My Sony VGN-S150 has an ATI graphics chip. Whether I'm using the free driver bundled with X.org or the closed-source driver from ATI, I'm afraid to run OpenGL apps on the thing, since there is a significant non-zero chance the app will lock up. This can and does happen with something as complicated as Celestia or Stellarium, or as simple as GLGears.
It's darned frustrating. I've written a fair number of graphics drivers in my day (all for BeOS, I'm afraid), so I have plenty of sympathy for driver writers trying to chase down lockups that happen very very infrequently.
I feel it's important to remind people that, no matter how slick the packaging or magnificent the graphics or interesting/useful the application, this piece of software comes with an enormous downside: You have to install spyware in order to play it.
Ordinarily, that would be the end of the discussion:
"Hey, check out these really slick animated cursors!"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Hey, isn't my new screen buddy cute?"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Woah, look at this uber-cool screensaver I installed!"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Wow, this free solitaire program I downloaded is much prettier than the one that comes with Windows."
"Dude, it's spyware!"
If a vendor distributes spyware, they are correctly pilloried by the community. Yet, for some reason, Valve gets a pass. No one has been able to make the argument that distinguishes Steam from other spyware suites out there. And no, claiming that Valve is trying to develop a new revenue model doesn't cut it, because Gator and BonziBuddy and CometCursor were also trying to develop a new revenue model.
Anti-cheat measures? A reasonable feature, but PunkBuster did the same thing with Quake3 without being a requirement.
If I seem just a bit more strident about this than most, it's because I'm still annoyed at Valve for breaking my copy of HalfLife. I had a perfectly working copy of HalfLife -- in fact, two copies, because I'd bought a second copy bundled with Counter-Strike because I didn't feel like spending hours downloading it -- when one day Valve announces Steam. I said, "No, thank you, Steam's 'features' are not valuable to me, and certainly not worth as much as what I'll lose in personal privacy and system stability. My copy of HalfLife works just fine the way it is." I made an economic decision; I voted with my wallet. That's what everyone here says to do, right?
Well, that wasn't good enough for Valve, who apparently threatened or bought off the GameSpy3D and All-Seeing Eye publishers into refusing to list non-Steam game servers (of which there were plenty), and shutting off the old authentication servers. In other words, they broke my copy of HalfLife to try and force me to install their spyware. I have stuck to my principles, and continue to refuse to install Steam. This means I don't get to play TFC or Counter-Strike any more, despite the fact that there's nothing, technically, wrong with the copies I own. A considerable fraction of the value in the software I bought and paid for has been destroyed.
Valve tried to change the terms of the sale in a big fscking way long after the fact. If they did it once, there's every reason to suspect they'll do it again. Sorry, you don't get to do that, not with my machine and not with my dollars. I feel it's still important to make people aware that the cost to them may well be far greater than simply the dollars they'll part with.
Schwab
P.S: If anyone knows of any master servers listing non-Steam TFC and Counter-Strike servers that will work with the old WON-based versions of HalfLife, I'd appreciate knowing about it.
I can't believe I haven't seen anyone make this point yet, so let me make it:
Tiered Pricing Will Create Bandwidth Shortages.
Rather than increasing available bandwidth, tiered pricing will have precisely the opposite effect. It will create an economic incentive to keep available bandwidth below needed levels.
The proof is really quite simple. Tiered pricing is being sold as a "guarantee" of network speed and latency. If you pay the premium, you'll get a "guarantee" that your packets will go through at a certain speed and rate of reliability.
Large organizations -- the ones you're actually trying to extract higher fees out of -- don't take marketing bluster for granted. They actually measure network performance. They assign a dollar cost to network speed, packet latency, dropped packets, and overall performance visible to end-users. Using this metric, they decide which network provider will offer the best network performance for the lowest cost (note that "cost" includes not only the fees charged by the provider, but the calculated costs assigned to network performance metrics).
Now, let us assume there's enough bandwidth for everyone, and all packets get through with more or less equal speed and latency. The organization measures network performance and discovers this to be true. Thus, since there is no cost advantage to switching to the higher tier of service, no one will subscribe. The money the telco hoped to rake in does not, in fact, appear.
