The reasoning "It's not feasible to copy and distribute media that way because you need to distribute the VMs too" is flawed. If you wanted to re-emulate the entire viewing, then yes, you'd need the VMs etc. But what you want is the media - and since you already have that data sitting inside your VM plus the snapshop (remember that the VM needs to simulate everything) it should be possible to either record the thing with an authentic (read simulated hardware behaves as if it had DRM) VM and then use a modified VM (which is nearly identical in behaviour, when it comes to input from the Guest OS, but lacks the DRM protection) or use an already "misbehaving" VM (which pretends to have DRM protection, but does not) to run the Gues OS in the first place - and then extract the media from the snapshop/running system. More complex? Yes. Impossible to do for us geeks. Hell, no!
Well, CCP has selected the only reasonable way out of this mess - whether the latest allegations had a foundation of truth or not, their clumsy handeling of the last incident had already sufficiently tarnished their reputation so that those new allegations further damaged it - some doubt would always remain.
By installing a player oversight they take important steps to restore player faith in them - as the article said, especially in online games, the perception of reality is the reality.
Story. Suspension of Disbeliev.
In RGPs you can be THE ONE - the hero who saves the world from the brink of destruction, you can be the one to beat the ULTIMATE EVIL.
In MMOGs its either not really feasible or not really good for the suspension of disbeliev.
So, you and your party comes up to the castle of the EVIL OVERLORD, to defeat him. Just like the guys that are following behind you, the guys who are currently inside and the guys who are currently on the way out and maybe give you the hint "watch out for his nastly AOE attack when he dies the second time, almost got us with that one". Will it be a fun run? Yeah. But there is no suspension of disbeliev if you kill the same guy over and over again, like everybody else.
Can anyone imagine a oldschool RPG like Planescape: Torment as MMO? It would just not work - MMORPGs and RPG have similarities, but are essentially different game types.
So that fireing of that ISD reporter at the command of a BoB member.
That odd dev promiting himself to director, demoting himself a couple of minutes later without communication.
All inquiries related to above incident being buried and blocked out.
Banning of members who inquired and asked "unpleasant" questions, over formalities
Evidence that CCP wants to push certain results - "outcome X is desirable. see to it" in the storyline.
Previous accounts of collusion and corruption.
Failure to punish above accounts as written in policy.
All those things are only coincidences. No, sir, I don't buy it.
Ok, if the Devs want to play favorites and follow up their big "Influence the storyline" advertisments with secret oders along the lines of "Outcome X is preferred. See that it happens." and abuse their power to ensure that - then I don't need to play this game.
Hell, ther are plenty of other excellent MMOGs out there, where the Developers don't cheat their customers.
Welcome on my "Games I will never play" list.
Well, what can we say?
The typical Microsoft=Evil bash aside, their response was rather understandable and logical. They have beta-software, and they have low number of people who a previewing/testing that software. That software ends up leaked on the internet. Thus the only logical conclusion is that (at least) one of those people is responsible for the leak.
Assuming that leaks is not what you want and that somebody who leaked software before, will do so again, it is best to freeze the entire process until the one(s) responsible has been found. Also assuming that they accepted a NDA (the usual stuff forfeiting your propery, soul, and firstborn) this one guy or gal will not be in a happy place.
So, all in all, its nothing extraordinary.
Well, for us us who don't really understand much of the stock market Google Finance offers a neat und simple chart system to look at the market lines. Here's one for SCO. I found the period between 29th of November 2006 and 1st of December 2006 especially interesting... can anyone say 50% value drop? Also its amazing to see how the stock started off at 94$ per share...
True enough, but how many GMs would you then need? 1 per 100? To catch cheaters you need a quick response time, having your ticket idle even for a minute is usually long enough to allow the cheater finish whatever he is doing (kill you in PVP with 99999 damage attacks etc.) and return to being a "normal" users.
