The marketing for Charlies Angles 2 in the UK was hilarious. There were two distinct styles of ads, one which urged people to see it early "to be one of the first", and one which urged people to go see it with a large groups of friends because they'd enjoy it more. It was so transparent that they wanted people to see it early before someone warned them not to bother and see it in a large group so one person wouldn't warn all their friends. I loved the original film and I was looking forward to the sequel, but those ads pretty much told me (a) it sucked and (b) the studio KNEW it sucked.
Normally I get around 100 spams every day but I've been getting 30-50 every five minutes for the last six hours. I even installed MailWasher to deal with them because my other virus checker (Spam Weasel) had to either (a) download them to check if they were spam or not, or (b) just let them through. Not much good.
Note that I'm *assuming* these spams are a result of the virus discussed in the News.com story, although the subject lines and attachments are very different from the ones mentioned.
So what happens now? Does this thing just go on and on until September 10th? Right now my business and personal e-mail accounts are pretty much useless, and at 100k+ per spam, one of my mailboxes is in danger of filling up unless I sit here constantly deleting all the junk.
there was little need for agents because game technology wasn't advanced enough to support dramatic music scores, lifelike animation, spectacular explosions and lengthy dialogue
Forcing the RIAA to have their subpoenas issued from the local court rather than Washington a) is legally correct
What a curious statement of "fact", if that's what it's intended to be. The implication is that issuing them without going through a local court is legally incorrect, which is an interesting take on things, ie: wrong.
I'm not arguing that the DMCA is a Good or Bad Thing, but it is law and it allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas without going through a court. Verizon was the test case and the RIAA won, hence there's a precedent ruling that their behaviour is "legally correct".
If the TV channels you watch use permanent on-screen logos (DOGs, idents, whatever) then once you've narrowed down your list of TV choices you should check-up on how prone each of them is to so-called "logo burn". Some sets are much more vulnerable than others, especially rear-projection.
Monitors have screensavers, TVs generally don't, and if (for example) you're watching a news channel for an hour, with a logo constantly displayed in the corner of the screen, you could soon find that there's a "shadow" permanently burned on your screen. This will interfere with the rest of your viewing as the colour in that area of the screen will always be distorted.
Note that some TV manufacturers do warn about their sets being prone to logo burn, but these warnings are only made in the small-print of the manual, which of course you will only read after you've bought the set, if at all.
I'd just like to thank the submitter for mentioning Putty.
I've been using it since I switched to an SSH-only web host last year, and I've always been 'troubled' by the fact that I wouldn't be able to get onto the server from another PC with a standard telnet client.
Being the quick-thinking genius that I am it never occurred to me to just keep a copy of Putty (plus key) on my pen drive! And even typing this, I wonder why I never thought to just put it on a floppy! (Which actually makes more sense, seeing as not all PCs have USB ports.)
Oh man I'm ashamed of how dumb I am.
Seriously, that's a weight off my mind! (What little mind I apparently have.)
Seems to me that people who buy an SOE game should pretty much know by now what they're getting themselves into.
Consider this: There are lots of complaints about bugs. Lots of complaints about servers being unavailable. Lots of complaints about cheating, poor gameplay, boring quests, etc, etc... But regardless of what specifically people are complaining about, the pervasive theme running through 90% of complaints is that SOE simply don't care about their customers.
A friend of mine who lives in Yorkshire feels exactly the same way. He's with NTL for his phone and broadband, and he says that if he ever moved house, being able to get either NTL or another non-BT comms provider would be a major influence in his decision of where to live. Like you, me, and many other people, he simply doesn't want to feed BT anymore.
Can't get it in my area. Our local council is currently using tax payer's money to run TV commercials encouraging people to "register their interest" in the hope that British Telecom will upgrade our exchange. It's crazy! Tax money is being wasted on TV ads so BT can be sure there's enough demand to make the exchange upgrade profitable! With the amount the ads have cost, I bet they could have upgraded the exchange. But that would be too simple.
The award for the most outrageous bandwidth cap so far must go to BTopenworld, the ISP division of British Telecom.
BT is widely disliked for not providing ADSL in rural areas. Solution? They launched a satellite service costing 900 pounds for installation and then 60 pounds per month subscription. (Why the hell does Slashdot not let me use a pound sign?! Okay we're a small country but we DO still have a currency!)
They waited until they had around a thousand subscribers, the most they were expected to get and all of them locked-in to a 12-month contract, and then they capped the service to near-dial-up level.