So, what do you do? Create a shortage. Or, more accurately, route the tiered traffic over the newer network infrastructure, and let everyone else use what's left over (which you neglect). Poof! Now packets over the lower tier are getting delayed or dropped like crazy. Performance on that tier of service suffers, which "costs" you money according to your metrics. So you consider the higher tier of service. If the cost increase of the higher service tier is less than the calculated costs of dropped packets on the lower tier, you switch.
In other words, the only way to get large subscribers to actually pay more for "premium" network service is to create an incentive to do so by ensuring that the non-premium service sucks. And as long as the higher tier exists, the lower tier will experience a perpetual shortage (because the large organizations don't stop measuring performance).
I absolutely guarantee you that the telcos long ago had accounting graphs drawn up that assign "costs" to various packet delivery performance metrics, and already know the exact level of bandwidth shortage required to get organizations to pay more. They will not exactly "create" this shortage. They will simply plow their dollars into new, faster network infrastructure, over which will exclusively be run the higher service tiers. The lower tiers will be left with the existing infrastructure, and the occasional hand-me-downs from upgrading the higher tiers.
Some people may observe that tiered service already exists. Well, yes, but not in the same way. Typically what you're buying is higher bandwidth. Once you get to a certain bandwidth level, quality-of-service guarantees are in place more or less by default (example: you can't really get a T3 link without a QoS guarantee). However, no matter what your endpoint capacity is, your packets are still pretty much running over the same routers as everyone else's, so everyone gets to share the pain of a choked router. However, with the tiered service model the telcos want, which router your packets go through will depend on what service plan you have. Which leads to artificial shortages.
In summary: The telcos are knowingly lying to your face. Tiered pricing will not reduce bandwidth shortages, but will instead establish the economic incentives to create them.
I don't think the article's author has his arguments straight. He claims that enforcement of net neutrality will forestall or kill network-centric OS development. But I was completely unable to find anything in the article explaining why the author believes this to be so, presumably assuming the reader will just go along with the unsupported assertion.
I don't buy it. I can't see how any ISP, under the current regulatory regime and network architecture (which is what net neutrality is (mostly) trying to preserve), could justify killing a network-centric OS, other than to whine about how much bandwidth it's using (boo-hoo).
Only one kind of regulation and enforcement is needed out of the Fed: Combating online fraud (spam and phish, primarily). Everything else is pretty much working as it's supposed to.
Oh, look. Online fraud is the only thing they're not planning on strangling in the crib. Shock, surprise...
This is a maliciously motivated, willful misunderstanding of how software development is performed. The "offensive" data was disconnected from the main game, but not fully removed. The reason it wasn't removed is because, when you're that close to a drop-dead ship date, you don't suddenly start yanking out huge wads of data and code because that will invalidate all your testing to date, and you'll have to re-test the entire damned game, which you don't have time for. So they did the next best thing -- they severed all the connections to it. In the annals of software engineering, this is considered, "good enough." And it's more than good enough for the likes of these pencil-pushing bureaucrats.
The data probably wasn't accessed. If the thief knew what they had, and was at all clever, they could have pulled the drive, performed a raw sector copy, and put it back. Poof! No date changes. I'm sure the FBI forensics team will be checking for this possibility.
I thought this was what Windows Activation was supposed to do -- validate the copy of Windows as genuine, and then we're done, we don't have to deal with those jerks any more.
Now they seem to be telling us, "Oh, no, Activation never really worked. We need to continuously validate the system."
No. You don't. And you won't.
I just built a brand new machine, primarily for gaming. Oblivion has been fairly sweet. But it looks like I won't be playing those games anymore -- not unless the entire game industry decides to support Linux.
This is morally and ethically reprehensible, and Microsoft knows it, and apparently doesn't care. Well, I do care. I do not, and shall not, grant consent to Microsoft to remotely snoop on my machine, regardless of their ostensible reasons. If my copy of Windows stops functioning as a result, I will take that as a maliciously incorporated product defect, and respond accordingly.
Wow, that Pentium basket must be awfully durable for Intel to be putting all their eggs in it. Or maybe Intel prefers not to be in a market in which there are about a dozen players (namely, providers of ARM-based system-on-chip products).
The briefest Google on my username should quickly reveal my views on the disaster that is the modern copyright regime, but your post makes me seriously question the ethics of your boss.
Quark is over $1000, and Freehand is about half that. The CEO said the company cannot justify the cost of these programs for just a few customers.