Also remember that those GM will have to deal with a flood of Support tickets, since people will use Bots and cheats if the punishment is unlikely. And of course even more peeps will be wrongly suspected of cheating if they behave "oddly".
When the "Warden" sofware got its first publicity I was among the sceptics - why should we give Blizzard the right and ability to sniff around in our computers.
I have started playing WoW a while ago, and now I have an answer: Because a significant number of people is willing to greedily cheat and spoil the fun for the rest of the players. And they are quite numerous, despite the Warden software - just imagine how many cheaters and bots there would be if the draconic punishment of being banned was not coupled with a high likelyhood of detection via the warden.
No matter where or when I log on I usually "meet" at least one cheater or bot per day. People who seem to run in predictable patters and do not respond to any meaningful interaction, and are still in the same area when you return from extended questing. Add to that number the countless gold-sellers who will whisper, yell and spam the chat with they annoying offers. No I don't want to buy your gold or powerleveling services, I hope your PC melts down into a puddle. And this is with the "Warden" software. I do not think I would want to play WoW in a warden-free environment, where "L0L0L0L, L00K aT m3, ImA lEeT hAXX0R!1!1!1!!" mindset of people run free and undisturbed.
The RIAA and MPAA have been lobbying for a bill that would allow them to shoot people, whom they suspect of being so-called pirates, on sight.
They promise they would never shoot innocent people, and in fact, added that being shot by a RIMPAA anti-piracy squad is actually proof that the target was a pirate.
Well, most people seem assume that Jeff Vogel is just another "I'm president of a software company, so I know what I'm talking about" guy. Wrong. This guy is also the main programmer of the Spiderwebsoftware. The company only has four people or so (do pet-taranulas count?). In any case, Jeff writes some excellent games - the Exile series (and the facelifted re-write the Avernum series) and the Geneforge series (to some extent) is pure crack for any old-school RPG addict.
If you have anything important to do, don't go download their trial versions - even the 1/3 of the game you can play before you have to register for the full version will cost you many, many, many, many hours. Personally, if you are not picky in the graphics sector, I'd reccommend you go for the Exile series first.
Humans are strange beings. Often its "Push them in one direction, they will run in the other".
So it is with DRM - part of the DRM hate originates from the "you force me to do (or rather not do) something" thought and the wish to resist whatever they are trying to do.
Watermarking, on the other hand, is more subtle, and I could actually support it; Share that file with your friends - no DRM or copyprotection will (in vain) try stop you. And even the company you downloaded the file from won't know or care - as long as you share it with just a few friends.
If you put it on the internet, however, you are in trouble - 10thousands of downloads do kinda catch the attention of the powers that be. Now if they only demanded realistic prices I'd be convinced.
Well, if Russia changes its laws so that AllOfMP3's service becomes illegal... the RIAA can't sue for alleged moetary losses before it became illegal, as there was no law to make it illegal before.
It would be like if the US made recycling of lightbulbs mandatory (giving the lightbulb-makers the right to sue you if you didn't bring broken lightbulbs) and then the lightbulbmakers try to sue you because you threw away a lightbulb ten years ago (instead of recycling it).
You cannot break laws retroactively. Even if the lightbulbmakers ran big campaigns and threatened to sue you if you don't recycle those lightbulbs, they cannot sue you for doing something in the past that now would break the law.
While I don't have any experience with Emulators I can only guess that the writers applied one of the very simplest principles of "getting anything done" to coding it: Divide and Conquer
Most humans can't deal with a gigantic trainload of work - they get caught up in details and start dropping important bits and pieces as they go along. Instead, partition the task in nice bite-sized chunks and deal with them one at a time - and while you worry about that one chunk, presume that anything farer away then, say, two references, somehow works automagically. Of course, if you want to get things done nicely you might add a bit more planning in the dividing, but the principle remains the same
Instead of programming a dynamic-webserver-gizmo, program a simple worker thread that listens to port 80. Then you expand that thread to reply when it recieves something. Then you rework it to be multi threaded with several worker threads...
