And it was easily circumvented. The first thing I did was write an agent that would remove this flag and the "read receipt" flag from every mail as it entered my inbox.
It made the messages easier to deal with, and I didn't have people calling me on the phone 2 minutes after they saw I opened their message, wondering why I hadn't replied yet.
Don't worry, it's not like it's AMD or Intel doing this....
(whisper whisper...)
THEY'RE DOING WHAT?!?!!? HOLY MOTHER OF @#$@#!!! THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY IS FRICKIN' FALLING!!!!!!!!
We only have one option to stop these guys: Don't buy it.
But here's the problem with that: What if they're only interested in huge commercial bulk orders anyway? I'm afraid my company and many others would buy them without even considering future repercussions.
Sooner or later, how are we going to get a relatively high-performance CPU without DRM? Someone here must have alternatives. THINK, NERDS! THINK!!!!
So, When you buy something at Babbages then walk across the mall to buy something from EB, you're gonna ask a stranger to hold your bag outside while you go in and shop - right? Otherwise, you're going to have to show the EB people your Babbages receipt for Baywatch Screensaver X.
While it is an interesting idea, I don't think it's realistic to expect many customers for such a product.
It seems that the main target audience is people who do things like building their own arcade cabinet. Face it: geeks like that (Me - Arcanomicon), like to put together the PC components too.
In my case, I built the entire thing from junk parts so that it didn't cost a dime. I can upgrade it a piece at a time, as I upgrade my other computers and scavenge their old motherboards/memory/etc...
An 'all-in-one' solution that's not a heck of a lot cheaper than buying the parts and which could restrict later upgrade options.... eh... not a hot product in my opinion.
The game you played was a port of the arcade Mario Brothers game. It kind of stunk; it wasn't nearly as successful as his other games, nor was it even innovative. Funny you mentioned Joust, because MB wasn't going to be a 2-player game until Miyamoto saw Joust and copied it.
They didn't mention Donkey Kong 3 and that horrible NES SMB2 thing which wasn't even a Mario Brothers game in Japan. Those might be the only 3 bad games he did in the 80's though; His good games far outnumber his bad.
One of his really good games not mentioned in the article is Donkey Kong Jr.
>> Here is an example of one thing people often think the client does NOT need to know... creatures that are behind a hill...
Incorrect. If my client doesn't know it's there, I can't sic my pet on it or cast non-los DD spells. I would hate for the game to not send me creatures it doesn't think I have Line Of Sight on, because bolt spells commonly miss if you or the mob or even NEAR a hill. I've also seen my rain spells miss many times in ToV ("You cannot see that target!") when I was near a corner but could still see 100% of the mob.
Creatures can attack you through walls too (because the servers aren't powerful enough to actually compute LoS and just use agro radius). Under your suggestion, I couldn't target them back, until they came through the wall. Which, if they're casters, could be very very bad.
In addition, a lot of clients needs to know where ALL creatures in the zone are:
Druids need it for tracking, Rangers need it for tracking, Bards need it for tracking, Magicians need it for sense summoned, sense undead, sense animal... etc...
Now, that said, they could change it so that the info only gets sent when these abilities are used. BUT, all you would have to do is use the ability while you had ShowEQ up to refresh it. It would cripple it's usefulness, but not disable it completely. The side effect is that it would cripple the servers completely, computing LoS for every client.
Bull. Internet routing isn't done on the hardware address level, all it cares about is your IP.
People change MACs all the time; it's an easily changeable driver setting with some NICs. Unless the machines with dupe MACs are on the same local segment, it shouldn't matter.
I know they are not the names of zones or items, and no one has to write down the names of their online friends to remember them.
Most EQ players keep a list like this. It's called an 'idiot list'.
I will almost guarantee that the names are of people he considered to be jerks (muscling in on his camps, or had ripped him off on trades, etc.). He probably wrote down their names so that he could either warn his friends to avoid them, or bash them on a discussion board later.
They probably didn't know him from Adam. So, I don't see what would be learned by talking them them short of "It was *our* pull, he was KSing *us*". They might not have anything to do with his final hours. Indeed - why make notes to remember someone if they've just driven you to suicide?
Secondly: When one person out of hundreds of thousands commits suicide over a *game*, it's pretty apparent that this one person had other issues.
