Those sounded like terrible solutions to me. Basically: manually adjust the permissions of every file you create or turn off the security stuff and pray.
I'm hoping that these articles are hyperbole and in fact when you create your own files you are marked as the owner with read/write/execute permissions on them. Granted, administration looks like a total nightmare, but MS has been working for years to make administration as hard as possible so this is no big surprise.
What I think the real fix should be: When you get a dialog box like this, there's a "validate me for X minutes" option that you can check to tell the machine that you're going to be administrating for some minutes and stop showering me with dialog boxes. Sort of like how most modern operating systems work.
Yeah, my first reaction was to use the "print this article" feature, only to discover that it's just a javascript:print() button, and it's going to print out the 12 or so words of actual content AND the 30 graphics on only that one page...
Seriously, who designed that page?
Why would I try most of these?
on
Forthcoming MMORPGs
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· Score: 4, Insightful
How many Swords and Sorcery MMOs are on that list? Does the term "also ran" not mean anything to these people?
I was also hoping to see more MMOs that deviate from the "beat up critters for loot, turn that loot into equiptment, chat if you like, it's your money" model. Sadly, that doesn't appear to be the case for most of the ones listed. It's like the RTS genre and FPS genres all over again. One or two companies make a really good game in the mold and suddenly dozens of copycats pop up in the hopes of cashing in, usually with inferior games.
Most games that I've messed with use the same character models for male and female (developers are lazy) and just modify the vertexes to differentiate.
Besides, that was just one example. There is a nearly limitless number of ways you could mess with existing game data that would make it not fit the current ESRB rating. You could even theoretically "clean up" some games by removing blood spatter or swapping a nude texture with a nun habit texture or something. Not that it'd matter to the ESRB of couse.
In fact there is a strong argument here that their ratings are meaningless because if it rates potental content, then nearly every game should be AO. You never know what those crazy modders could do.
What if I create a mod for a different game (A T rated game) that swaps a skin texture from one character (say, a shirtless guy) to another (a female character) and creates the effect of a "topless character"? Should the game then get an M higher rating? It's only using content that was already in there, although not normally accessable to players? "Potentally sexual content" could be nearly anything!
Are you talking about the Magmic Texas Hold-em? One thing I've discovered is that although the free version has horrible AI (at least one player will _never_ fold, allowing you to clear the table after only a few good hands), the commercial version is at least up to a junior varsity level in it's betting patterns. Each version is apparently better than the last.
It does have some annoying behavior still though, like the occasional guy who comes in and puts it all in before the flop goes down every round. Because he comes in with more money than anyone else on the table, it's an annoying risk to take him down. It really sucks to lose everything you have because he had a 3 and 5 in his hand compared to your two kings, but the flop gives him a straight flush and you're stuck with your lousy pair.
From what I've seen, in order to be "throttled" you have to be one of those guys who rips all three DVDs the day you get them and drops them back in the mail on the same day. If you actually spend the time to watch the movies, it's nearly impossible to get up to the volume of DVDs that's required to be throttled. Basically, unless you're building a huge ripped DVD collection by abusing Netflix, it's not something you have to worry about. Even the ardent movie watchers I know have never seen anything like the "throttling" that people talk about on sites with names like omgnetflixripoff.com.
The people who constantly harp on the "throttling" issue IMHO are the ones who have some agenda unrelated to the issue their discussing. I'd be surprised if there was really anything to it at all. The other option is that the throttlers are the guys who were abusing Netflix and are hoping to embarass them enough (by putting up angry websites) to let them abuse the service more. It's a lot like the people who try to scam money out of people through paypal and then post thousands of angry letters to message boards when their scam is shut down by paypal and their ill gotten gains are locked up in the system, denying them the chance to grab the money and run.
If your library has a selection even in the same ballpark as Netflix I'd say go for it you lucky bastard. However, I have never, ever, seen a library selection that even made me thing it was even worth the Librarian's time to deal with it.
Also, the 7 days at 50 cents deals are usually on extremly crappy movies that video store owners don't even want on their shelf anymore. Half of the time I think they're secretly wishing you'll steal it so they don't have to try to sell it.