Yet your CEO is able to justify accepting jobs from customers he cannot, technically, support. This analogy is admittedly imprecise, but if a customer came in with a job on eight-inch floppies, would you accept it? Or would you turn the customer away, saying, "Sorry, we don't have the facilities to read your job data?"
And I don't even pay attention to who owns what fonts, because I know my company would never spend one cent on a font.
Let's assume computers didn't exist, and you were still using cast lead type. If a customer came in requesting a job in Garamond, and you didn't have a case of Garamond, would you turn away the job, or suggest substituting a typeface you do have?
If we make the analogy more precise, and the customer walks in with their own case of Garamond type, would you return the type to them when the job was complete?
It's my personal view that computer software and data, once it's been created, is essentially valueless, since it can be infinitely duplicated at zero cost. So I don't see unsanctioned copying ("piracy") as a problem, but merely an inevitability that all software authors and vendors must acknowledge and learn to live with. However, even I am taken aback by the rather cavalier attitude your CEO seems to show for the economic realities facing those who created the tools he uses to conduct his business and satisfy his customers.
Our civilization stands at a crossroads in our social and economic evolution. The computer heralds a day where even physical goods can be duplicated infinitely and effortlessly (assuming we survive the rising seas), and copyrights and patents as we conceptualize them today truly will become meaningless. But we're in a transition period, and that future is in peril. Physical artifacts can't be freely duplicated -- a fundamental assumption of the old economy -- but digital artifacts can, which the old economy can't cope with. It will take an exercise of good character and strong ethics by many people to carry us through to the real New Economy.
Your CEO may care to participate in this transition, and acknowledge the good work he is able to do by rewarding the good work of others.
Schwab
Still Playing QuakeWorld
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 1
I still play QuakeWorld on a regular basis. I never got into Quake2, as I thought the visuals were kinda depressing (washed out concrete and steel everywhere), and I also didn't care for the firing delays on some of the weapons. I mess around on Quake3 infrequently, as the in-game server browser is pathetically slow, but All-Seeing Eye refuses to be compatible with Punkbuster.
I seem to have reached the edge of my own QuakeWorld-playing skills, and could really use an expert's guidance on how to improve further. I've read most of the tutorials, but what I really need is to see an expert playing the game. How do they have the keyboard and mouse buttons mapped? WASD, ESDF, or something else? What's +attack bound to, and why? How do they hold the mouse? So if a Quake wizard in or near the San Francisco peninsula has some free time, let me know.
If you have an installation of Quake laying around, download the demo files and run it directly on your machine. That way you can have arbitrarily high resolution and frame rate, rather than a grainy AVI.
Also, if you have the add-on pack "Scourge of Armagon," they complete that game in 666 seconds. It also has production values, with vocals and added "machinima" clips. The whole thing is worth it for the one move that triggers the vocal, "The Levelord is impressed!"
Great stuff. I wish I was 1/10th as good as those guys...
I have a partner as well. We are of opposite sex, so your jealous, vindictive, increasingly irrelevant $(GOD) should not be offended (perish the thought).
People often mistake us for being married (must be something to do with how we interact). We are, however, not married. We can't go around calling each other husband and wife, because that would be misleading, since we're not married. Hence, we refer to each other as, "partners."
In other words, the term "partner" is not exlcusively used to refer to same-sex relationships. In fact, from the context of the article, "partner" could even refer to a business relationship, rather than a personal one.
Like most religious/Republican extremists, you are likely incapable of apology, regardless of how strongly it is merited. Absent such, self-immolation will do nicely. *plonk*
Seconded. My sweetie's Gateway laptop was having unrelated issues which required me to crack it open. As is my general practice when opening computers, I apply liberal amounts of Hoover to get the dust out. There wasn't a lot of dust inside the Gateway, but it was noticeable.
After buttoning the machine back up, my sweetie remarked that the cooling fan had become much quieter, and wasn't spinning up as often, which tells me it was now much cooler and happier.
In short, using the word 'theft' to describe copyright infringement is misleading, but using the word 'theft' to describe those things that are deprived to the victims of identity theft is perfectly acceptable.
"Identity Theft" isn't too far off the mark semantically, but I prefer the term Identity (or Reputation) Fraud which, to my mind, seems more precise.
