make a good film (and since its fictional, you dont have to worry about offending the sensibilities of some war veteran somewhere)
Or you could dive into the vast catalogs of Science Fiction books to find source material. Isac Asimov. Arthur C Clarke. Harry Harrison. John Christopher. Orson Scott Card. Douglas Adams. And others.
Books like the Foundation series. Harry Harrison Deathworld 1/2/3. The Tripods. (would work great as a trilogy of films) Enders Game. Sequels to The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.
Just as long as they dont try to re-make 2001 A Space Odyssey (there is no way ANY living director or screenwriter could come CLOSE to matching the talents of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanly Kubrick)
Or go for technology and tap into books from authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson (even if people havent heard of the books, the special effects would be enough to get bums in seats)
The US really needs to stop thinking that it has to be the worlds police force and pull its troops out of places that it doesn't really need them. Iraq for one (let the new democratically elected government of Iraq decide what sort of military Iraq needs to defend itself). Get out of Europe altogether (the cold war is over and the threat of the Russians are going to send fleets of tanks west is long gone and that's assuming they actually have any armies left after the collapse of their military) Pull all the covert guys (including CIA and special forces) out of South America and stop trying to topple or influence governments in the region (be they democratic or otherwise) Get out of Japan (the Japanese are unlikely to attack America again, not when the Americans spend so much money on Japanese electronics, automobiles and other products) Stop spending so much money on expensive new toys like the F35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter and start spending money on the kind of operations required to get intel on the bad guys, especially the terrorists. Stop spending money on ever more data collection (including tapping every phone and internet connection in the known world and dumping the contents of every storage device that passes through a US point of entry) and spend money on paying gurus to analyze the data to find the good bits.
You dont beat terrorists by shooting at them with Sidewinder missiles, you beat them by finding where they are through good intel and blowing up their camp with a few artillery pieces or bazookas. You dont beat IEDs with massive radar installations that make radio telescopes look small, you beat IEDs with detector dogs, guys carrying metal detectors, bomb detection robots and bomb squad teams.
Things that should be cut: Subsidies for all kinds of vested interests and industries including the coal industry, the big agribusiness companies and giant factory farms, the airline industry, the oil companies, the telcos and others Various military projects that are over budget and/or unnecessary (they are talking about cutting the James Webb Space Telescope because of budget blowouts but there are military projects that are worse that should be cut or scaled back)
So you dont use rotor blades, you use fanjets (basically some sort of motor/engine, electric/gasoline/diesel/jet fuel/whatever) that spins a shrouded fan (somewhat like the one on the front of a turbofan engine). The fan sucks air in and pushes it out to cause the vehicle to move.
This is the same Sony that has released various films shot in 2D and then upconverted to 3D just to make more money.
Films that are shot in 3D (including Avatar and that new 3 Musketeers film) are fine, films shot in 2D and upconverted to 3D are not. Obviously CGI films like Cars and Toy Story that are rendered properly for 3D (with separate rendering passes for left and right eyes) are also OK.
I thought my local Borders (in Perth CBD) was great as a place to buy computer books if they had the one you wanted on the shelf. Bought a couple of books from them (including a book on QT and a couple of Java books)
The #1 reason I refuse to buy from HTC is because they continue to violate the GPL, releasing kernel sources months after the phones release, often kernel sources that dont match whats on the phone.
When I moved into this apartment a few years ago, I bought a 6-pack of Phillips branded Compact Fluorescent bulbs and replaced most of the incandescent light bulbs. So far none of them have failed (the only bulbs I havent replaced is one in the outside lamp because I almost never use that light and one in the toilet because the fixture is slightly broken and I havent figured out how to get the bulb out without damaging the fixture further.)
And for those who say CF bulbs take longer to start or dont give of enough light, I have a CF in the bathroom and the incandescent in the toilet on the same switch and I cant tell the difference in startup times or light output.
Motorola are also fighting Microsoft rather than bending over. But Motorola have been in the cellphone game from day one (the Motorola DynaTAC was the first true mobile phone, previous phones usually needed to be installed in automobiles or carried in heavy cases) and they have a massive patent portfolio to back up their years of innovation and invention so unlike HTC, they probably DO have a nice fat portfolio of patents they can use against Windows Phone and Microsoft.
