Kingdom of Loathing is entirely free to play, and is my obsession. It is my strongly-held opinion that they do the "freemium" thing exactly right, and are quite possibly the only game developers who ever have done it quite so perfectly (they've been doing it since before there was a word for it;)). There's stuff you can buy with cash, but it was an explicit design decision when they first started the experiment years ago (having realized that, if they wanted to quit their day job, they needed to actually find a way to make some money off the project) that everything you could buy with cash, you could also play with by purchasing it in-game. Nothing ever -forces- you to pay for anything with cash.
Though, amusingly enough, it wasn't originally designed as a game at all. It was designed as a cross between a joke, and the original two developers wanting a project to work on their PHP skills. Then it got fairly popular, and now it's been going for like 7 years, getting gradually more robust, more actual-game-like.
It does exist in the same rough genre as others of its ilk (you have to do a bunch of stuff every day if you want to get the most out of it, there are buttloads of various things you can collect, many of them forcibly extended over a period of days/weeks/months, etc.), but if you told the developers that their goals were getting you hooked and making money off you, they would be extremely sad. And probably unleash snark at you on the forums.
If you decide to try it out, let me know; I'm neminem there like everywhere else.;)
Uh... I'm pretty sure there were occasional quests like that (where they provided you an NPC, who could do the quest while you watched, just slower) in vanilla and BC, too. And better that and an NPC who you had to protect or lose the quest, who had no hp and would always run off and aggro everything no matter what you did... vanilla just freaking -loved- those.
Anyway, everyone knows the leveling to the level cap process is just a lengthy tutorial for the actual game (namely, raiding). Wasn't that just as true in vanilla and BC? And, as someone who has never been in a guild capable of fielding 25 people to raid, I quite liked their "simplifications":p. (Though I will admit, I was less than impressed with the first tier in Cataclysm. I think everyone was. Firelands is pretty cool, though.)
I have no problem with this at all. People buy gold anyway; better Blizzard gets the profits than sketchy, might-steal-your-account-later trade-channel-spammers. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I like this model way better than the previous one, where there are vanity items you can *only* buy with cash. If they did that with raid-tier gear, I'd quit, full stop, right now. If they used *this* model with raid-tier gear, on the other hand, I'd actually think it was sort of neat. (Kingdom of Loathing, my favorite game ever, basically survives on that model, though granted, it's different in that it's otherwise free to play. I give them about as much a year as I give WoW, though.)
I'm aware that it didn't come up with the concept of real-life superheroes, but it did just have an episode recently that featured the concept highly. I won't spoil it here, but if anyone is reading this and thinking, "that'd be a neat idea for a show"... go watch the episode, it's called "Heroes & Villains".
Nobody cares. English words are frequently overloaded.
Hacking is gaining access to servers you shouldn't have access to. Also writing elegant, clever software (yet, at the same time, also writing clever but ugly and horribly *inelegant* software). Furthermore, hacking is *also* something you do to plants with a machete. Also something you do if you have a cold, or (apparently, I just looked on wiktionary) something you can do in either baseball or ice hockey.
Similarly, piracy is ship to ship armed robbery. Piracy is also making illegitimate copies of copyrighted content. Almost every word has multiple, sometimes only tenuously-related meanings; context is everything. And that is something, personally, that I love about this language.
Except that VB6 was a horrible monstrosity (I've seen it; it's disturbing), while C# is quite possibly the prettiest language I've worked with. And yes, Python fanboys, that does include Python. (Haven't worked with Ruby, though; I've heard good things there, too.)
VB6 "devs", who could, presumably jumped ship early to learn just about anything else, because anything was better than VB6.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Better default handling of newlines: good idea. Very good idea. I got bit by that a few times, too. See post modes on this page: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml
I believe HTML is and has always been the default, which means newlines are totally ignored unless you put them in with a br tag. Which is... not terribly expected behavior. Also, "plain old text" does almost the opposite of what it sounds like it does. (I would expect it to do what extrans actually does, and I would have no idea what extrans did without looking it up.) Thanks for reminding me!
It incurs new bandwidth cost compared to the previous owner stuffing a game in their closet cause they got bored of playing it and can't sell it, though.;)
After all, that would be the biggest win for Sony, right? If everyone bought their games and then never even opened the box.