Actually, my local BB dropped out of that no-late-fees thing. I noticed the sign on their door (they're locaed right next to the ABC store). Now, I'm willing to grant that my local store is probably worse than most, but it's not like I have any other video store within easy biking distance (next one is ~12 miles away). The Mom and Pop video stores are all long dead in my area. The only thing that's even close is the all Spanish language video store.
Networking. The top level executive pool is an exlusive club, but once you get in you're pretty much set for life, no matter how much of a screwup you are. The best way to get in is to be the son of an existing high level executive, although there are occasional chances for other people to squeeze in. It helps a lot to already be rich too.
In-store coupons for BB are pretty worthless where I live. BBs in-store selection is pathetic (almost completely lacking in older movies, even cult classics), and greater than 50% of the store is checked out pretty much all of the time. That's the reason I got Netflix in the first place, because it was usually the case that BB didn't have any movie that I was even vaguely interested in seeing. The small handfull of cult classics they had were always checked out, and they seemed to stock huge numbers of horrible movies (that stupid ocean liner horror movie stands out in my mind with a full wall of copies with disks behind them surrounded by a sea of checked out (better) movies).
All it took was BB screwing me on one late fee--got to the store around 11:55 or so, but had to stand outside waiting for the guy to finish his work on the door (apparently some punks had vandalized it the night before) before I could get in. Got in the store at a touch after 12 and got hit with a late fee because I was after the 12:00 time limit. The manager was insistant that I should have just gone earlier to drop it off too. Needless to say, that's the last time I've ever visited BB. I can't remember if I even paid that late fee.
Good lord, how many movies are they watching? I have netflix too, but I just use the DVDs like the parent and I still find I rarely go through more than 5 or 6 a month.
Besides, if you do the mass rip/burn thing, eventually Netflix starts to throttle your queue since it is unprofitable for them to process more than ~20 movies a month for a single account.
Sales numbers have been pretty close to shipping numbers for the entire life of the 360. People are _still_ reporting shortages, which is a travesty IMHO. Again, where in the world are you getting your numbers?
The hacking thing didn't bother me as much as most people. I mean they'd been studying the stupid spaceship for how long? I figure one of the backroom guys (maybe Commander Data) hacked together some API that allowed them to hook the Mac up to the comm system.
You figure these aliens send spaceships apparently all over the place, they have to work a lot of backwards compatability into their comms systems. The crafty humans must have discovered some exploit in the system, perhaps even worked it into the API so all Jeff Goldblum had to do was write a 5 line script to completely own them. Granted, it seems monumentally stupid to not have enough basic security in the system to avoid that sort of exploit from completely disabling your entire invasion force, but maybe there was some aspect of the aliens that prevented that from being a concern? Perhaps they were ant-like and free will was not an issue? Or maybe a hive mind?
What are you talking about? The Xbox 360 hasn't even been on the shelves 6 months, although it's close enough now that you can make pretty good guesses on what the 6 month figure will be. It's supposed to be around 5M units or so by the end of the fiscal year in June.
With only a few exceptions, you have two choices as a young (but talented) band:
1. Mega Stardom offered by the label, but eventual financial ruin as the label keeps pretty much all of your money. The financial problems won't hit you for a couple of years though, and can be mititaged for a long time if you make it big.
2. Some popularity as an "indy" or "cult" hit by rolling your own or signing up with an independant label. Few people will know your name, but you'll stand a much better chance of making enough that you won't have to file for bankruptcy after a few years when the traditional label's costs catch up to you.
This is what happens when the one side has pretty much all of the power in a contract negotiation. The other side gets screwed. Record companies pick and choose a small handful of bands from hundreds and hundreds of entries each year. The reason every band is screwed is that if a band tries to negotiate better terms, the recording company just walks away from the deal and finds a less financially savvy band. Granted, big names that renegotiate their contracts really have no excuse, except that they were the same ones who agreed to the original horrible contracts in the first place.
This is why smart bands tend to form their own labels or join together with other small time artists to form coop labels. Sadly, this makes it very hard to promote and hold big concerts because most of the radio stations and large venues are held by the same companies that run the labels, and they tend to prefer their own artists over outsiders.