The data that we license for Google Earth and Google Maps is made available for use under the restriction that it not be accessed or used outside of Google's client software.
In other words, they got a license for the images, data, whatever only for use in their software. The original providers of that data would - understandably - be unhappy if they allowed the data to be used by other products (remember, they want to keep selling the data to people). So Google has to be the "bad guy" and pull the plug from the 3rd party devs or the data providers will sue them for allowing others to take the data and/or pull the plug on Google's license.
This guy should get a medal and the senator should get a severe case of ass-kicking.
Congressman Markey is either dumb or incomptent to believe that closing eyes and ears to gaping security flaws and loudly chanting *our security is perfect* *our security of perfect* will magically prevent them from being exploited by a do-no-gooder. For heavens sake, Senator Schumer pointed out a similar exploit and NOTHING happened to fix it. *our security is perfect* *our security is perfect*.
I wish Congressman Markey would get his HEAD out of his ASS long enough not to order a FBI crackdown on a grad-student but to say "thank you for pointing them out, even though we ignored them so long, we will fix them" instead.
Finally, if he claims that this way the evil-doers will learn about new way to compromise security... guess what Mr. Congressman, I highly doubt they say "I want to do evil, let's browse the internet for exploits" - the amount of criminal energy required to perform those evil deeds we want to prevent usually means they also know something about "researching your target" and "planning" - so you can bet your ASS (including your head) that they already know about this weakness before a grad-student or a well-spirited senator stumble over them.
In the end it is all a question of leverage.
If the RIAA or MPAA or whatever had decided to agressively target youtube it would have had to either agree to some quite bad deals (=be neutered) or be dragged to court and taken down (as this kind of ligitation eats money like popcorn)
Now that Google stands behind it things have changed. Google is a heavyweight, both moneywise and in the "importance" sector - being one of the most important companies in searching and advertising and a few other sectors gives you lots of leverage in the industry. Thus RIAA and MPAA know that starting a pissing contest with Google would be quite painful indeed. And trying to out-sue Google would take long, eat lots of money with dubious results.
Thus the "content industry" will most likely try to seek a (for them) good deal with Google - which in turn means that Google there too has quit some leverage in the negotiations.
As the article says with some key characters dead and the major mysteries resolved there are no plot lines to hook on.
One could feel in the movie that the series ended prematurely - with the highly compressed plot material found in the movie and the comic one could have easily filled a 2nd season, not to mention "paths not taken". But I must say Joss Whedon did the right thing - he gave the series closure. We know how the big plots resolved, we mourn the loss of loved ones and yet there is a somewhat bright future imaginable for Serenity and their crew.
Still, I am sad that there will be no new Firefly movie or series in the predictable future, but who knows - once Fox loses its choking grip on this good TV series there might be hope again if a better channel picks up the series - but this will not happen in the next few years, so I will not be holding my breath.
Starting with place #5 Chrono Trigger:
It was definitly one of the most entertaining while also groundbreaking games of its time - the time-battle system, the combination of techniques for the battles, dozends of possible endings, countless sidequests and the ability to avoid battles (having to take on the 415th Generic Enemy you wipe away easily is a major turn-off). Shame with Chrono Cross though (it still was a great game, if only the story-makers had not decided to "hey let's kill off everything CT players hold dear and piss on their graves")
For #4
System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Both game stand synonymous for a new Genre - true first person action role playing games - not FPSs that got added an "roleplaying" system as if as an afterthought, but both sides - action and roleplaying - made as one, from one yarn. The multiple solution & multiple ending ability in Deus Ex gives it a slight advantage over SS2, but I would have been happy to see either on this spot.
For #3
Oblivion - is it the new quantum leap or just a propagation from the old. Perhaps a bit of both. I had some qualms regarding the difficulty of the game (scaling the power of enemies according to your level is nice, but please make sure their power niveau fits the setting - a level 1 character that gets beaten up by City Guards, but that can become champion of the arena - and thus best fighter in the world - just because the arena opponents are also pitiful weak hurts both the sense of accomplishment and suspension of disbelieve), but still the direction is the right one - RPGs become even more open-ended and lifelike, and Oblivion is pointing that direction.
