"While I agree with you that it's a pain.. Why blame Valve?"
I would say Valve should be blamed for setting up a system that didn't work. If they insist on a server based auth system for somthing thier customers PAID for, them it's thier duty to make shure the system is reasonably failproof.
Since they can tell how many copies they shipped (I'm reasonably comfortable they didn't just say 'I dunno make a bunch of copies and ship them, bill us later' to the manufacturer) then they SHOULD have made shure they could handle that many authorizations at once. They failed to do so effectively putting them in the position of selling a product that doese not work as advertised through a knowable fault in thier actions.
It shure sounds like thier customers have grounds to cry foul over this, likely in a court (IANAL).
I also believe this may finally be what crosses the line for many. Not only does the product have requirements that are totaly extant to support this content controll scheme (internet connectivity) that reduces thier potential customer base, but it puts thier customers through unaceptable hassle if and when it finaly works.
Given the two above I can see a potential backlash that could seriously hurt them, potentially sever if they suffer in court as a result (Class action fever is downright insane with suits over non-issues, let alone something so obviously thier fault).
So the only thing I would directly blame Valve et al for is the server issue, they could and should have prepared well enough to prevent that.
I figure the market will 'punish' them for not treating thier customer properly by simply choosing to spend thier hard earned cash elsewhere.
AFAIK all the current radeon cards with tv out allow any desktop resolution while doing tv out, though I think some of the older cards may limit the resolution choice if your outputting an exact copy of the monitors screen to the tv, the aiwradeon (original) would do any res even then, but one of the two images would be distorted looking (usually the monitor) because of differing aspect ratio's. Havent tried that particular scenario with my current card (AIWRadeon 9600).
He says he didn't MOD the xbox, thus no change to hardware. There was a loophole (a buffer exploit or some such) that allowed unsigned software to be run wich in turn let all sorts of things such as linux installs without ever opening anything but the cd-tray and putting in nothing but a disc.
Among other things that keep doom3 (and farcry) from running are ide drivers. In specific the optimized drivers that come with some nforce2 motherboards such as my brothers gigabyte board.
To be fair those divers have a prominent 'no guarantees these will actually do anything good and thier use is strictly at your own risk don't call us we don't support them' type blurb shoved in your face if want to install those drivers(you can cancell the install at that point, and xp's driver rollback worked just fine to get said games running).
If you are thinking of installing them or already have be warned Farcry and Doom3 will NOT play with them giving a 'cd not found' type error in both cases.
"Close tab by middle clicking... I didn't know this wasn't default in FireFox. I guess Tabbrowser Extensions must do it."
FF1.0 does this without extensions, I don't have any extensions and clicking the trackwheel(I don't use a mouse, I use a trackball, thus trackwheel:) ) over a tab closes it.
As someone who lives just ouside St. Louis, Mo that did not know this I would like to know more. do you by chance have anymore details, or at least websites you could point me at.
Thanks
There was a movie (comedy of course) along those lines a while back, some guy (played by Danny Divito IIRC) who was hack tv writer or producer or some such managed to get a list of the names and adress of all the neilson households and send them tickets for a 'cruise' they had won. Of course the 'cruise' was a sham and the boat took the neilson families all over the place except home while this guy hired people to stay in the neilson houses and keep the tv tuned only to shows he was responsible for.
Had cartoons about successfull mobsters using such phrases 'get yer rocks off' on saturday morning and so on. Quite funny, though a bit overboard in some places. Been a while though so I can't remember the name of movie.
You are lucky, I no longer enough tv to be frightned by the possibilty some tv exec might spot that and use it. Else I might be tempted to say somthing REALLY bad about you.
Perhaps you talk to your doctor about adjusting dosage?
Mycroft (all in good fun, no offence intended(it is a scary idea though))
I was under the impression that rullings varied a bit and tended to side AGAINST eulas.
I seem to remember nintendo losing one as well. though the details are vague.
Quick look around found this: http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html
But I haven't looked it over much yet so I don't know if it's a good place to start or not.
And irregardless of court decisions on the matter, most eula's are unethical peices of crap, and valid or no are the leagle equivalant of spyware and other such malware. Both in terms of what they say and in terms of how they are sprung on purchasers AFTER the fact. Shure many claim you can get a full refund, but just try it and soon the effort and expense of said 'refund' exceeds whatever value the software may have had and they know it, or should.
I have to admit I did buy a Lexmark printer once, It was $9.00US after rebate. Of course once it ran out of ink I couldn't bring myself to spend $40 on more ink for a printer sold for less $49.99 before the $40 rebate. especially when I could buy a better printer for less than $20 more with full ink carts.