More people will install classic shell. There we go, problem solved. I mean, Win7's start menu is already an ugly piece of garbage, who cares whether they take it out? (Unless it were to replace it with something that wasn't an ugly piece of garbage, but we all know how likely that is.) I have Win7 at home, and almost none of the UI is native. I predict, for computer-savvy people at least, that will be increasingly common as the Windows UI team goes more and more bonkers changing things for the sake of it.
I know Starz entirely as "the channel that brought Torchwood to America for a season". That was pretty decent (though it started off stronger than it ended), and it was in no way Disney.
I actually did use DuckDuckGo for a little while, not because it doesn't track me, but because I was sick of google bloating up their interface with crap I didn't care about or want. I used it for about a month. Then I realized I'd rather deal with google's pushing dumb features, than use a search engine that returns terrible results. At least half the time I searched for something on DuckDuckGo, I got a pretty, incredibly useable page full of irrelevant results, and ended up consulting google anyway. So I switched back.
And last time I tried Bing, they were even worse.
Google doesn't have a monopoly, they're just good at what they do.
You should tell your boss that VS2010 is better, incidentally. I agree with you, I hate "upgrading" software mindlessly when the old version does its job fine (not to mention, frequently, the old version is actually *better*. I'm looking at you, Skype v.-anything-higher-than-3. Also you, Windows Explorer in versions of Windows newer than XP.)
VS2010 is better. More robust, and now that I've gotten used to the improved intellisense, I'm always sad whenever I have to go back and work on a project that for one reason or another has to remain a 2008 project.
That said, being that I *do* sometimes have to work on such projects, like right now... I do wish addons/plugins/extensions/whatevers would be less version-specific. I miss being able to lock tabs.
Yep! After fighting with the native Win7 file manager to fix all the buggy behaviors they introduced, eventually I gave up and tried a few of those alternatives. I went with explorer++, because it is technically open source (it's mostly just the original guy working on it, with occasional bugfixes submitted from a couple other people, but you can still download the source and fix things yourself if you really need to. I've fiddled with it a little for my own benefit.) Sadly, there are a few obvious bugs in it that would prevent me from recommending it fully, but it's still way better than the default Win7 explorer (I miss XP's).
So anyway, this news really doesn't affect me - the native file manager was already a buggy, unuseable piece of garbage, so if they make it even worse, I will just continue to not use it.
To be fair, he probably didn't use paragraphs because, well, he *did* use paragraphs, he just didn't have the right text setting enabled. I know, as I've done that accidentally myself a time or two. Slashdot doesn't exactly make that obvious. (Though, yes, he could've hit preview first. I could have, too, but sometimes you just think you got it right.)
I won't argue in general that censorship is silly, but really... if your system doesn't make the clbuttic mistake, I'd be happy enough for that, given the myriad examples of systems that have. Small steps and all that.
There're actually also at least a couple addons specifically for the purpose of putting that button back. Though I'd already gotten used to right clicking a long time ago; it doesn't really bother me anymore, though I will agree it's not necessarily the most discoverable replacement.
Only problem: I found duckduckgo a while ago, I thought they sounded really cool, so I set it as my home page instead of google. I like the look way better, I think it has some neat features, and I can count on them not adding annoying "features" without some way of turning them off, but... about half the searches I did, I ended up being annoyed with the crap results, and queried them again with !google at the front. After a couple weeks of doing that, I gave up and set it back to google. Google may be increasingly annoying and arguably eviler, but they won the search engine game for one major, obvious reason: their search results are rather higher quality than any other search engine I've ever tried, and always have been.
Until, you know, their gps runs out of battery, or they can't get a signal, or someone breaks into their car and jacks it... I have a gps, but I only turn it on in case of emergency (I took a wrong turn and can't figure out how to get back). I'm well aware I'm not normal for that these days, though.
I'm using Aurora right now because I'd heard they'd done a lot of work on that end recently, and... I seem to have heard correctly. In my recent experience, FF7 gobbles way less memory, and is much better about giving it back, than any previous version. Well, other than one greasemonkey script that with FF7 started consuming all my ram and never gives it back, but I gather that's a bug in greasemonkey, not with Firefox per se.