Note that Motorola is one of the few phone OEMs NOT producing WP7 handsets.
The only ISPs to have signed up to the filter so far are the 2 big boys (Telstra and Optus).
A number of big ISPs (including the #3 provider iiNet as well as Internode and TPG) have specifically said they will not filter anything unless they are legally required to do so.
Anyone smart enough to care about the Internet filter should be smart enough to know that Tel$tra and Optarse are junk and should be avoided if alternatives are available (if you can get DSL from BigPond or Optus, you can also get DSL from better options like Internode, iiNet and others)
The answer is to adapt routing protocols where each node has an address and each node knows which of its neighbor nodes to talk to to reach or
Heck, just give each mesh router (and local systems connected to it) a separate IP address or addresses on its own logical subnet (as defined through CIDR) and use some variant of a existing routing protocol like OSPF that has already taken care of the hard bits (like making sure that you dont have loops)
Not sure which routing protocol is the most suitable in this case where you need a routing protocol where no one router has any more power or importance than any other router.
The last piece of music I bought was a "Bushfire Aid" CD and I bought that because I knew the money was going to the bushfire victims (via the Salvation Army bushfire appeal) and not the greedy record company people.
Great way to support a worthy cause AND get some cool songs from some artists I like at the same time (genuine artists, not trussed up "pop stars" like that guy who seems to make more endorsing skincare products than actually making music...)
If I was an American, I would be out there writing letters to my Representatives (and getting as many people as I could to do the same) DEMANDING that they do something meaningful about the national debt and threatening to vote for the other guy if they dont do it.
If enough people started asking for something to be done to solve the problem, Congress would have to listen (especially with an election in the near future)
How about cutting things from the budget that will ACTUALLY HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
Cutting the space telescope (with its tiny budget) wont make any difference.
If you want to fix the US economy and the US debt problem, cut where it will help. Cut the billions and billions of dollars spent on subsidies to the airlines, the big agribusiness companies, the coal industry, the oil industry, the media companies, the defence industry etc.
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I am also a long time Diablo II fan (and intend to get back to playing with my Barbarian sometime in the future) and have played both single player and direct-connect online with friends (and lan in the days when I used to go to lan parties).
What Blizzard SHOULD have done for this game is made 2 different setups, one where you connect through battle.net and play on their server with all the anti-cheat and real-money-trading and good economy and etc. This would be playable with one player in a single "instance" of the game world or with multiple players in the same "instance".
Then they could have a normal Diablo 2 style offline/lan/direct connect setup without the need to be always online and without real-money-trading etc.
I suspect the REAL reason not to have the offline stuff is because its become essentially impossible to prevent piracy of pc games without some kind of phone home/always online setup.
I have learned to ignore anything about new medical discoveries until the drug in question is available from my local doctor, hospital or chemist.
Just because "drug x" does good things in rats or labs or even monkey/human trials doesn't mean its going to be available for normal people any time soon, if ever (think about all the instances where a promising drug came about and then never made it to market because of side effects)
In America Nokia does not dominate.
I cant find a single Nokia phone (dumb or smart) listed on the web page for Tracfone, Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint.
The AT&T page lists ONE, the Nokia 6350. Thats ONE nokia phone across all 4 major carriers plus the largest seller of prepaid dumbphones.
Nowhere does it say Nokia is killing off the dumbphones in those markets where Nokia dumbphones actually make money...
Find me an Android phone that provides a fully functioning GPU including OpenGL without using a single binary blob to do it...
Even the Nexus S (supposedly the most open of the android handsets) has a binary userspace blob for the GPU, a binary userspace blob for WiFi/bluetooth/GPS, a binary userspace blob for the NFC support and a binary userspace blob for the cell modem.
I thought Al Qaida and Osama Bin Laden where friendly with the Saudis.
If you read the pdf linked for the earlier case (which involved a hotel that had a bank of VCRs with movies in them and a system where you would pick a movie and then a switch would feed the output from that VCR to your room (and only your room, i.e. one viewing of the film at once) it makes it clear that the the "Transmit Clause"
(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.
was specifically modified to cover exactly the kind of system that On Command (and now Zediva) are producing.