Also, when was the last time the Antivirus software on your computer caught _anything_? The only thing I've had since I moved away from booting the OS off of a floppy disk in 1994 (we were behinde the times) is a false positive on a traffic generator I was using to test some network code.
The tradeoff is a lot of bloat and money wasted on a product that doesn't seem to be useful at all. The only thing I have that's worse behaved is ZoneAlarm, which has to be the most bloated firewall of all time.
That and GSM isn't particularly well implemented in the states. I have GSM and GPRS through T-Mobile and it comse up short next to CDMA phones. Not only is the coverage not as good, but there have been more instances of dialing up someone and having only half of the connection actually work (I can hear what they're saying or they can hear me but not both) and the sound quality is definatly not as good. I tried to read out a CD key to someone over my phone (that's what he gets for leaving the sleeves behind when he has to reinstall something on his laptop) and it was hopeless. Every time I read it out he got something a bit differenent because he couldn't make out the individual characters very well at all; even with me going "alpha niner X-ray...".
T-Mobile GPRS has terrible latency too, often on the order of seconds. OTOH, my wife's CDMA phone doesn't do data at all so there's really no comparison there.
That was my complaint when I tried the previous incarnation of this (MSH). It seemed to take 80 keystrokes to do even simple operations. This felt a lot like a Perl replacement, not a Bash replacement, IE not something you'd use in the command line, but rather a scripting language for when your normal scripting language isn't good enough (which means you'll be getting a lot of use out of it since the normal scripting language is cmd.exe).
Have you actually looked at that Bankruptcy reform stuff though? It did basically nothing. Since it only affects people who are earning more than the median income in the US it actually hits very few people. The worst part is that everybody has to fill out the stupid (and expensive) form that tells them that yes, because they're poor it doesn't apply to them. The original forms of the legislation might have been brutal for the average Joe, but the one that made it through Congress is basically a waste of paper.
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I thought it was genius myself. The Windows Vista experiance on your home machine today!
Those sounded like terrible solutions to me. Basically: manually adjust the permissions of every file you create or turn off the security stuff and pray.
I'm hoping that these articles are hyperbole and in fact when you create your own files you are marked as the owner with read/write/execute permissions on them. Granted, administration looks like a total nightmare, but MS has been working for years to make administration as hard as possible so this is no big surprise.
What I think the real fix should be: When you get a dialog box like this, there's a "validate me for X minutes" option that you can check to tell the machine that you're going to be administrating for some minutes and stop showering me with dialog boxes. Sort of like how most modern operating systems work.
Yeah, my first reaction was to use the "print this article" feature, only to discover that it's just a javascript:print() button, and it's going to print out the 12 or so words of actual content AND the 30 graphics on only that one page...
Seriously, who designed that page?
How many Swords and Sorcery MMOs are on that list? Does the term "also ran" not mean anything to these people?
I was also hoping to see more MMOs that deviate from the "beat up critters for loot, turn that loot into equiptment, chat if you like, it's your money" model. Sadly, that doesn't appear to be the case for most of the ones listed. It's like the RTS genre and FPS genres all over again. One or two companies make a really good game in the mold and suddenly dozens of copycats pop up in the hopes of cashing in, usually with inferior games.
Most games that I've messed with use the same character models for male and female (developers are lazy) and just modify the vertexes to differentiate.
Besides, that was just one example. There is a nearly limitless number of ways you could mess with existing game data that would make it not fit the current ESRB rating. You could even theoretically "clean up" some games by removing blood spatter or swapping a nude texture with a nun habit texture or something. Not that it'd matter to the ESRB of couse.
In fact there is a strong argument here that their ratings are meaningless because if it rates potental content, then nearly every game should be AO. You never know what those crazy modders could do.
What if I create a mod for a different game (A T rated game) that swaps a skin texture from one character (say, a shirtless guy) to another (a female character) and creates the effect of a "topless character"? Should the game then get an M higher rating? It's only using content that was already in there, although not normally accessable to players? "Potentally sexual content" could be nearly anything!