We've heard this all a hundred times before: "Dungeons and Dragons makes kids go nuts!", "Laser Tag makes kids go shoot people!", etc, etc.
If *I* were an epileptic who quit my job and move back in with my parents, I don't think there's any chance in hell they would pay for (or let) me to sit on my ass 12 hours a day in front of a device guaranteed to give me seizures. If his parents did that, what other values might they have reinforced in this guy for 21 years prior?
Depending upon the time of the call, earth might be on the opposite side of the Sun - the distance varies a lot. 17 minutes was my guess at an 'average'.
Of course I didn't read the article! What do you think - I have all day to read articles? If I did that, when would I have time to fly off the handle with quick responses?!?!? Damn it, they say you emulate what you hate (which explains my collection of Odyssey2 ROMs)... (and yes... I do own the original cartriges)... and I just turned into one of those guys who believes what everyone else was writing without reading the frickin' article.
I saw some other posts indicating that the wording was vague enough to include DoS attacks. Now, reading it myself, I see what you mean - I don't think it would encompass that due to the 'intermediary' mention. It's more like putting a bunch of Charlie Pride CDs in Metallica cases.
I can foresee one result of this: 'trusted' P2P. These fools are going to get checks built into P2P so that we can add blocks for lamers who share fakes! Thanks RIAA!
A) I own every Sonic Youth CD (true story). B) In a drunken stupor, I drop one of my CD's, step on it and crack it. C) Should I not be able to get the songs again via P2P and burn a replacement? After all, I've already paid for them once (x4 for the record companies share). D) The RIAA DoS's me, shutting down the web server and other functions of my main machine not related to the supposed 'infringement'.
As I see it, this allows the RIAA to 'take the law into their own hands', they can attack whomever they want, whenever they want, with no burden of proof and not be liable for unwarranted damages. That's not what this country is about.
Speaking of country: Say this gets passed into law. What if the person who gets a misguided attack resides in *another* country. Can that person sue the RIAA back to the stone age? I certainly hope they can.
Here's one more kink in the works for you:
a) The RIAA starts attacking a guy. b) He disconnect/reconnects (getting a new IP address). c) I sign on and get his old IP - wasting my time and effort to troubleshoot the problem. Maybe I reboot a few times but get the same IP.
>> So, if you want to go past, say, Mars, you're going to have to be ready for some lag on your phone call home.
"*some* lag"??? I think it takes about 17 minutes for light to travel the distance from here Mars, much less beyond it. It would be 34 minutes before you heard their reply to what you just said - I think that qualifies as "hella lag".
How about they ask us which type of advertisements we'd like to see (let us choose categories via a menu), instead of trying to ascertain what we're interested in via spying on our viewing habits?
The one night of the week I watch BattleBots, I don't want to see a ton of feminine hygene product advertisements just because my wife watches soap operas every day.
The one friend I have who *had* a StarBand setup cancelled it. For these reasons:
- *Constant* disconnections. I'm talking about a dozen times a day.
- Sub-5k upload speeds. Tech support said that his speed was 'normal', despite the promises of 25k upstream when he signed up.
- Latency from hell. You will not be able to play any online games without being at a *major* disadvantage.
He was happier back when he had a DirecPC dish and had his upstream going through a modem.
If you only want to web-surf or read usenet, and you don't mind outages, isn't a dial-up cheaper?
WHAT?!?!? Sony's going to make a PS3 and it's *more* powerful than the XBOX?!?!?
But, of course, NINTENDO knows this... and their ready with their "GAMEPENTAGON", which *supposedly* will have even better specs as the PS3 (as soon as they find out what those specs are).
BUT WAIT, as unbelievable as it sounds, MICROSOFT is just *WAITING* for this move so that they can release the XBOX-II. Now, you're gonna call me a liar, but: IT HAS HIGHER SPECS THAN THE GAMEPENTAGON!!!!!
Now, I'm sure you Sony insiders know that the PS3 is just a farce, meant to draw out the competition, so that they can then release the *PS4*!!!!!
BUT...
aww, screw it... it's just too far to go for a joke.
Let me play devil's advocate for a second here. Please don't flame me for thinking out loud, just point out the errors in my logic.