I suspect that its going to be very hard for Zediva to win this given the clear precedent of the On Command case (although IANAL so I dont know for sure what arguments Zediva are going to use to argue that they are different to On Command)
Elder Scrolls Oblivion on PC is exactly like this.
Why the hell cant I click my mouse button to open the chest that I am pointing at instead of needing to reach over and press the "open chest" button. Or the "pick up item" button.
Another pet beef is games that dont let me assign controls to all the buttons on my mouse. My mouse has left & right buttons, clickable wheel (which acts as the middle button when pressed) plus left and right side buttons. Why cant games let me assign things like reload or "drink potion" to these left and right side buttons so I dont have to reach for as many keyboard keys all the time.
I am also blacklisting Diablo 3 (as part of my general blacklist of Activision Blizzard for a bunch of reasons).
Their approach to DRM is one of the big reasons I hate them.
Triple DES can be cracked by anyone with a sufficiently fast computer (even faster if you have special custom made chips for it) and should be avoided for anything unless you have to talk to something that's already using triple DES.
These days the best choice is a well tested open implementation of AES that has been peer-reviewed. And then you ideally review it yourself for back-doors.
Short of bugs in the encryption code that make it weak, 256 bit AES is as good as unbreakable with today's technology (I bet even the NSA cant read AES)
Everyone says video game movies suck but that's usually because:
A.The video games they pick to make into movies are crap in the first place (or are unsuitable for filming)
and B.The people they pick to make the films are idiots.
The Resident Evil films aren't high art but they are no worse than any number of other action flicks like Die Hard.
Plenty of video games that could be turned into good films by the right people. Command & Conquer for one would make a good film (and since its fictional, you dont have to worry about offending the sensibilities of some war veteran somewhere)
Or you could dive into the vast catalogs of Science Fiction books to find source material. Isac Asimov. Arthur C Clarke. Harry Harrison. John Christopher. Orson Scott Card. Douglas Adams. And others.
Books like the Foundation series. Harry Harrison Deathworld 1/2/3. The Tripods. (would work great as a trilogy of films) Enders Game. Sequels to The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.
Just as long as they dont try to re-make 2001 A Space Odyssey (there is no way ANY living director or screenwriter could come CLOSE to matching the talents of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanly Kubrick)
Or go for technology and tap into books from authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson (even if people havent heard of the books, the special effects would be enough to get bums in seats)
The US really needs to stop thinking that it has to be the worlds police force and pull its troops out of places that it doesn't really need them. Iraq for one (let the new democratically elected government of Iraq decide what sort of military Iraq needs to defend itself).
Get out of Europe altogether (the cold war is over and the threat of the Russians are going to send fleets of tanks west is long gone and that's assuming they actually have any armies left after the collapse of their military)
Pull all the covert guys (including CIA and special forces) out of South America and stop trying to topple or influence governments in the region (be they democratic or otherwise)
Get out of Japan (the Japanese are unlikely to attack America again, not when the Americans spend so much money on Japanese electronics, automobiles and other products)
Stop spending so much money on expensive new toys like the F35 Lightning Joint Strike Fighter and start spending money on the kind of operations required to get intel on the bad guys, especially the terrorists. Stop spending money on ever more data collection (including tapping every phone and internet connection in the known world and dumping the contents of every storage device that passes through a US point of entry) and spend money on paying gurus to analyze the data to find the good bits.
You dont beat terrorists by shooting at them with Sidewinder missiles, you beat them by finding where they are through good intel and blowing up their camp with a few artillery pieces or bazookas.
You dont beat IEDs with massive radar installations that make radio telescopes look small, you beat IEDs with detector dogs, guys carrying metal detectors, bomb detection robots and bomb squad teams.
Things that should be cut:
Subsidies for all kinds of vested interests and industries including the coal industry, the big agribusiness companies and giant factory farms, the airline industry, the oil companies, the telcos and others
Various military projects that are over budget and/or unnecessary (they are talking about cutting the James Webb Space Telescope because of budget blowouts but there are military projects that are worse that should be cut or scaled back)
It would be more accurate to say it has a browser based shell.