Changes aren't always progress. Hiding information that was previously available is definitely not progress. Completely unnecessary? I *like* knowing such things as a. where a link is going to take me, and b. the progress of loading a page I'm loading. More generally, though, for *any* program, if I've been using it for 10 years and have gotten used to looking for some piece of information in a particular place, I like being able to expect that, after updating the software to a new version, that information will still be in the same place. That's really just common sense UI design.
Now, yes, occasionally a new version of a program comes along and redesigns the UI and makes everyone think, "holy carp, I can't believe I lived with the old design for so long!" But that's why you test UI redesigns on actual users. If a decent fraction of your users say something like that, you probably have a winner. If, as in this case, almost everyone says, "alright, but how do I set it back like it was before?", you probably... don't.
The only good thing I can say about Firefox is that it's still just as customizeable and extensible as always, which is of course why I continue to use it in the first place. Absolutely every change I hated about the new Firefox, I found with only the slightest bit of googling someone posting about how to set it back how it was. I wish that weren't *necessary*, but it's still much nicer than just having to suck it up. (In comparison with, say, all the anti-progress Windows 7 made to Explorer (not IE), much of which was unfixable except by using an alternate file manager, which is what I'm now doing.)
3) They dislike the horrible, annoying, potentially-computer-breaking restrictions imposed on them by the DRM of the legal version. Possibly they're boycotting paying for it for that reason, possibly they actually *did* pay for it but still want to avoid said restrictions. I've done both of those things (for instance: a long time ago, I once wanted to play Duke 3d, which I owned, on a computer that lacked a cd drive. Duke 3d had a cd-is-in-the-drive check). I agree your first two reasons are probably the most common, but my addition's pretty common too (I wouldn't mind seeing a study about *that*, though I'm not sure how you'd get around the fact that your previously-mentioned scumbags would have no reason to not lie about it.;))
Given that the fastest I can get here is 3, yes, 10mbps would be blistering. I'd kill for 10mbps. Yes, this is sad, I'm well aware. (I miss my college network.)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you listening? My Archos 5 is still stuck permanently at 1.6. And now they're working on 4? It's getting a bit depressing.
Kingdom of Loathing is entirely free to play, and is my obsession. It is my strongly-held opinion that they do the "freemium" thing exactly right, and are quite possibly the only game developers who ever have done it quite so perfectly (they've been doing it since before there was a word for it ;)). There's stuff you can buy with cash, but it was an explicit design decision when they first started the experiment years ago (having realized that, if they wanted to quit their day job, they needed to actually find a way to make some money off the project) that everything you could buy with cash, you could also play with by purchasing it in-game. Nothing ever -forces- you to pay for anything with cash.
Though, amusingly enough, it wasn't originally designed as a game at all. It was designed as a cross between a joke, and the original two developers wanting a project to work on their PHP skills. Then it got fairly popular, and now it's been going for like 7 years, getting gradually more robust, more actual-game-like.
It does exist in the same rough genre as others of its ilk (you have to do a bunch of stuff every day if you want to get the most out of it, there are buttloads of various things you can collect, many of them forcibly extended over a period of days/weeks/months, etc.), but if you told the developers that their goals were getting you hooked and making money off you, they would be extremely sad. And probably unleash snark at you on the forums.
If you decide to try it out, let me know; I'm neminem there like everywhere else. ;)
Uh... I'm pretty sure there were occasional quests like that (where they provided you an NPC, who could do the quest while you watched, just slower) in vanilla and BC, too. And better that and an NPC who you had to protect or lose the quest, who had no hp and would always run off and aggro everything no matter what you did... vanilla just freaking -loved- those.
:p. (Though I will admit, I was less than impressed with the first tier in Cataclysm. I think everyone was. Firelands is pretty cool, though.)
Anyway, everyone knows the leveling to the level cap process is just a lengthy tutorial for the actual game (namely, raiding). Wasn't that just as true in vanilla and BC? And, as someone who has never been in a guild capable of fielding 25 people to raid, I quite liked their "simplifications"
I have no problem with this at all. People buy gold anyway; better Blizzard gets the profits than sketchy, might-steal-your-account-later trade-channel-spammers. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I like this model way better than the previous one, where there are vanity items you can *only* buy with cash. If they did that with raid-tier gear, I'd quit, full stop, right now. If they used *this* model with raid-tier gear, on the other hand, I'd actually think it was sort of neat. (Kingdom of Loathing, my favorite game ever, basically survives on that model, though granted, it's different in that it's otherwise free to play. I give them about as much a year as I give WoW, though.)