I dream for the day Logitech wake up and take the wingman gaming mouse and add a laser, 2 thumb buttons and a scroll wheel.
Oh, man, I still have one of those plugged in to my KVM. It suffers from the "reverse blip" problem, which drove me nuts with all of Logitech's mice. But damn that thing has been solid and reliable.
Thank you for the cross-post. That was very edifying.
I guess I'm a finger mouser. However, I have relatively long hands (I can strike ten keys apart on a piano keyboard), and I also use airplane controls (inverted Y) on all my FPS games. So the issues of the mouse's body jamming into my palm don't really come up. (I'm guessing the original Razer Boomslang drove you crazy.)
Wow. I had no idea Razer engendered such vitriol in the game community. For myself, I've owned and used Razer mice since their first optomechanical Boomslang offering (I even still have the original "cookie tin" it came in). I've also owned a Viper (using it now at work), and have a Diamondback at home, which is rather nice. I'm disinclined to get the Copperhead, however, as it seems to fall into the "diminishing returns" category.
But what I find almost as puzzling is how swiftly people jump to recommend Logitech. Granted, this was a while ago, but I've used Logitech mice in the past, and all of them seemed to suffer from a problem I called, "the reverse blip." This is a circumstance where, if you're moving the mouse very finely (such as when trying to line up items on the screen, or point at a particular pixel), the pointer occasionally jumps one pixel in the wrong direction before heading in the direction you've actually been pushing. This only happens during direction changes. I could never quite get it to happen at will, but it happened often enough that it drove me nuts. And it was only Logitech mice that did this.
Additionally, Logitech's "drivers" were becoming more a study in graphic design and bundleware rather than an efficient, usable user interface. I was always worrying, "What the hell else are they installing in my machine? Why is it taking six megs of disk space to install a mouse driver?"
So I've kinda gone off Logitech, and Razer so far hasn't done anything to piss me off.
Slashdot Mirror
It's darned frustrating. I've written a fair number of graphics drivers in my day (all for BeOS, I'm afraid), so I have plenty of sympathy for driver writers trying to chase down lockups that happen very very infrequently.
Schwab
This is off-topic. But since you asked...
I feel it's important to remind people that, no matter how slick the packaging or magnificent the graphics or interesting/useful the application, this piece of software comes with an enormous downside: You have to install spyware in order to play it.
Ordinarily, that would be the end of the discussion:
"Hey, check out these really slick animated cursors!"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Hey, isn't my new screen buddy cute?"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Woah, look at this uber-cool screensaver I installed!"
"Dude, it's spyware."
"Wow, this free solitaire program I downloaded is much prettier than the one that comes with Windows."
"Dude, it's spyware!"
If a vendor distributes spyware, they are correctly pilloried by the community. Yet, for some reason, Valve gets a pass. No one has been able to make the argument that distinguishes Steam from other spyware suites out there. And no, claiming that Valve is trying to develop a new revenue model doesn't cut it, because Gator and BonziBuddy and CometCursor were also trying to develop a new revenue model.
Anti-cheat measures? A reasonable feature, but PunkBuster did the same thing with Quake3 without being a requirement.
If I seem just a bit more strident about this than most, it's because I'm still annoyed at Valve for breaking my copy of HalfLife. I had a perfectly working copy of HalfLife -- in fact, two copies, because I'd bought a second copy bundled with Counter-Strike because I didn't feel like spending hours downloading it -- when one day Valve announces Steam. I said, "No, thank you, Steam's 'features' are not valuable to me, and certainly not worth as much as what I'll lose in personal privacy and system stability. My copy of HalfLife works just fine the way it is." I made an economic decision; I voted with my wallet. That's what everyone here says to do, right?
Well, that wasn't good enough for Valve, who apparently threatened or bought off the GameSpy3D and All-Seeing Eye publishers into refusing to list non-Steam game servers (of which there were plenty), and shutting off the old authentication servers. In other words, they broke my copy of HalfLife to try and force me to install their spyware. I have stuck to my principles, and continue to refuse to install Steam. This means I don't get to play TFC or Counter-Strike any more, despite the fact that there's nothing, technically, wrong with the copies I own. A considerable fraction of the value in the software I bought and paid for has been destroyed.