Oh and I was getting an employee discount (15%) on ink at the time it ran out.
Speaking of HP, what the heck is with the dozen programs it loads on startup no matter HOW you put the drivers in. You can't load just raw drivers at least on some moddels as the data file on the disk insists that stupid helper apps ARE part of the drivers.
Lesse, an ac calls mods stupid, implies they could be even stupider, makes an OBVIOUS play for postive modderation. AND GETS MODDED UP.
I dunno, I've been here over a year and even I am amazed at this one.
If I've learned ONE thing in 20+ years of online discussions (starting in 1984 with the local bbs systems) it's that text has limits over face to face and be prepared to missunderstand and be missunderstoood because of that. And be very prepared change your opinin on someone in case you do read in more/less than is meant.
It still amazes me when someone makes a negative judgement about someone bassed on missunderstanding what the other persons intent was, and then refuse to change thier opinion of the person even when it's obvious they missunderstood the person.
What you don't think he's entitled to what he payed for?
He paid for a game that was do to be done by a certain date and got NOTHING, not even an apology for the delay.
Course it's possible you were joking, in which case I've missed it completely.
I got the dvd version of enter the matrix. First time I saw it, it was 19.99 while the cd version was 29.99 (clearly labled on the box, stickers had 'dvd ver' or 'cd ver' and 19.99 or 29.99 on it) but had already spent to much and my friend had it on his xbox anyway so I didn't get eigther.
Next week the prices had reversed.
Next week they were both 17.99 so I went ahead and bought it.
I think less comes out on DVD because the game companies can't figure out to charge more for the version on the better tech, or charge more for the version that cost more to make (since both dvd's and cd's cost the same to stamp out). And rather than decide they just give up in total confusion and indecision.
No kidding prices on dvd burners are dropping like a rock lately. My dual layer burner (lite on) was $78, Though it was marked on the shelf for $108. Still I rarely have use to burn a single layer dvd. Games that come on 3+ cd's should be at least offered on dvd as well.
Depends on whether they make it clear that it HAS to phone home before you can play it, in a way that mr. Smith buying it for Junior can clearly see and understand.
Elsewise they may have significant returns to deal with.
Personally I don't trust an app that has to phone home unless it's an obvious requirement for the app to do it's job (such updates for anti-virus programs). Not to mention it potentially adds one more infection vector for viruses and other mallware.
You can certainly digitize the image on the film, and send it over a network. Though to watch it you'd have to print it out on a transparent medium and then shine an apropriate light at it.
Of course the resolution of the scan and print will have to be high enough for that to work.
I seem to remember some artist using computer generated interference patterns to create his holo-art a few years ago. He basically modeled what he wanted with some 3d program then set his computer crunching to figure out the patterns needed for the resulting hologram. It took quite some time for fairly simple patterns IIRC.
But the real trick would be a display device that could show holograms. Would be really nice.
Of course the accelerator card to get a decent fps on doomXVIII would probably need 5gig ram and a pcixpress IV 32 lane slot and you still wouldn't have duct-tape in game.
I know you said annectedotaly, but at what point in the process did thier divergence from actual drop down near one percent? Was it early in the voting process (say after less than 25% of the votes were counted) or later when the count was nearly done or even after all the counting was done?
I also just recalled that many pollsters were saying things such as early voting unusually high turnout were likely to reduce accuracy durring because it changed in part the demographics of who voted when.
Does sound like it's not/. , and likely not FF unless it's some particular target platform such as win 95c or a particular linux distro or bsd flavor.
hmm maybe if enough people with the problem and without compared details the culprit could be found.
I'm running FF 1.0 (been running since late.7 or early.8 not shure) on WinXP-Pro/sp2 radeon aiw9600 with catalyst 4.6. Can't think of anything else might have anything to do with it off the top of my head other than it's JUST FF 1.0 with no extensions and no edits to the default settings other than the homepage and some of the bookmarks.
Whoops, I guese there are so many ready to jump in and say 'it's micrsofts LIES again' that my hyperboly got taken to seriously. I actually like IE almost as much visually as FF, (the security sucks of course) I do have a few issues with FF that may or may not be because it renders wrong or people develope to much to IE. I was just commenting how I seem to lead a charmed life compared to some when it comes to sites that 'work' under IE yet go horribly awry in FF.
Read the part about ms astroturfing or whatever as 'unless they're all cia plants lying to confuse the mafia' or some such and you'll get the tone I was amming at.
While I agree to many people are idiots at a light (that is moreso idiotic than elsewhen). You theory looks like 'just getting even' and frankly I don't see ANY value in deliberately antogonizing someone in a 1ton plus metal shell when all you've got is a spiffy helmet.