#2 Planescape Torment
What can I say. A perfect story, told in a perfect way. Be who and what you want - literally; waking up without memories gives you that freedom. Truely one of the best RPG ever made.
#1 Fallout
Words fail me. Fallout has it all (though PS:T still wins in the story department).
Well seems like my notion was right after all.
They are nothing but sad wannabes, scriptkiddies who wanted to pose as l33t haX0rZ. Well, heads up guys, this will have been your last convention for quite some time because somehow quite unexpectedly (for you) most of the community didn't go "we really got punked!!! LOLOLOLOLOL! you win teh internets!" Bottom line. Don't be an asshole, or you will pay for it.
If you have not done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about
Ok you convinced me, I won't fly to the USA. I don't see any reason why a goverment should be allowed snoop in my private life "just to make sure I'm not a terrorist". Do they think terrorists are dumb enough to say "No, please only one way tickets and I don't need a method of leaving the airport. And please only a light meal, I don't want to blow myself up with a full stomach. But first I'll clear out my account and donate everything to a well-know extremist organistion." *sigh*
From the Article The hackers claim they know of about 30 unpatched Firefox flaws. They don't plan to disclose them, instead holding on to the bugs.
Jesse Ruderman, a Mozilla security staffer, attended the presentation and was called up on the stage with the two hackers. He attempted to persuade the presenters to responsibly disclose flaws via Mozilla's bug bounty program instead of using them for malicious purposes such as creating networks of hijacked PCs, called botnets.
"I do hope you guys change your minds and decide to report the holes to us and take away $500 per vulnerability instead of using them for botnets," Ruderman said.
The two hackers laughed off the comment. "It is a double-edged sword, but what we're doing is really for the greater good of the Internet, we're setting up communication networks for black hats," Wbeelsoi said.
First of all, guys, so you refuse to tell us what the bugs are, so we can't fix them and do this for the "greater good of the internet... setting up communication networks for black hats" WTF? What does having tens of thousands of additional zombie-machines that could DDoS or send SPAM do with the greater good of the internet. I almost hope you try to make money off the bugs (if you even know any more) so you get to know a nice prison cell and "Life without PC"(TM). Honestly, I think those guys are full of it, they probably don't know even one additional vulnerability and just try to show off how "big and powerful" they are.
They must feel kinda left out now that the RIAA has taken their place as "most hated content industry organisation" - but let's be honest, the RIAA have really toiled for that, so please, no hard feelings please.
Oh well, so they basically say "For every 1$ we ''lose'' through pirace (display extremely inflated numbers) the economy loses two dollars extra." Yes, I know its hard to believe, but that are the facts - I mean, all this surplus money, it just vanishes, being flushed down the toilets or is spent on some imported goods. Its not that just the MPAA members lose out, but the whole economy does. Besides, all those bits and bytes that those pirates steal, do you think nobody will miss them? No! The US economy is slowly being bled dry out of bits and bytes and soon they will have to import expensive foreign bits and bytes to keep operating - which might not even fit will into the pipes of the internets and clog that up too. This is the true threat of piracy.
Re-use when possible, re-code when sensible - that should be the baseline for both managers and programmers.
For programmers its simple to put into words - if you have programmed a function to resample colour images and now you need a function to resample black and white images, just use the colour image function.
As for managers - if you discover you have three projects to manage the time shedule of section A, section B and section C - tell one of the teams to make the software generic enough to manage all kinds of time shedules (including those of sections A, B, C) and reassign the other two teams.
But if, in the above image resampling example your function needs about twenty times as much time as a function specialized for B&W imaged would need and is used constantly, you should code a specialized function, if performance would take a too large hit.