Valve tried to change the terms of the sale in a big fscking way long after the fact. If they did it once, there's every reason to suspect they'll do it again. Sorry, you don't get to do that, not with my machine and not with my dollars. I feel it's still important to make people aware that the cost to them may well be far greater than simply the dollars they'll part with.
Schwab
P.S: If anyone knows of any master servers listing non-Steam TFC and Counter-Strike servers that will work with the old WON-based versions of HalfLife, I'd appreciate knowing about it.
Schwab
Seriously. The Folsom facility is a sea of nothing but 6*8 cubes. It's completely cheerless. Those people really should have more space.
Schwab
Tiered Pricing Will Create Bandwidth Shortages.
Rather than increasing available bandwidth, tiered pricing will have precisely the opposite effect. It will create an economic incentive to keep available bandwidth below needed levels.
The proof is really quite simple. Tiered pricing is being sold as a "guarantee" of network speed and latency. If you pay the premium, you'll get a "guarantee" that your packets will go through at a certain speed and rate of reliability.
Large organizations -- the ones you're actually trying to extract higher fees out of -- don't take marketing bluster for granted. They actually measure network performance. They assign a dollar cost to network speed, packet latency, dropped packets, and overall performance visible to end-users. Using this metric, they decide which network provider will offer the best network performance for the lowest cost (note that "cost" includes not only the fees charged by the provider, but the calculated costs assigned to network performance metrics).
Now, let us assume there's enough bandwidth for everyone, and all packets get through with more or less equal speed and latency. The organization measures network performance and discovers this to be true. Thus, since there is no cost advantage to switching to the higher tier of service, no one will subscribe. The money the telco hoped to rake in does not, in fact, appear.
So, what do you do? Create a shortage. Or, more accurately, route the tiered traffic over the newer network infrastructure, and let everyone else use what's left over (which you neglect). Poof! Now packets over the lower tier are getting delayed or dropped like crazy. Performance on that tier of service suffers, which "costs" you money according to your metrics. So you consider the higher tier of service. If the cost increase of the higher service tier is less than the calculated costs of dropped packets on the lower tier, you switch.
In other words, the only way to get large subscribers to actually pay more for "premium" network service is to create an incentive to do so by ensuring that the non-premium service sucks. And as long as the higher tier exists, the lower tier will experience a perpetual shortage (because the large organizations don't stop measuring performance).
I absolutely guarantee you that the telcos long ago had accounting graphs drawn up that assign "costs" to various packet delivery performance metrics, and already know the exact level of bandwidth shortage required to get organizations to pay more. They will not exactly "create" this shortage. They will simply plow their dollars into new, faster network infrastructure, over which will exclusively be run the higher service tiers. The lower tiers will be left with the existing infrastructure, and the occasional hand-me-downs from upgrading the higher tiers.
Some people may observe that tiered service already exists. Well, yes, but not in the same way. Typically what you're buying is higher bandwidth. Once you get to a certain bandwidth level, quality-of-service guarantees are in place more or less by default (example: you can't really get a T3 link without a QoS guarantee). However, no matter what your endpoint capacity is, your packets are still pretty much running over the same routers as everyone else's, so everyone gets to share the pain of a choked router. However, with the tiered service model the telcos want, which router your packets go through will depend on what service plan you have. Which leads to artificial shortages.
In summary: The telcos are knowingly lying to your face. Tiered pricing will not reduce bandwidth shortages, but will instead establish the economic incentives to create them.
Schwab
I don't buy it. I can't see how any ISP, under the current regulatory regime and network architecture (which is what net neutrality is (mostly) trying to preserve), could justify killing a network-centric OS, other than to whine about how much bandwidth it's using (boo-hoo).
I think it's a very poor, misleading article.
Schwab
Oh, look. Online fraud is the only thing they're not planning on strangling in the crib. Shock, surprise...
Schwab
Schwab
This is government harassment, pure and simple.
Schwab
Uh, no. The first thing that comes to my mind is their calculators. After that, their test instruments, and then maybe their printers.
Schwab
You won't know the meaning of the word 'nightmare' until you start facing down a PS3.
Schwab
...Perhaps because it was red and circular?
Schwab
The data probably wasn't accessed. If the thief knew what they had, and was at all clever, they could have pulled the drive, performed a raw sector copy, and put it back. Poof! No date changes. I'm sure the FBI forensics team will be checking for this possibility.