And just because the car driver isn't 'hurt' through running over you because you did somthing stupid at a light by NO means implies thier life isn't pretty much screwed for some time. If you think it's somthing easy to blow off killing/maiming someone even if it's thier fault then I sincerely hope you never find out. That doesn't even include the fact it can take alot of money not to go jail for a long time unless you have plenty of witnesses who can back up it was completely out of your controll and the cyclist is %100 responsible for doing somthing incredibly stupid.
Mycroft
Perhaps in an ideal world one would always be at a safe speed for thier visibilty, but the reality is if you slow down to much below what people EXPECT you get hit by someone who can't see you. And in car vs car letting the insurance companies payoff while you have a bad day is unpleasant but acceptable, in semi vs bike it's a tragedy.
|And on the one road it's simply not possible as I understand it for a semi ride on it's brakes to that degree, some break systems have a limited brake to travel ratio, plus you'll destroy the brake linings fast that way. You can argue that it's really stupid to place an industrial park in a location that requires big trucks to go down a long hill, and for the most part I'll agree, but that's what they did, I'm just the poor sap who had to worry about eigther hitting some idiot bicyclist riding next to the yellow line just past a corner, or going slow enough to avoid him should I suddenly spot him and get run over by the half awake semi driver. Not an easy choice.
I AGREE that roads and other such travel areas should be safely usable by all (bicycles, cars, horses, etc.), but thats not the reality, in fact your reduction attempt at the end goes a long way towards explaining why. Take a small road originally intended for horses, perhaps a carraige, convert to a car road without spending the huge fourtune needed to do it well enough to be as safe as it should be, and bicyclist who stupidly try to argue thier rights in the wrong place (try the courts and your local government first) wind up a tragedy.
I used to at one point or another in my adult life ride bicycles and motorcycles and even horses though not as primary transportation like the first two. So in short I agree with the theory, but in pratice trying to enforce it as single individual without thinking through the realities can to easilly lead to tragedy. That is my primary point.
Mycroft
Slashdot Mirror
"While I agree with you that it's a pain.. Why blame Valve?"
I would say Valve should be blamed for setting up a system that didn't work. If they insist on a server based auth system for somthing thier customers PAID for, them it's thier duty to make shure the system is reasonably failproof.
Since they can tell how many copies they shipped (I'm reasonably comfortable they didn't just say 'I dunno make a bunch of copies and ship them, bill us later' to the manufacturer) then they SHOULD have made shure they could handle that many authorizations at once. They failed to do so effectively putting them in the position of selling a product that doese not work as advertised through a knowable fault in thier actions.
It shure sounds like thier customers have grounds to cry foul over this, likely in a court (IANAL).
I also believe this may finally be what crosses the line for many. Not only does the product have requirements that are totaly extant to support this content controll scheme (internet connectivity) that reduces thier potential customer base, but it puts thier customers through unaceptable hassle if and when it finaly works.
Given the two above I can see a potential backlash that could seriously hurt them, potentially sever if they suffer in court as a result (Class action fever is downright insane with suits over non-issues, let alone something so obviously thier fault).
So the only thing I would directly blame Valve et al for is the server issue, they could and should have prepared well enough to prevent that.
I figure the market will 'punish' them for not treating thier customer properly by simply choosing to spend thier hard earned cash elsewhere.
Mycroft
err, shure it wasn't that 7H3_g0d?
Mycroft
AFAIK all the current radeon cards with tv out allow any desktop resolution while doing tv out, though I think some of the older cards may limit the resolution choice if your outputting an exact copy of the monitors screen to the tv, the aiwradeon (original) would do any res even then, but one of the two images would be distorted looking (usually the monitor) because of differing aspect ratio's. Havent tried that particular scenario with my current card (AIWRadeon 9600).
Mycroft
He says he didn't MOD the xbox, thus no change to hardware. There was a loophole (a buffer exploit or some such) that allowed unsigned software to be run wich in turn let all sorts of things such as linux installs without ever opening anything but the cd-tray and putting in nothing but a disc.
Mycroft
Among other things that keep doom3 (and farcry) from running are ide drivers. In specific the optimized drivers that come with some nforce2 motherboards such as my brothers gigabyte board.
To be fair those divers have a prominent 'no guarantees these will actually do anything good and thier use is strictly at your own risk don't call us we don't support them' type blurb shoved in your face if want to install those drivers(you can cancell the install at that point, and xp's driver rollback worked just fine to get said games running).
If you are thinking of installing them or already have be warned Farcry and Doom3 will NOT play with them giving a 'cd not found' type error in both cases.