Slashdot Mirror
The reasoning "It's not feasible to copy and distribute media that way because you need to distribute the VMs too" is flawed. If you wanted to re-emulate the entire viewing, then yes, you'd need the VMs etc. But what you want is the media - and since you already have that data sitting inside your VM plus the snapshop (remember that the VM needs to simulate everything) it should be possible to either record the thing with an authentic (read simulated hardware behaves as if it had DRM) VM and then use a modified VM (which is nearly identical in behaviour, when it comes to input from the Guest OS, but lacks the DRM protection) or use an already "misbehaving" VM (which pretends to have DRM protection, but does not) to run the Gues OS in the first place - and then extract the media from the snapshop/running system. More complex? Yes. Impossible to do for us geeks. Hell, no!
Well, CCP has selected the only reasonable way out of this mess - whether the latest allegations had a foundation of truth or not, their clumsy handeling of the last incident had already sufficiently tarnished their reputation so that those new allegations further damaged it - some doubt would always remain.
By installing a player oversight they take important steps to restore player faith in them - as the article said, especially in online games, the perception of reality is the reality.
Story. Suspension of Disbeliev. In RGPs you can be THE ONE - the hero who saves the world from the brink of destruction, you can be the one to beat the ULTIMATE EVIL. In MMOGs its either not really feasible or not really good for the suspension of disbeliev.
So, you and your party comes up to the castle of the EVIL OVERLORD, to defeat him. Just like the guys that are following behind you, the guys who are currently inside and the guys who are currently on the way out and maybe give you the hint "watch out for his nastly AOE attack when he dies the second time, almost got us with that one". Will it be a fun run? Yeah. But there is no suspension of disbeliev if you kill the same guy over and over again, like everybody else.
Can anyone imagine a oldschool RPG like Planescape: Torment as MMO? It would just not work - MMORPGs and RPG have similarities, but are essentially different game types.
So that fireing of that ISD reporter at the command of a BoB member.
That odd dev promiting himself to director, demoting himself a couple of minutes later without communication.
All inquiries related to above incident being buried and blocked out.
Banning of members who inquired and asked "unpleasant" questions, over formalities
Evidence that CCP wants to push certain results - "outcome X is desirable. see to it" in the storyline.
Previous accounts of collusion and corruption.
Failure to punish above accounts as written in policy.
All those things are only coincidences. No, sir, I don't buy it.
Ok, if the Devs want to play favorites and follow up their big "Influence the storyline" advertisments with secret oders along the lines of "Outcome X is preferred. See that it happens." and abuse their power to ensure that - then I don't need to play this game.
Hell, ther are plenty of other excellent MMOGs out there, where the Developers don't cheat their customers.
Welcome on my "Games I will never play" list.
Well, what can we say?
The typical Microsoft=Evil bash aside, their response was rather understandable and logical. They have beta-software, and they have low number of people who a previewing/testing that software. That software ends up leaked on the internet. Thus the only logical conclusion is that (at least) one of those people is responsible for the leak.
Assuming that leaks is not what you want and that somebody who leaked software before, will do so again, it is best to freeze the entire process until the one(s) responsible has been found. Also assuming that they accepted a NDA (the usual stuff forfeiting your propery, soul, and firstborn) this one guy or gal will not be in a happy place.
So, all in all, its nothing extraordinary.
Well, for us us who don't really understand much of the stock market Google Finance offers a neat und simple chart system to look at the market lines. Here's one for SCO. I found the period between 29th of November 2006 and 1st of December 2006 especially interesting... can anyone say 50% value drop? Also its amazing to see how the stock started off at 94$ per share...
True enough, but how many GMs would you then need? 1 per 100? To catch cheaters you need a quick response time, having your ticket idle even for a minute is usually long enough to allow the cheater finish whatever he is doing (kill you in PVP with 99999 damage attacks etc.) and return to being a "normal" users.
Also remember that those GM will have to deal with a flood of Support tickets, since people will use Bots and cheats if the punishment is unlikely. And of course even more peeps will be wrongly suspected of cheating if they behave "oddly".