Are you talking about the Magmic Texas Hold-em? One thing I've discovered is that although the free version has horrible AI (at least one player will _never_ fold, allowing you to clear the table after only a few good hands), the commercial version is at least up to a junior varsity level in it's betting patterns. Each version is apparently better than the last.
It does have some annoying behavior still though, like the occasional guy who comes in and puts it all in before the flop goes down every round. Because he comes in with more money than anyone else on the table, it's an annoying risk to take him down. It really sucks to lose everything you have because he had a 3 and 5 in his hand compared to your two kings, but the flop gives him a straight flush and you're stuck with your lousy pair.
From what I've seen, in order to be "throttled" you have to be one of those guys who rips all three DVDs the day you get them and drops them back in the mail on the same day. If you actually spend the time to watch the movies, it's nearly impossible to get up to the volume of DVDs that's required to be throttled. Basically, unless you're building a huge ripped DVD collection by abusing Netflix, it's not something you have to worry about. Even the ardent movie watchers I know have never seen anything like the "throttling" that people talk about on sites with names like omgnetflixripoff.com.
The people who constantly harp on the "throttling" issue IMHO are the ones who have some agenda unrelated to the issue their discussing. I'd be surprised if there was really anything to it at all. The other option is that the throttlers are the guys who were abusing Netflix and are hoping to embarass them enough (by putting up angry websites) to let them abuse the service more. It's a lot like the people who try to scam money out of people through paypal and then post thousands of angry letters to message boards when their scam is shut down by paypal and their ill gotten gains are locked up in the system, denying them the chance to grab the money and run.
If your library has a selection even in the same ballpark as Netflix I'd say go for it you lucky bastard. However, I have never, ever, seen a library selection that even made me thing it was even worth the Librarian's time to deal with it. Also, the 7 days at 50 cents deals are usually on extremly crappy movies that video store owners don't even want on their shelf anymore. Half of the time I think they're secretly wishing you'll steal it so they don't have to try to sell it.
Actually, my local BB dropped out of that no-late-fees thing. I noticed the sign on their door (they're locaed right next to the ABC store). Now, I'm willing to grant that my local store is probably worse than most, but it's not like I have any other video store within easy biking distance (next one is ~12 miles away). The Mom and Pop video stores are all long dead in my area. The only thing that's even close is the all Spanish language video store.
Networking. The top level executive pool is an exlusive club, but once you get in you're pretty much set for life, no matter how much of a screwup you are. The best way to get in is to be the son of an existing high level executive, although there are occasional chances for other people to squeeze in. It helps a lot to already be rich too.
In-store coupons for BB are pretty worthless where I live. BBs in-store selection is pathetic (almost completely lacking in older movies, even cult classics), and greater than 50% of the store is checked out pretty much all of the time. That's the reason I got Netflix in the first place, because it was usually the case that BB didn't have any movie that I was even vaguely interested in seeing. The small handfull of cult classics they had were always checked out, and they seemed to stock huge numbers of horrible movies (that stupid ocean liner horror movie stands out in my mind with a full wall of copies with disks behind them surrounded by a sea of checked out (better) movies).
All it took was BB screwing me on one late fee--got to the store around 11:55 or so, but had to stand outside waiting for the guy to finish his work on the door (apparently some punks had vandalized it the night before) before I could get in. Got in the store at a touch after 12 and got hit with a late fee because I was after the 12:00 time limit. The manager was insistant that I should have just gone earlier to drop it off too. Needless to say, that's the last time I've ever visited BB. I can't remember if I even paid that late fee.
Good lord, how many movies are they watching? I have netflix too, but I just use the DVDs like the parent and I still find I rarely go through more than 5 or 6 a month.
Besides, if you do the mass rip/burn thing, eventually Netflix starts to throttle your queue since it is unprofitable for them to process more than ~20 movies a month for a single account.
Sales numbers have been pretty close to shipping numbers for the entire life of the 360. People are _still_ reporting shortages, which is a travesty IMHO. Again, where in the world are you getting your numbers?