They had previously signed-up hundreds of thousands of people to a 24/7 dial-up plan and then capped them to a couple of hours per day. (I was one of them. I cancelled, they continued billing me for five months. It's a year later and I'm still fighting them for the 80 pounds they took. Court looks like the next step.)
a developer incapable of actually producing a game
You're talking about DNF. Other games have bolted from the 3DR stable while DNF is still being preened.
Why does/. like to predict the death of things so much? So much negativity here.
Well obviously I speak on behalf of Slashdot and its entire readership. Oh no, hang on, I don't. And besides I'm not predicting the death of anything, merely a change of direction. And I'm not even predicting it, I'm saying it's a possibility. So there!:-)
It's possible, perhaps even likely, that games companies will become the dominant producers of guides. Why should they let third-parties profit off the back of their hard work? Plus of course there are two revenue streams available to them, not just the one available to third-parties...
1. Selling the guide on its own.
2. At a later date, when sales of the game and guide have dried up, bundling them together (perhaps with a DVD or soundtrack CD) and selling them as special editions, gift packs, etc. Third-party guide publishers generally don't have this option available to them, so the shelf life of a guide is relatively short.
George Broussard of 3D Realms has already talked about preventing third-parties from publishing guides to Duke Nukem Forever, by not allowing them to use screenshots. (Sure they can still publish the guide, freedom of speech 'n' all that, but who's going to buy a guide without screenshots?) That would suggest 3DR intends to produce their own guide at some point, and if a big developer like 3DR starts the bandwagon rolling then we can expect to see a lot of other developers piling up on the back of it. And quite right too.
A game called "Star Monkey" just sounds like fun:)
I think it's a ridiculous name that doesn't fit the game at all. The game is a tough, military-themed shooter and "Star Monkey" sounds like a jokey game for kids. Doubtless quite a few people have given the game a miss because of its name, and they'll have missed out on a winner. (Plus the developers will have missed out on a sale.)
Both games have demo versions available, although the demo of Ultra Assault plays for a very short period of time (a minute?) and has a counter ticking down in the middle of the screen, so it's very difficult to experience what the game is like because you simply can't play enough of it. Star Monkey doesn't suffer from this problem.
Both of these games use 3D graphics but are presented as top-down 2D shooters.
(Obvious disclaimer: I'm not associated with Small Rockets in any way.)
Did you know that 'Network users have a back door to your hard drive while you're online, thereby seeing your personal, private information, such as bank records, social security number, etc.'?
This is no more dishonest than the pro-p2p crowd saying that p2p apps are used for legal reasons as well as illegal ones. Yes they are, but we all know what the most popular uses are, and they're illegal. It is equally true for the MPAA to say that p2p apps give people a back door to your hard drive (disregarding the awful 80s hacker movie terminology). Theoretically they do, although in most cases it would require stupidity on the part of the user.
You can't use semi-dishonest arguments and then complain when they are met with semi-dishonest counter-arguments!:-)
(Well you *can* because you can do whatever you want, but your argument loses credibility.)
Kinda nit-picking here but a quote from the article...
Usenet is a giant, distributed database of discussion groups, called news groups
Actually it would be more accurate to say it the other way around, ie: News groups are a giant, distributed database of discussion groups, called Usenet. If I remember correctly, the term "news groups" was started by AOL, referring to what had always been known as Usenet. In much the same way that blogs on AOL will be known as journals.
we use computer games to exercise and enhance our information processing capabilities
No we don't. We use them for fun. Any enhancement of our "information processing" is an accidental bonus. There may be rare cases when specially written/selected games are used by carers to help people who are suffering from physical or mental problems. But games are never designed, marketed or purchased on the strength of how they might enhance our information processing.
Honestly I have nothing against the hardware, but if you ever have to call their tech support people... OH. MY. GOD. And this company has won awards for its after-sales support! They're appalling.
What I should have said is that I've stopped using Windows Update entirely. I figure that if a major bundled app like Movie Maker (which I chose to update manually) can be tampered with like that then I really don't want Microsoft having carte blanche freedom to change other components of my OS.
I was even more suspicious when they incorporated rights management into Media Player and then suddenly there were security holes "discovered" in previous versions that required people to urgently upgrade to the new version. Seems to me like MS software updates can be less about upgrading your system and more about changing it to Microsoft's new view of how it should be.
I wonder if Microsoft already knows of security flaws in any other Windows components, but they're keeping quiet about them until such a time as the "critical security patch" can be used to deploy other features, changes, restrictions, etc...
(I'm not at all anti-Microsoft btw, I'm just wary of their upgrades following my Movie Maker experience!)
a lot of people are starting to distrust microsoft and are turning off the automatic update
That's exactly what I've done.