When the "Warden" sofware got its first publicity I was among the sceptics - why should we give Blizzard the right and ability to sniff around in our computers.
I have started playing WoW a while ago, and now I have an answer: Because a significant number of people is willing to greedily cheat and spoil the fun for the rest of the players. And they are quite numerous, despite the Warden software - just imagine how many cheaters and bots there would be if the draconic punishment of being banned was not coupled with a high likelyhood of detection via the warden.
No matter where or when I log on I usually "meet" at least one cheater or bot per day. People who seem to run in predictable patters and do not respond to any meaningful interaction, and are still in the same area when you return from extended questing. Add to that number the countless gold-sellers who will whisper, yell and spam the chat with they annoying offers. No I don't want to buy your gold or powerleveling services, I hope your PC melts down into a puddle. And this is with the "Warden" software. I do not think I would want to play WoW in a warden-free environment, where "L0L0L0L, L00K aT m3, ImA lEeT hAXX0R!1!1!1!!" mindset of people run free and undisturbed.
The RIAA and MPAA have been lobbying for a bill that would allow them to shoot people, whom they suspect of being so-called pirates, on sight.
They promise they would never shoot innocent people, and in fact, added that being shot by a RIMPAA anti-piracy squad is actually proof that the target was a pirate.
Well, most people seem assume that Jeff Vogel is just another "I'm president of a software company, so I know what I'm talking about" guy. Wrong. This guy is also the main programmer of the Spiderwebsoftware. The company only has four people or so (do pet-taranulas count?). In any case, Jeff writes some excellent games - the Exile series (and the facelifted re-write the Avernum series) and the Geneforge series (to some extent) is pure crack for any old-school RPG addict.
If you have anything important to do, don't go download their trial versions - even the 1/3 of the game you can play before you have to register for the full version will cost you many, many, many, many hours. Personally, if you are not picky in the graphics sector, I'd reccommend you go for the Exile series first.
Humans are strange beings. Often its "Push them in one direction, they will run in the other".
So it is with DRM - part of the DRM hate originates from the "you force me to do (or rather not do) something" thought and the wish to resist whatever they are trying to do.
Watermarking, on the other hand, is more subtle, and I could actually support it; Share that file with your friends - no DRM or copyprotection will (in vain) try stop you. And even the company you downloaded the file from won't know or care - as long as you share it with just a few friends.
If you put it on the internet, however, you are in trouble - 10thousands of downloads do kinda catch the attention of the powers that be. Now if they only demanded realistic prices I'd be convinced.
This is Soviet Russia.
:p)
Prepeare to be Dot-Slashed.
(Oh well, I had Karma to burn
Well, if Russia changes its laws so that AllOfMP3's service becomes illegal... the RIAA can't sue for alleged moetary losses before it became illegal, as there was no law to make it illegal before.
It would be like if the US made recycling of lightbulbs mandatory (giving the lightbulb-makers the right to sue you if you didn't bring broken lightbulbs) and then the lightbulbmakers try to sue you because you threw away a lightbulb ten years ago (instead of recycling it). You cannot break laws retroactively. Even if the lightbulbmakers ran big campaigns and threatened to sue you if you don't recycle those lightbulbs, they cannot sue you for doing something in the past that now would break the law.
While I don't have any experience with Emulators I can only guess that the writers applied one of the very simplest principles of "getting anything done" to coding it:
Divide and Conquer
Most humans can't deal with a gigantic trainload of work - they get caught up in details and start dropping important bits and pieces as they go along. Instead, partition the task in nice bite-sized chunks and deal with them one at a time - and while you worry about that one chunk, presume that anything farer away then, say, two references, somehow works automagically. Of course, if you want to get things done nicely you might add a bit more planning in the dividing, but the principle remains the same
Instead of programming a dynamic-webserver-gizmo, program a simple worker thread that listens to port 80. Then you expand that thread to reply when it recieves something. Then you rework it to be multi threaded with several worker threads...