Mycroft
"Close tab by middle clicking... I didn't know this wasn't default in FireFox. I guess Tabbrowser Extensions must do it."
:) ) over a tab closes it.
FF1.0 does this without extensions, I don't have any extensions and clicking the trackwheel(I don't use a mouse, I use a trackball, thus trackwheel
Mycroft
As someone who lives just ouside St. Louis, Mo that did not know this I would like to know more. do you by chance have anymore details, or at least websites you could point me at.
Thanks
Mycroft
There was a movie (comedy of course) along those lines a while back, some guy (played by Danny Divito IIRC) who was hack tv writer or producer or some such managed to get a list of the names and adress of all the neilson households and send them tickets for a 'cruise' they had won. Of course the 'cruise' was a sham and the boat took the neilson families all over the place except home while this guy hired people to stay in the neilson houses and keep the tv tuned only to shows he was responsible for.
Had cartoons about successfull mobsters using such phrases 'get yer rocks off' on saturday morning and so on. Quite funny, though a bit overboard in some places. Been a while though so I can't remember the name of movie.
Mycroft
You are lucky, I no longer enough tv to be frightned by the possibilty some tv exec might spot that and use it. Else I might be tempted to say somthing REALLY bad about you.
Perhaps you talk to your doctor about adjusting dosage?
Mycroft
(all in good fun, no offence intended(it is a scary idea though))
I was under the impression that rullings varied a bit and tended to side AGAINST eulas.
I seem to remember nintendo losing one as well. though the details are vague.
Quick look around found this:
http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html
But I haven't looked it over much yet so I don't know if it's a good place to start or not.
And irregardless of court decisions on the matter, most eula's are unethical peices of crap, and valid or no are the leagle equivalant of spyware and other such malware. Both in terms of what they say and in terms of how they are sprung on purchasers AFTER the fact. Shure many claim you can get a full refund, but just try it and soon the effort and expense of said 'refund' exceeds whatever value the software may have had and they know it, or should.
Mycroft
Mycroft
I have to admit I did buy a Lexmark printer once, It was $9.00US after rebate. Of course once it ran out of ink I couldn't bring myself to spend $40 on more ink for a printer sold for less $49.99 before the $40 rebate. especially when I could buy a better printer for less than $20 more with full ink carts.
Oh and I was getting an employee discount (15%) on ink at the time it ran out.
Mycroft
Speaking of HP, what the heck is with the dozen programs it loads on startup no matter HOW you put the drivers in. You can't load just raw drivers at least on some moddels as the data file on the disk insists that stupid helper apps ARE part of the drivers.
Mycroft
Lesse, an ac calls mods stupid, implies they could be even stupider, makes an OBVIOUS play for postive modderation. AND GETS MODDED UP.
I dunno, I've been here over a year and even I am amazed at this one.
Mycroft
If I've learned ONE thing in 20+ years of online discussions (starting in 1984 with the local bbs systems) it's that text has limits over face to face and be prepared to missunderstand and be missunderstoood because of that. And be very prepared change your opinin on someone in case you do read in more/less than is meant.
It still amazes me when someone makes a negative judgement about someone bassed on missunderstanding what the other persons intent was, and then refuse to change thier opinion of the person even when it's obvious they missunderstood the person.
Mycroft
What you don't think he's entitled to what he payed for?
He paid for a game that was do to be done by a certain date and got NOTHING, not even an apology for the delay.
Course it's possible you were joking, in which case I've missed it completely.
Mycroft
I got the dvd version of enter the matrix. First time I saw it, it was 19.99 while the cd version was 29.99 (clearly labled on the box, stickers had 'dvd ver' or 'cd ver' and 19.99 or 29.99 on it) but had already spent to much and my friend had it on his xbox anyway so I didn't get eigther.
Next week the prices had reversed.
Next week they were both 17.99 so I went ahead and bought it.
I think less comes out on DVD because the game companies can't figure out to charge more for the version on the better tech, or charge more for the version that cost more to make (since both dvd's and cd's cost the same to stamp out). And rather than decide they just give up in total confusion and indecision.
Mycroft
No kidding prices on dvd burners are dropping like a rock lately. My dual layer burner (lite on) was $78, Though it was marked on the shelf for $108.
Still I rarely have use to burn a single layer dvd.
Games that come on 3+ cd's should be at least offered on dvd as well.
Mycroft
Depends on whether they make it clear that it HAS to phone home before you can play it, in a way that mr. Smith buying it for Junior can clearly see and understand.
Elsewise they may have significant returns to deal with.