One of their "updates" to Movie Maker (which I use solely to grab DV from an encoder) made the output files incompatible with other video programmes, in particular VirtualDub. Thankfully I was able to get the previous version back by doing a system restore but that's the last time I'll upgrade an MS app when the one I've got is working fine.
I know you should never trust release dates for games, but with retailers citing a specific date for so long (August 21) I've been counting the days until Doom comes out.
Amazon now states November 14. Why exactly?
I very nearly bought a new graphics card the other day, figuring I'd have a month to make sure it was installed and working properly. (Home PC == work PC so I can't tinker.)
But then, an extra six months or so... it won't kill me. And the game will be better. Hell we might even have broadband in my area by then!
So I'm disappointed but it's good news too. Now I just hope Id don't go and panic when it's "nearly done", rush it out and have us all downloading patches for a year.
I wonder if the system specs will be higher now, seeing as the current high-end specs will be mid-range or budget specs by Q1 2004.
Slashdot Mirror
The marketing for Charlies Angles 2 in the UK was hilarious. There were two distinct styles of ads, one which urged people to see it early "to be one of the first", and one which urged people to go see it with a large groups of friends because they'd enjoy it more. It was so transparent that they wanted people to see it early before someone warned them not to bother and see it in a large group so one person wouldn't warn all their friends. I loved the original film and I was looking forward to the sequel, but those ads pretty much told me (a) it sucked and (b) the studio KNEW it sucked.
The description in the Sophos advisory is more accurate...
t ml
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/articles/sobigf.h
Normally I get around 100 spams every day but I've been getting 30-50 every five minutes for the last six hours. I even installed MailWasher to deal with them because my other virus checker (Spam Weasel) had to either (a) download them to check if they were spam or not, or (b) just let them through. Not much good.
Note that I'm *assuming* these spams are a result of the virus discussed in the News.com story, although the subject lines and attachments are very different from the ones mentioned.
So what happens now? Does this thing just go on and on until September 10th? Right now my business and personal e-mail accounts are pretty much useless, and at 100k+ per spam, one of my mailboxes is in danger of filling up unless I sit here constantly deleting all the junk.
I'm not arguing that the DMCA is a Good or Bad Thing, but it is law and it allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas without going through a court. Verizon was the test case and the RIAA won, hence there's a precedent ruling that their behaviour is "legally correct".
If the TV channels you watch use permanent on-screen logos (DOGs, idents, whatever) then once you've narrowed down your list of TV choices you should check-up on how prone each of them is to so-called "logo burn". Some sets are much more vulnerable than others, especially rear-projection.
Monitors have screensavers, TVs generally don't, and if (for example) you're watching a news channel for an hour, with a logo constantly displayed in the corner of the screen, you could soon find that there's a "shadow" permanently burned on your screen. This will interfere with the rest of your viewing as the colour in that area of the screen will always be distorted.
Note that some TV manufacturers do warn about their sets being prone to logo burn, but these warnings are only made in the small-print of the manual, which of course you will only read after you've bought the set, if at all.
Check these pages for some brief info...
Watching TV is bad for your set!
Screen Burn (LogoFreeTV campaign)
Example picture #1
Example picture #2
I'd just like to thank the submitter for mentioning Putty.
I've been using it since I switched to an SSH-only web host last year, and I've always been 'troubled' by the fact that I wouldn't be able to get onto the server from another PC with a standard telnet client.
Being the quick-thinking genius that I am it never occurred to me to just keep a copy of Putty (plus key) on my pen drive! And even typing this, I wonder why I never thought to just put it on a floppy! (Which actually makes more sense, seeing as not all PCs have USB ports.)
Oh man I'm ashamed of how dumb I am.
Seriously, that's a weight off my mind! (What little mind I apparently have.)
Seems to me that people who buy an SOE game should pretty much know by now what they're getting themselves into.
Consider this: There are lots of complaints about bugs. Lots of complaints about servers being unavailable. Lots of complaints about cheating, poor gameplay, boring quests, etc, etc... But regardless of what specifically people are complaining about, the pervasive theme running through 90% of complaints is that SOE simply don't care about their customers.
I'm seeing cause, I'm seeing effect.
A friend of mine who lives in Yorkshire feels exactly the same way. He's with NTL for his phone and broadband, and he says that if he ever moved house, being able to get either NTL or another non-BT comms provider would be a major influence in his decision of where to live. Like you, me, and many other people, he simply doesn't want to feed BT anymore.
The award for the most outrageous bandwidth cap so far must go to BTopenworld, the ISP division of British Telecom.
BT is widely disliked for not providing ADSL in rural areas. Solution? They launched a satellite service costing 900 pounds for installation and then 60 pounds per month subscription. (Why the hell does Slashdot not let me use a pound sign?! Okay we're a small country but we DO still have a currency!)