The data that we license for Google Earth and Google Maps is made available for use under the restriction that it not be accessed or used outside of Google's client software.
In other words, they got a license for the images, data, whatever only for use in their software. The original providers of that data would - understandably - be unhappy if they allowed the data to be used by other products (remember, they want to keep selling the data to people). So Google has to be the "bad guy" and pull the plug from the 3rd party devs or the data providers will sue them for allowing others to take the data and/or pull the plug on Google's license.
This guy should get a medal and the senator should get a severe case of ass-kicking.
Congressman Markey is either dumb or incomptent to believe that closing eyes and ears to gaping security flaws and loudly chanting *our security is perfect* *our security of perfect* will magically prevent them from being exploited by a do-no-gooder. For heavens sake, Senator Schumer pointed out a similar exploit and NOTHING happened to fix it. *our security is perfect* *our security is perfect*.
I wish Congressman Markey would get his HEAD out of his ASS long enough not to order a FBI crackdown on a grad-student but to say "thank you for pointing them out, even though we ignored them so long, we will fix them" instead.
Finally, if he claims that this way the evil-doers will learn about new way to compromise security... guess what Mr. Congressman, I highly doubt they say "I want to do evil, let's browse the internet for exploits" - the amount of criminal energy required to perform those evil deeds we want to prevent usually means they also know something about "researching your target" and "planning" - so you can bet your ASS (including your head) that they already know about this weakness before a grad-student or a well-spirited senator stumble over them.
In the end it is all a question of leverage.
If the RIAA or MPAA or whatever had decided to agressively target youtube it would have had to either agree to some quite bad deals (=be neutered) or be dragged to court and taken down (as this kind of ligitation eats money like popcorn)
Now that Google stands behind it things have changed. Google is a heavyweight, both moneywise and in the "importance" sector - being one of the most important companies in searching and advertising and a few other sectors gives you lots of leverage in the industry. Thus RIAA and MPAA know that starting a pissing contest with Google would be quite painful indeed. And trying to out-sue Google would take long, eat lots of money with dubious results.
Thus the "content industry" will most likely try to seek a (for them) good deal with Google - which in turn means that Google there too has quit some leverage in the negotiations.
As the article says with some key characters dead and the major mysteries resolved there are no plot lines to hook on.
One could feel in the movie that the series ended prematurely - with the highly compressed plot material found in the movie and the comic one could have easily filled a 2nd season, not to mention "paths not taken". But I must say Joss Whedon did the right thing - he gave the series closure. We know how the big plots resolved, we mourn the loss of loved ones and yet there is a somewhat bright future imaginable for Serenity and their crew.
Still, I am sad that there will be no new Firefly movie or series in the predictable future, but who knows - once Fox loses its choking grip on this good TV series there might be hope again if a better channel picks up the series - but this will not happen in the next few years, so I will not be holding my breath.
Starting with place #5 Chrono Trigger:
It was definitly one of the most entertaining while also groundbreaking games of its time - the time-battle system, the combination of techniques for the battles, dozends of possible endings, countless sidequests and the ability to avoid battles (having to take on the 415th Generic Enemy you wipe away easily is a major turn-off). Shame with Chrono Cross though (it still was a great game, if only the story-makers had not decided to "hey let's kill off everything CT players hold dear and piss on their graves")
For #4
System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Both game stand synonymous for a new Genre - true first person action role playing games - not FPSs that got added an "roleplaying" system as if as an afterthought, but both sides - action and roleplaying - made as one, from one yarn. The multiple solution & multiple ending ability in Deus Ex gives it a slight advantage over SS2, but I would have been happy to see either on this spot.
For #3
Oblivion - is it the new quantum leap or just a propagation from the old. Perhaps a bit of both. I had some qualms regarding the difficulty of the game (scaling the power of enemies according to your level is nice, but please make sure their power niveau fits the setting - a level 1 character that gets beaten up by City Guards, but that can become champion of the arena - and thus best fighter in the world - just because the arena opponents are also pitiful weak hurts both the sense of accomplishment and suspension of disbelieve), but still the direction is the right one - RPGs become even more open-ended and lifelike, and Oblivion is pointing that direction.