The hacking thing didn't bother me as much as most people. I mean they'd been studying the stupid spaceship for how long? I figure one of the backroom guys (maybe Commander Data) hacked together some API that allowed them to hook the Mac up to the comm system.
You figure these aliens send spaceships apparently all over the place, they have to work a lot of backwards compatability into their comms systems. The crafty humans must have discovered some exploit in the system, perhaps even worked it into the API so all Jeff Goldblum had to do was write a 5 line script to completely own them. Granted, it seems monumentally stupid to not have enough basic security in the system to avoid that sort of exploit from completely disabling your entire invasion force, but maybe there was some aspect of the aliens that prevented that from being a concern? Perhaps they were ant-like and free will was not an issue? Or maybe a hive mind?
What are you talking about? The Xbox 360 hasn't even been on the shelves 6 months, although it's close enough now that you can make pretty good guesses on what the 6 month figure will be. It's supposed to be around 5M units or so by the end of the fiscal year in June.
Shoot, forgot my bottom line:
With only a few exceptions, you have two choices as a young (but talented) band:
1. Mega Stardom offered by the label, but eventual financial ruin as the label keeps pretty much all of your money. The financial problems won't hit you for a couple of years though, and can be mititaged for a long time if you make it big.
2. Some popularity as an "indy" or "cult" hit by rolling your own or signing up with an independant label. Few people will know your name, but you'll stand a much better chance of making enough that you won't have to file for bankruptcy after a few years when the traditional label's costs catch up to you.
This is what happens when the one side has pretty much all of the power in a contract negotiation. The other side gets screwed. Record companies pick and choose a small handful of bands from hundreds and hundreds of entries each year. The reason every band is screwed is that if a band tries to negotiate better terms, the recording company just walks away from the deal and finds a less financially savvy band. Granted, big names that renegotiate their contracts really have no excuse, except that they were the same ones who agreed to the original horrible contracts in the first place.
This is why smart bands tend to form their own labels or join together with other small time artists to form coop labels. Sadly, this makes it very hard to promote and hold big concerts because most of the radio stations and large venues are held by the same companies that run the labels, and they tend to prefer their own artists over outsiders.
OEM, as in when they were known as Packard Bell?
Also, when was the last time the Antivirus software on your computer caught _anything_? The only thing I've had since I moved away from booting the OS off of a floppy disk in 1994 (we were behinde the times) is a false positive on a traffic generator I was using to test some network code.
The tradeoff is a lot of bloat and money wasted on a product that doesn't seem to be useful at all. The only thing I have that's worse behaved is ZoneAlarm, which has to be the most bloated firewall of all time.
"Up to NEC standards" isn't exactly a high bar to hurdle.
That and GSM isn't particularly well implemented in the states. I have GSM and GPRS through T-Mobile and it comse up short next to CDMA phones. Not only is the coverage not as good, but there have been more instances of dialing up someone and having only half of the connection actually work (I can hear what they're saying or they can hear me but not both) and the sound quality is definatly not as good. I tried to read out a CD key to someone over my phone (that's what he gets for leaving the sleeves behind when he has to reinstall something on his laptop) and it was hopeless. Every time I read it out he got something a bit differenent because he couldn't make out the individual characters very well at all; even with me going "alpha niner X-ray...".
T-Mobile GPRS has terrible latency too, often on the order of seconds. OTOH, my wife's CDMA phone doesn't do data at all so there's really no comparison there.
That was my complaint when I tried the previous incarnation of this (MSH). It seemed to take 80 keystrokes to do even simple operations. This felt a lot like a Perl replacement, not a Bash replacement, IE not something you'd use in the command line, but rather a scripting language for when your normal scripting language isn't good enough (which means you'll be getting a lot of use out of it since the normal scripting language is cmd.exe).
Have you actually looked at that Bankruptcy reform stuff though? It did basically nothing. Since it only affects people who are earning more than the median income in the US it actually hits very few people. The worst part is that everybody has to fill out the stupid (and expensive) form that tells them that yes, because they're poor it doesn't apply to them. The original forms of the legislation might have been brutal for the average Joe, but the one that made it through Congress is basically a waste of paper.