These companies are bitching because they basically don't get a $10 discount on Windows if they offer other OS solutions. So, basically, MS is giving these companies a discount if they 'partner' with them to promote Windows. Don't *all* companies do something like this??? Does this differ from the 'bulk discount' manufacturer deals we see everywhere by *that* much? Instead of discounting in quantities bought, they're discounting in percentages installed - that's the only difference.
So, companies that offer Linux et al are outraged because they have to pay $10 more for Windows than if they were exclusively MS. What does that tell you? Could it be telling us that these companies really should stick to just Windows if that's all they anticipate selling? After all, they wouldn't have to pay the $10 more for all the non-Windows systems they sell! In fact, they would save money on all those systems by not having to pay MS a dime.
Which brings to mind this:
Do you *really* want a manufacturer's installation of Linux on your box??? Is there ONE SINGLE Linux user that wouldn't much prefer to FDISK and install it clean? Do you *want* your Linux to come with an AOL icon integrated into the desktop???
Come on guys! We've seen how HP, Compaq, and company can totally trash up an OS as simple as *Windows* with all their shareware and free previews (not to mention that sometimes they just plain screw up and have the wrong drivers in the build). Just *imagine* how f'd up the Linux builds would be! I get tired of seeing manufacturer logos on BIOS screens; I sure as hell don't want them all over the kernel too.
If enough companies sold systems with Linux, FreeBSD, or whatever already loaded on them, Microsoft would be *forced* to drop the $10 extra crap - in order to sell more Windows! Buy your next computer from a manufacturer with a backbone, if you *must* have a badly mangled pre-loaded OS on it.
And that ends my rant boys and girls. Tip your waitress. I'll be here all week.
Slashdot Mirror
And it was easily circumvented. The first thing I did was write an agent that would remove this flag and the "read receipt" flag from every mail as it entered my inbox.
It made the messages easier to deal with, and I didn't have people calling me on the phone 2 minutes after they saw I opened their message, wondering why I hadn't replied yet.
I think polititians shouldn't have any filters on their e-mail.
After about 2 weeks of what the average person goes through, we'd see stronger anti-spam legislation/penalties.
The XP model numbers do *not* indicate the equivalent Intel P4 processor speed.
The XP model numbers are a benchmark of how fast previous AMD non-XP processors would have to be clocked to provide the same performance.
Uhmmm... if Taco didn't read the comments the first time it was submitted, what makes anyone think he'll read this one and find out it's a dupe? :)
Don't worry, it's not like it's AMD or Intel doing this....
(whisper whisper...)
THEY'RE DOING WHAT?!?!!? HOLY MOTHER OF @#$@#!!! THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY IS FRICKIN' FALLING!!!!!!!!
We only have one option to stop these guys: Don't buy it.
But here's the problem with that: What if they're only interested in huge commercial bulk orders anyway? I'm afraid my company and many others would buy them without even considering future repercussions.
Sooner or later, how are we going to get a relatively high-performance CPU without DRM? Someone here must have alternatives. THINK, NERDS! THINK!!!!
So, When you buy something at Babbages then walk across the mall to buy something from EB, you're gonna ask a stranger to hold your bag outside while you go in and shop - right? Otherwise, you're going to have to show the EB people your Babbages receipt for Baywatch Screensaver X.
It seems that the main target audience is people who do things like building their own arcade cabinet. Face it: geeks like that (Me - Arcanomicon), like to put together the PC components too.
In my case, I built the entire thing from junk parts so that it didn't cost a dime. I can upgrade it a piece at a time, as I upgrade my other computers and scavenge their old motherboards/memory/etc...
An 'all-in-one' solution that's not a heck of a lot cheaper than buying the parts and which could restrict later upgrade options.... eh... not a hot product in my opinion.
OMG...
Must not...
write virus....
to turn...
everyone else's systems...
*pink* at the LAN party.
Oh, who am I kidding - gotta start coding now.
The game you played was a port of the arcade Mario Brothers game. It kind of stunk; it wasn't nearly as successful as his other games, nor was it even innovative. Funny you mentioned Joust, because MB wasn't going to be a 2-player game until Miyamoto saw Joust and copied it.
They didn't mention Donkey Kong 3 and that horrible NES SMB2 thing which wasn't even a Mario Brothers game in Japan. Those might be the only 3 bad games he did in the 80's though; His good games far outnumber his bad.