They waited until they had around a thousand subscribers, the most they were expected to get and all of them locked-in to a 12-month contract, and then they capped the service to near-dial-up level.
They had previously signed-up hundreds of thousands of people to a 24/7 dial-up plan and then capped them to a couple of hours per day. (I was one of them. I cancelled, they continued billing me for five months. It's a year later and I'm still fighting them for the 80 pounds they took. Court looks like the next step.)
And don't get me started on 2-hour cut-offs...
It's possible, perhaps even likely, that games companies will become the dominant producers of guides. Why should they let third-parties profit off the back of their hard work? Plus of course there are two revenue streams available to them, not just the one available to third-parties...
1. Selling the guide on its own.
2. At a later date, when sales of the game and guide have dried up, bundling them together (perhaps with a DVD or soundtrack CD) and selling them as special editions, gift packs, etc. Third-party guide publishers generally don't have this option available to them, so the shelf life of a guide is relatively short.
George Broussard of 3D Realms has already talked about preventing third-parties from publishing guides to Duke Nukem Forever, by not allowing them to use screenshots. (Sure they can still publish the guide, freedom of speech 'n' all that, but who's going to buy a guide without screenshots?) That would suggest 3DR intends to produce their own guide at some point, and if a big developer like 3DR starts the bandwagon rolling then we can expect to see a lot of other developers piling up on the back of it. And quite right too.
<include "warm_and_fuzzy.h">
<include "recommendations.h">
if (game_status==AVAILABLE_NOW) {
download();
enjoy();
} else {
recommend("Download NeoRAGE emulator");
recommend("Download Metal Slug NeoGeo ROM");
recommend("Enjoy!");
}
// Those screenshots look great!
If you're into 2D shooters then you might want to have a look at Star Monkey or Ultra Assault by the UK-based developer Small Rockets.
Both games have demo versions available, although the demo of Ultra Assault plays for a very short period of time (a minute?) and has a counter ticking down in the middle of the screen, so it's very difficult to experience what the game is like because you simply can't play enough of it. Star Monkey doesn't suffer from this problem.
Both of these games use 3D graphics but are presented as top-down 2D shooters.
(Obvious disclaimer: I'm not associated with Small Rockets in any way.)
This is no more dishonest than the pro-p2p crowd saying that p2p apps are used for legal reasons as well as illegal ones. Yes they are, but we all know what the most popular uses are, and they're illegal. It is equally true for the MPAA to say that p2p apps give people a back door to your hard drive (disregarding the awful 80s hacker movie terminology). Theoretically they do, although in most cases it would require stupidity on the part of the user.
You can't use semi-dishonest arguments and then complain when they are met with semi-dishonest counter-arguments!
(Well you *can* because you can do whatever you want, but your argument loses credibility.)
If it's a Dell you're fixing then take a pillow. You'll need something to scream into.
Yes you're right.
What I should have said is that I've stopped using Windows Update entirely. I figure that if a major bundled app like Movie Maker (which I chose to update manually) can be tampered with like that then I really don't want Microsoft having carte blanche freedom to change other components of my OS.
I was even more suspicious when they incorporated rights management into Media Player and then suddenly there were security holes "discovered" in previous versions that required people to urgently upgrade to the new version. Seems to me like MS software updates can be less about upgrading your system and more about changing it to Microsoft's new view of how it should be.
I wonder if Microsoft already knows of security flaws in any other Windows components, but they're keeping quiet about them until such a time as the "critical security patch" can be used to deploy other features, changes, restrictions, etc...
(I'm not at all anti-Microsoft btw, I'm just wary of their upgrades following my Movie Maker experience!)
One of their "updates" to Movie Maker (which I use solely to grab DV from an encoder) made the output files incompatible with other video programmes, in particular VirtualDub. Thankfully I was able to get the previous version back by doing a system restore but that's the last time I'll upgrade an MS app when the one I've got is working fine.
I know you should never trust release dates for games, but with retailers citing a specific date for so long (August 21) I've been counting the days until Doom comes out.
Amazon now states November 14. Why exactly?
I very nearly bought a new graphics card the other day, figuring I'd have a month to make sure it was installed and working properly. (Home PC == work PC so I can't tinker.)
But then, an extra six months or so... it won't kill me. And the game will be better. Hell we might even have broadband in my area by then!
So I'm disappointed but it's good news too. Now I just hope Id don't go and panic when it's "nearly done", rush it out and have us all downloading patches for a year.
I wonder if the system specs will be higher now, seeing as the current high-end specs will be mid-range or budget specs by Q1 2004.