Personally I don't trust an app that has to phone home unless it's an obvious requirement for the app to do it's job (such updates for anti-virus programs). Not to mention it potentially adds one more infection vector for viruses and other mallware.
Mycroft
Sorry if I misread your tone. I guesse I've just seen to many cyclist with the wrong attitude and jumped to a false conclusion. Mycroft
You can certainly digitize the image on the film, and send it over a network. Though to watch it you'd have to print it out on a transparent medium and then shine an apropriate light at it.
Of course the resolution of the scan and print will have to be high enough for that to work.
I seem to remember some artist using computer generated interference patterns to create his holo-art a few years ago. He basically modeled what he wanted with some 3d program then set his computer crunching to figure out the patterns needed for the resulting hologram. It took quite some time for fairly simple patterns IIRC.
But the real trick would be a display device that could show holograms. Would be really nice.
Of course the accelerator card to get a decent fps on doomXVIII would probably need 5gig ram and a pcixpress IV 32 lane slot and you still wouldn't have duct-tape in game.
Mycroft
I know you said annectedotaly, but at what point in the process did thier divergence from actual drop down near one percent? Was it early in the voting process (say after less than 25% of the votes were counted) or later when the count was nearly done or even after all the counting was done?
I also just recalled that many pollsters were saying things such as early voting unusually high turnout were likely to reduce accuracy durring because it changed in part the demographics of who voted when.
Does sound like it's not /. , and likely not FF unless it's some particular target platform such as win 95c or a particular linux distro or bsd flavor.
.7 or early .8 not shure) on WinXP-Pro /sp2 radeon aiw9600 with catalyst 4.6. Can't think of anything else might have anything to do with it off the top of my head other than it's JUST FF 1.0 with no extensions and no edits to the default settings other than the homepage and some of the bookmarks.
hmm maybe if enough people with the problem and without compared details the culprit could be found.
I'm running FF 1.0 (been running since late
Mycroft
Whoops, I guese there are so many ready to jump in and say 'it's micrsofts LIES again' that my hyperboly got taken to seriously. I actually like IE almost as much visually as FF, (the security sucks of course) I do have a few issues with FF that may or may not be because it renders wrong or people develope to much to IE. I was just commenting how I seem to lead a charmed life compared to some when it comes to sites that 'work' under IE yet go horribly awry in FF.
Read the part about ms astroturfing or whatever as 'unless they're all cia plants lying to confuse the mafia' or some such and you'll get the tone I was amming at.
Mycroft
While I agree to many people are idiots at a light (that is moreso idiotic than elsewhen). You theory looks like 'just getting even' and frankly I don't see ANY value in deliberately antogonizing someone in a 1ton plus metal shell when all you've got is a spiffy helmet. And just because the car driver isn't 'hurt' through running over you because you did somthing stupid at a light by NO means implies thier life isn't pretty much screwed for some time. If you think it's somthing easy to blow off killing/maiming someone even if it's thier fault then I sincerely hope you never find out. That doesn't even include the fact it can take alot of money not to go jail for a long time unless you have plenty of witnesses who can back up it was completely out of your controll and the cyclist is %100 responsible for doing somthing incredibly stupid. Mycroft
Perhaps in an ideal world one would always be at a safe speed for thier visibilty, but the reality is if you slow down to much below what people EXPECT you get hit by someone who can't see you. And in car vs car letting the insurance companies payoff while you have a bad day is unpleasant but acceptable, in semi vs bike it's a tragedy. |And on the one road it's simply not possible as I understand it for a semi ride on it's brakes to that degree, some break systems have a limited brake to travel ratio, plus you'll destroy the brake linings fast that way. You can argue that it's really stupid to place an industrial park in a location that requires big trucks to go down a long hill, and for the most part I'll agree, but that's what they did, I'm just the poor sap who had to worry about eigther hitting some idiot bicyclist riding next to the yellow line just past a corner, or going slow enough to avoid him should I suddenly spot him and get run over by the half awake semi driver. Not an easy choice. I AGREE that roads and other such travel areas should be safely usable by all (bicycles, cars, horses, etc.), but thats not the reality, in fact your reduction attempt at the end goes a long way towards explaining why. Take a small road originally intended for horses, perhaps a carraige, convert to a car road without spending the huge fourtune needed to do it well enough to be as safe as it should be, and bicyclist who stupidly try to argue thier rights in the wrong place (try the courts and your local government first) wind up a tragedy. I used to at one point or another in my adult life ride bicycles and motorcycles and even horses though not as primary transportation like the first two. So in short I agree with the theory, but in pratice trying to enforce it as single individual without thinking through the realities can to easilly lead to tragedy. That is my primary point. Mycroft