One of his really good games not mentioned in the article is Donkey Kong Jr.
>> Here is an example of one thing people often think the client does NOT need to know... creatures that are behind a hill...
Incorrect. If my client doesn't know it's there, I can't sic my pet on it or cast non-los DD spells. I would hate for the game to not send me creatures it doesn't think I have Line Of Sight on, because bolt spells commonly miss if you or the mob or even NEAR a hill. I've also seen my rain spells miss many times in ToV ("You cannot see that target!") when I was near a corner but could still see 100% of the mob.
Creatures can attack you through walls too (because the servers aren't powerful enough to actually compute LoS and just use agro radius). Under your suggestion, I couldn't target them back, until they came through the wall. Which, if they're casters, could be very very bad.
In addition, a lot of clients needs to know where ALL creatures in the zone are:
Druids need it for tracking, Rangers need it for tracking, Bards need it for tracking, Magicians need it for sense summoned, sense undead, sense animal... etc...
Now, that said, they could change it so that the info only gets sent when these abilities are used. BUT, all you would have to do is use the ability while you had ShowEQ up to refresh it. It would cripple it's usefulness, but not disable it completely. The side effect is that it would cripple the servers completely, computing LoS for every client.
The actual driver is unified. You can pull a TNT-based card out of your machine and replace it with a GF4 board and never have to update the drivers.
Bull. Internet routing isn't done on the hardware address level, all it cares about is your IP.
People change MACs all the time; it's an easily changeable driver setting with some NICs. Unless the machines with dupe MACs are on the same local segment, it shouldn't matter.
I think his point was, since you can do /tell's between all users/servers in EQ, it's also a bigger chat 'forum' than EFNET.
About those names scribbled in his notes:
I know they are not the names of zones or items, and no one has to write down the names of their online friends to remember them.
Most EQ players keep a list like this. It's called an 'idiot list'.
I will almost guarantee that the names are of people he considered to be jerks (muscling in on his camps, or had ripped him off on trades, etc.). He probably wrote down their names so that he could either warn his friends to avoid them, or bash them on a discussion board later.
They probably didn't know him from Adam. So, I don't see what would be learned by talking them them short of "It was *our* pull, he was KSing *us*". They might not have anything to do with his final hours. Indeed - why make notes to remember someone if they've just driven you to suicide?
First of all, 21 is not a 'kid'.
Secondly: When one person out of hundreds of thousands commits suicide over a *game*, it's pretty apparent that this one person had other issues.
We've heard this all a hundred times before: "Dungeons and Dragons makes kids go nuts!", "Laser Tag makes kids go shoot people!", etc, etc.
If *I* were an epileptic who quit my job and move back in with my parents, I don't think there's any chance in hell they would pay for (or let) me to sit on my ass 12 hours a day in front of a device guaranteed to give me seizures. If his parents did that, what other values might they have reinforced in this guy for 21 years prior?
If you comprehend what he's saying, metric users need to change too, so you would *also* be changing to the right system for the *first* time.
-J
Depending upon the time of the call, earth might be on the opposite side of the Sun - the distance varies a lot. 17 minutes was my guess at an 'average'.
-J
Of course I didn't read the article! What do you think - I have all day to read articles? If I did that, when would I have time to fly off the handle with quick responses?!?!? Damn it, they say you emulate what you hate (which explains my collection of Odyssey2 ROMs)... (and yes... I do own the original cartriges)... and I just turned into one of those guys who believes what everyone else was writing without reading the frickin' article.
I saw some other posts indicating that the wording was vague enough to include DoS attacks. Now, reading it myself, I see what you mean - I don't think it would encompass that due to the 'intermediary' mention. It's more like putting a bunch of Charlie Pride CDs in Metallica cases.
I can foresee one result of this: 'trusted' P2P. These fools are going to get checks built into P2P so that we can add blocks for lamers who share fakes! Thanks RIAA!
-J
In your example you're *removing* an item, not duplicating it. Duh.
Consider this scenario:
A) I own every Sonic Youth CD (true story).
B) In a drunken stupor, I drop one of my CD's, step on it and crack it.
C) Should I not be able to get the songs again via P2P and burn a replacement? After all, I've already paid for them once (x4 for the record companies share).
D) The RIAA DoS's me, shutting down the web server and other functions of my main machine not related to the supposed 'infringement'.