So you dont use rotor blades, you use fanjets (basically some sort of motor/engine, electric/gasoline/diesel/jet fuel/whatever) that spins a shrouded fan (somewhat like the one on the front of a turbofan engine). The fan sucks air in and pushes it out to cause the vehicle to move.
This is the same Sony that has released various films shot in 2D and then upconverted to 3D just to make more money.
Films that are shot in 3D (including Avatar and that new 3 Musketeers film) are fine, films shot in 2D and upconverted to 3D are not. Obviously CGI films like Cars and Toy Story that are rendered properly for 3D (with separate rendering passes for left and right eyes) are also OK.
I thought my local Borders (in Perth CBD) was great as a place to buy computer books if they had the one you wanted on the shelf. Bought a couple of books from them (including a book on QT and a couple of Java books)
The #1 reason I refuse to buy from HTC is because they continue to violate the GPL, releasing kernel sources months after the phones release, often kernel sources that dont match whats on the phone.
When I moved into this apartment a few years ago, I bought a 6-pack of Phillips branded Compact Fluorescent bulbs and replaced most of the incandescent light bulbs. So far none of them have failed (the only bulbs I havent replaced is one in the outside lamp because I almost never use that light and one in the toilet because the fixture is slightly broken and I havent figured out how to get the bulb out without damaging the fixture further.)
And for those who say CF bulbs take longer to start or dont give of enough light, I have a CF in the bathroom and the incandescent in the toilet on the same switch and I cant tell the difference in startup times or light output.
Motorola are also fighting Microsoft rather than bending over.
But Motorola have been in the cellphone game from day one (the Motorola DynaTAC was the first true mobile phone, previous phones usually needed to be installed in automobiles or carried in heavy cases) and they have a massive patent portfolio to back up their years of innovation and invention so unlike HTC, they probably DO have a nice fat portfolio of patents they can use against Windows Phone and Microsoft.
Note that Motorola is one of the few phone OEMs NOT producing WP7 handsets.
The only ISPs to have signed up to the filter so far are the 2 big boys (Telstra and Optus).
A number of big ISPs (including the #3 provider iiNet as well as Internode and TPG) have specifically said they will not filter anything unless they are legally required to do so.
Anyone smart enough to care about the Internet filter should be smart enough to know that Tel$tra and Optarse are junk and should be avoided if alternatives are available (if you can get DSL from BigPond or Optus, you can also get DSL from better options like Internode, iiNet and others)
The answer is to adapt routing protocols where each node has an address and each node knows which of its neighbor nodes to talk to to reach or
Heck, just give each mesh router (and local systems connected to it) a separate IP address or addresses on its own logical subnet (as defined through CIDR) and use some variant of a existing routing protocol like OSPF that has already taken care of the hard bits (like making sure that you dont have loops)
Not sure which routing protocol is the most suitable in this case where you need a routing protocol where no one router has any more power or importance than any other router.
The last piece of music I bought was a "Bushfire Aid" CD and I bought that because I knew the money was going to the bushfire victims (via the Salvation Army bushfire appeal) and not the greedy record company people.
Great way to support a worthy cause AND get some cool songs from some artists I like at the same time (genuine artists, not trussed up "pop stars" like that guy who seems to make more endorsing skincare products than actually making music...)
If I was an American, I would be out there writing letters to my Representatives (and getting as many people as I could to do the same) DEMANDING that they do something meaningful about the national debt and threatening to vote for the other guy if they dont do it.
If enough people started asking for something to be done to solve the problem, Congress would have to listen (especially with an election in the near future)
How about cutting things from the budget that will ACTUALLY HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
Cutting the space telescope (with its tiny budget) wont make any difference.
If you want to fix the US economy and the US debt problem, cut where it will help. Cut the billions and billions of dollars spent on subsidies to the airlines, the big agribusiness companies, the coal industry, the oil industry, the media companies, the defence industry etc.
X is running just FINE on my Nokia N900 thankyou very much.