I'm aware that it didn't come up with the concept of real-life superheroes, but it did just have an episode recently that featured the concept highly. I won't spoil it here, but if anyone is reading this and thinking, "that'd be a neat idea for a show"... go watch the episode, it's called "Heroes & Villains".
Nobody cares. English words are frequently overloaded.
Hacking is gaining access to servers you shouldn't have access to. Also writing elegant, clever software (yet, at the same time, also writing clever but ugly and horribly *inelegant* software). Furthermore, hacking is *also* something you do to plants with a machete. Also something you do if you have a cold, or (apparently, I just looked on wiktionary) something you can do in either baseball or ice hockey.
Similarly, piracy is ship to ship armed robbery. Piracy is also making illegitimate copies of copyrighted content. Almost every word has multiple, sometimes only tenuously-related meanings; context is everything. And that is something, personally, that I love about this language.
Except that VB6 was a horrible monstrosity (I've seen it; it's disturbing), while C# is quite possibly the prettiest language I've worked with. And yes, Python fanboys, that does include Python. (Haven't worked with Ruby, though; I've heard good things there, too.)
VB6 "devs", who could, presumably jumped ship early to learn just about anything else, because anything was better than VB6.
But I like slashdot memes! They make me laugh (you insensitive clod.)
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Better default handling of newlines: good idea. Very good idea. I got bit by that a few times, too. See post modes on this page: http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml
I believe HTML is and has always been the default, which means newlines are totally ignored unless you put them in with a br tag. Which is... not terribly expected behavior. Also, "plain old text" does almost the opposite of what it sounds like it does. (I would expect it to do what extrans actually does, and I would have no idea what extrans did without looking it up.) Thanks for reminding me!
It incurs new bandwidth cost compared to the previous owner stuffing a game in their closet cause they got bored of playing it and can't sell it, though. ;)
After all, that would be the biggest win for Sony, right? If everyone bought their games and then never even opened the box.
More people will install classic shell. There we go, problem solved. I mean, Win7's start menu is already an ugly piece of garbage, who cares whether they take it out? (Unless it were to replace it with something that wasn't an ugly piece of garbage, but we all know how likely that is.) I have Win7 at home, and almost none of the UI is native. I predict, for computer-savvy people at least, that will be increasingly common as the Windows UI team goes more and more bonkers changing things for the sake of it.
I know Starz entirely as "the channel that brought Torchwood to America for a season". That was pretty decent (though it started off stronger than it ended), and it was in no way Disney.
I actually did use DuckDuckGo for a little while, not because it doesn't track me, but because I was sick of google bloating up their interface with crap I didn't care about or want. I used it for about a month. Then I realized I'd rather deal with google's pushing dumb features, than use a search engine that returns terrible results. At least half the time I searched for something on DuckDuckGo, I got a pretty, incredibly useable page full of irrelevant results, and ended up consulting google anyway. So I switched back.
And last time I tried Bing, they were even worse.
Google doesn't have a monopoly, they're just good at what they do.
You should tell your boss that VS2010 is better, incidentally. I agree with you, I hate "upgrading" software mindlessly when the old version does its job fine (not to mention, frequently, the old version is actually *better*. I'm looking at you, Skype v.-anything-higher-than-3. Also you, Windows Explorer in versions of Windows newer than XP.)
VS2010 is better. More robust, and now that I've gotten used to the improved intellisense, I'm always sad whenever I have to go back and work on a project that for one reason or another has to remain a 2008 project.
That said, being that I *do* sometimes have to work on such projects, like right now... I do wish addons/plugins/extensions/whatevers would be less version-specific. I miss being able to lock tabs.
Sort of hard to Streisand anything that every person on the entire planet has ALREADY HEARD OF. (And, most likely, watched at least part of.)
Yep! After fighting with the native Win7 file manager to fix all the buggy behaviors they introduced, eventually I gave up and tried a few of those alternatives. I went with explorer++, because it is technically open source (it's mostly just the original guy working on it, with occasional bugfixes submitted from a couple other people, but you can still download the source and fix things yourself if you really need to. I've fiddled with it a little for my own benefit.) Sadly, there are a few obvious bugs in it that would prevent me from recommending it fully, but it's still way better than the default Win7 explorer (I miss XP's).