As I see it, this allows the RIAA to 'take the law into their own hands', they can attack whomever they want, whenever they want, with no burden of proof and not be liable for unwarranted damages. That's not what this country is about.
Speaking of country: Say this gets passed into law. What if the person who gets a misguided attack resides in *another* country. Can that person sue the RIAA back to the stone age? I certainly hope they can.
Here's one more kink in the works for you:
a) The RIAA starts attacking a guy.
b) He disconnect/reconnects (getting a new IP address).
c) I sign on and get his old IP - wasting my time and effort to troubleshoot the problem. Maybe I reboot a few times but get the same IP.
Who's the criminal here?
>> So, if you want to go past, say, Mars, you're going to have to be ready for some lag on your phone call home.
"*some* lag"??? I think it takes about 17 minutes for light to travel the distance from here Mars, much less beyond it. It would be 34 minutes before you heard their reply to what you just said - I think that qualifies as "hella lag".
How about they ask us which type of advertisements we'd like to see (let us choose categories via a menu), instead of trying to ascertain what we're interested in via spying on our viewing habits?
The one night of the week I watch BattleBots, I don't want to see a ton of feminine hygene product advertisements just because my wife watches soap operas every day.
-J
The one friend I have who *had* a StarBand setup cancelled it. For these reasons: - *Constant* disconnections. I'm talking about a dozen times a day. - Sub-5k upload speeds. Tech support said that his speed was 'normal', despite the promises of 25k upstream when he signed up. - Latency from hell. You will not be able to play any online games without being at a *major* disadvantage. He was happier back when he had a DirecPC dish and had his upstream going through a modem. If you only want to web-surf or read usenet, and you don't mind outages, isn't a dial-up cheaper?
WHAT?!?!? Sony's going to make a PS3 and it's *more* powerful than the XBOX?!?!?
But, of course, NINTENDO knows this... and their ready with their "GAMEPENTAGON", which *supposedly* will have even better specs as the PS3 (as soon as they find out what those specs are).
BUT WAIT, as unbelievable as it sounds, MICROSOFT is just *WAITING* for this move so that they can release the XBOX-II. Now, you're gonna call me a liar, but: IT HAS HIGHER SPECS THAN THE GAMEPENTAGON!!!!!
Now, I'm sure you Sony insiders know that the PS3 is just a farce, meant to draw out the competition, so that they can then release the *PS4*!!!!!
BUT...
aww, screw it... it's just too far to go for a joke.
Let me play devil's advocate for a second here. Please don't flame me for thinking out loud, just point out the errors in my logic.
These companies are bitching because they basically don't get a $10 discount on Windows if they offer other OS solutions. So, basically, MS is giving these companies a discount if they 'partner' with them to promote Windows. Don't *all* companies do something like this??? Does this differ from the 'bulk discount' manufacturer deals we see everywhere by *that* much? Instead of discounting in quantities bought, they're discounting in percentages installed - that's the only difference.
So, companies that offer Linux et al are outraged because they have to pay $10 more for Windows than if they were exclusively MS. What does that tell you? Could it be telling us that these companies really should stick to just Windows if that's all they anticipate selling? After all, they wouldn't have to pay the $10 more for all the non-Windows systems they sell! In fact, they would save money on all those systems by not having to pay MS a dime.
Which brings to mind this:
Do you *really* want a manufacturer's installation of Linux on your box??? Is there ONE SINGLE Linux user that wouldn't much prefer to FDISK and install it clean? Do you *want* your Linux to come with an AOL icon integrated into the desktop???
Come on guys! We've seen how HP, Compaq, and company can totally trash up an OS as simple as *Windows* with all their shareware and free previews (not to mention that sometimes they just plain screw up and have the wrong drivers in the build). Just *imagine* how f'd up the Linux builds would be! I get tired of seeing manufacturer logos on BIOS screens; I sure as hell don't want them all over the kernel too.
If enough companies sold systems with Linux, FreeBSD, or whatever already loaded on them, Microsoft would be *forced* to drop the $10 extra crap - in order to sell more Windows! Buy your next computer from a manufacturer with a backbone, if you *must* have a badly mangled pre-loaded OS on it.
And that ends my rant boys and girls. Tip your waitress. I'll be here all week.
-J