#2 Planescape Torment
What can I say. A perfect story, told in a perfect way. Be who and what you want - literally; waking up without memories gives you that freedom. Truely one of the best RPG ever made. #1 Fallout
Words fail me. Fallout has it all (though PS:T still wins in the story department).
Well seems like my notion was right after all.
They are nothing but sad wannabes, scriptkiddies who wanted to pose as l33t haX0rZ. Well, heads up guys, this will have been your last convention for quite some time because somehow quite unexpectedly (for you) most of the community didn't go "we really got punked!!! LOLOLOLOLOL! you win teh internets!" Bottom line. Don't be an asshole, or you will pay for it.
If you have not done anything wrong you have nothing to worry about
Ok you convinced me, I won't fly to the USA. I don't see any reason why a goverment should be allowed snoop in my private life "just to make sure I'm not a terrorist". Do they think terrorists are dumb enough to say "No, please only one way tickets and I don't need a method of leaving the airport. And please only a light meal, I don't want to blow myself up with a full stomach. But first I'll clear out my account and donate everything to a well-know extremist organistion." *sigh*
From the Article
The hackers claim they know of about 30 unpatched Firefox flaws. They don't plan to disclose them, instead holding on to the bugs.
Jesse Ruderman, a Mozilla security staffer, attended the presentation and was called up on the stage with the two hackers. He attempted to persuade the presenters to responsibly disclose flaws via Mozilla's bug bounty program instead of using them for malicious purposes such as creating networks of hijacked PCs, called botnets.
"I do hope you guys change your minds and decide to report the holes to us and take away $500 per vulnerability instead of using them for botnets," Ruderman said.
The two hackers laughed off the comment. "It is a double-edged sword, but what we're doing is really for the greater good of the Internet, we're setting up communication networks for black hats," Wbeelsoi said.
First of all, guys, so you refuse to tell us what the bugs are, so we can't fix them and do this for the "greater good of the internet... setting up communication networks for black hats" WTF? What does having tens of thousands of additional zombie-machines that could DDoS or send SPAM do with the greater good of the internet. I almost hope you try to make money off the bugs (if you even know any more) so you get to know a nice prison cell and "Life without PC"(TM). Honestly, I think those guys are full of it, they probably don't know even one additional vulnerability and just try to show off how "big and powerful" they are.
They must feel kinda left out now that the RIAA has taken their place as "most hated content industry organisation" - but let's be honest, the RIAA have really toiled for that, so please, no hard feelings please.
Oh well, so they basically say "For every 1$ we ''lose'' through pirace (display extremely inflated numbers) the economy loses two dollars extra." Yes, I know its hard to believe, but that are the facts - I mean, all this surplus money, it just vanishes, being flushed down the toilets or is spent on some imported goods. Its not that just the MPAA members lose out, but the whole economy does. Besides, all those bits and bytes that those pirates steal, do you think nobody will miss them? No! The US economy is slowly being bled dry out of bits and bytes and soon they will have to import expensive foreign bits and bytes to keep operating - which might not even fit will into the pipes of the internets and clog that up too. This is the true threat of piracy.
Re-use when possible, re-code when sensible - that should be the baseline for both managers and programmers.
For programmers its simple to put into words - if you have programmed a function to resample colour images and now you need a function to resample black and white images, just use the colour image function.
As for managers - if you discover you have three projects to manage the time shedule of section A, section B and section C - tell one of the teams to make the software generic enough to manage all kinds of time shedules (including those of sections A, B, C) and reassign the other two teams.
But if, in the above image resampling example your function needs about twenty times as much time as a function specialized for B&W imaged would need and is used constantly, you should code a specialized function, if performance would take a too large hit.