So anyway, this news really doesn't affect me - the native file manager was already a buggy, unuseable piece of garbage, so if they make it even worse, I will just continue to not use it.
To be fair, he probably didn't use paragraphs because, well, he *did* use paragraphs, he just didn't have the right text setting enabled. I know, as I've done that accidentally myself a time or two. Slashdot doesn't exactly make that obvious. (Though, yes, he could've hit preview first. I could have, too, but sometimes you just think you got it right.)
I won't argue in general that censorship is silly, but really... if your system doesn't make the clbuttic mistake, I'd be happy enough for that, given the myriad examples of systems that have. Small steps and all that.
There're actually also at least a couple addons specifically for the purpose of putting that button back. Though I'd already gotten used to right clicking a long time ago; it doesn't really bother me anymore, though I will agree it's not necessarily the most discoverable replacement.
Sounds sort of like http://www.palemoon.org
Though they're continuing to use the silly version naming, which, whatever. It's dumb, but it's not the end of the world.
Only problem: I found duckduckgo a while ago, I thought they sounded really cool, so I set it as my home page instead of google. I like the look way better, I think it has some neat features, and I can count on them not adding annoying "features" without some way of turning them off, but... about half the searches I did, I ended up being annoyed with the crap results, and queried them again with !google at the front. After a couple weeks of doing that, I gave up and set it back to google. Google may be increasingly annoying and arguably eviler, but they won the search engine game for one major, obvious reason: their search results are rather higher quality than any other search engine I've ever tried, and always have been.
Until, you know, their gps runs out of battery, or they can't get a signal, or someone breaks into their car and jacks it... I have a gps, but I only turn it on in case of emergency (I took a wrong turn and can't figure out how to get back). I'm well aware I'm not normal for that these days, though.
I'm using Aurora right now because I'd heard they'd done a lot of work on that end recently, and... I seem to have heard correctly. In my recent experience, FF7 gobbles way less memory, and is much better about giving it back, than any previous version. Well, other than one greasemonkey script that with FF7 started consuming all my ram and never gives it back, but I gather that's a bug in greasemonkey, not with Firefox per se.
Changes aren't always progress. Hiding information that was previously available is definitely not progress. Completely unnecessary? I *like* knowing such things as a. where a link is going to take me, and b. the progress of loading a page I'm loading. More generally, though, for *any* program, if I've been using it for 10 years and have gotten used to looking for some piece of information in a particular place, I like being able to expect that, after updating the software to a new version, that information will still be in the same place. That's really just common sense UI design.
Now, yes, occasionally a new version of a program comes along and redesigns the UI and makes everyone think, "holy carp, I can't believe I lived with the old design for so long!" But that's why you test UI redesigns on actual users. If a decent fraction of your users say something like that, you probably have a winner. If, as in this case, almost everyone says, "alright, but how do I set it back like it was before?", you probably... don't.
The only good thing I can say about Firefox is that it's still just as customizeable and extensible as always, which is of course why I continue to use it in the first place. Absolutely every change I hated about the new Firefox, I found with only the slightest bit of googling someone posting about how to set it back how it was. I wish that weren't *necessary*, but it's still much nicer than just having to suck it up. (In comparison with, say, all the anti-progress Windows 7 made to Explorer (not IE), much of which was unfixable except by using an alternate file manager, which is what I'm now doing.)
3) They dislike the horrible, annoying, potentially-computer-breaking restrictions imposed on them by the DRM of the legal version. Possibly they're boycotting paying for it for that reason, possibly they actually *did* pay for it but still want to avoid said restrictions. I've done both of those things (for instance: a long time ago, I once wanted to play Duke 3d, which I owned, on a computer that lacked a cd drive. Duke 3d had a cd-is-in-the-drive check). I agree your first two reasons are probably the most common, but my addition's pretty common too (I wouldn't mind seeing a study about *that*, though I'm not sure how you'd get around the fact that your previously-mentioned scumbags would have no reason to not lie about it. ;))
Given that the fastest I can get here is 3, yes, 10mbps would be blistering. I'd kill for 10mbps. Yes, this is sad, I'm well aware. (I miss my college network.)