Schwab
Now they seem to be telling us, "Oh, no, Activation never really worked. We need to continuously validate the system."
No. You don't. And you won't.
I just built a brand new machine, primarily for gaming. Oblivion has been fairly sweet. But it looks like I won't be playing those games anymore -- not unless the entire game industry decides to support Linux.
This is morally and ethically reprehensible, and Microsoft knows it, and apparently doesn't care. Well, I do care. I do not, and shall not, grant consent to Microsoft to remotely snoop on my machine, regardless of their ostensible reasons. If my copy of Windows stops functioning as a result, I will take that as a maliciously incorporated product defect, and respond accordingly.
Schwab
Schwab
Yet your CEO is able to justify accepting jobs from customers he cannot, technically, support. This analogy is admittedly imprecise, but if a customer came in with a job on eight-inch floppies, would you accept it? Or would you turn the customer away, saying, "Sorry, we don't have the facilities to read your job data?"
Let's assume computers didn't exist, and you were still using cast lead type. If a customer came in requesting a job in Garamond, and you didn't have a case of Garamond, would you turn away the job, or suggest substituting a typeface you do have?
If we make the analogy more precise, and the customer walks in with their own case of Garamond type, would you return the type to them when the job was complete?
It's my personal view that computer software and data, once it's been created, is essentially valueless, since it can be infinitely duplicated at zero cost. So I don't see unsanctioned copying ("piracy") as a problem, but merely an inevitability that all software authors and vendors must acknowledge and learn to live with. However, even I am taken aback by the rather cavalier attitude your CEO seems to show for the economic realities facing those who created the tools he uses to conduct his business and satisfy his customers.
Our civilization stands at a crossroads in our social and economic evolution. The computer heralds a day where even physical goods can be duplicated infinitely and effortlessly (assuming we survive the rising seas), and copyrights and patents as we conceptualize them today truly will become meaningless. But we're in a transition period, and that future is in peril. Physical artifacts can't be freely duplicated -- a fundamental assumption of the old economy -- but digital artifacts can, which the old economy can't cope with. It will take an exercise of good character and strong ethics by many people to carry us through to the real New Economy.
Your CEO may care to participate in this transition, and acknowledge the good work he is able to do by rewarding the good work of others.
Schwab
I seem to have reached the edge of my own QuakeWorld-playing skills, and could really use an expert's guidance on how to improve further. I've read most of the tutorials, but what I really need is to see an expert playing the game. How do they have the keyboard and mouse buttons mapped? WASD, ESDF, or something else? What's +attack bound to, and why? How do they hold the mouse? So if a Quake wizard in or near the San Francisco peninsula has some free time, let me know.
Schwab
Also, if you have the add-on pack "Scourge of Armagon," they complete that game in 666 seconds. It also has production values, with vocals and added "machinima" clips. The whole thing is worth it for the one move that triggers the vocal, "The Levelord is impressed!"
Great stuff. I wish I was 1/10th as good as those guys...
Schwab
I have a partner as well. We are of opposite sex, so your jealous, vindictive, increasingly irrelevant $(GOD) should not be offended (perish the thought).
People often mistake us for being married (must be something to do with how we interact). We are, however, not married. We can't go around calling each other husband and wife, because that would be misleading, since we're not married. Hence, we refer to each other as, "partners."
In other words, the term "partner" is not exlcusively used to refer to same-sex relationships. In fact, from the context of the article, "partner" could even refer to a business relationship, rather than a personal one.
Like most religious/Republican extremists, you are likely incapable of apology, regardless of how strongly it is merited. Absent such, self-immolation will do nicely. *plonk*
Schwab
"I just port scanned him and, like, his firewall *waaaaay* overreacted..."
Seconded. My sweetie's Gateway laptop was having unrelated issues which required me to crack it open. As is my general practice when opening computers, I apply liberal amounts of Hoover to get the dust out. There wasn't a lot of dust inside the Gateway, but it was noticeable.
After buttoning the machine back up, my sweetie remarked that the cooling fan had become much quieter, and wasn't spinning up as often, which tells me it was now much cooler and happier.
Clean your fans and fan filters.
Schwab
"Identity Theft" isn't too far off the mark semantically, but I prefer the term Identity (or Reputation) Fraud which, to my mind, seems more precise.
Schwab
Oh, man, I still have one of those plugged in to my KVM. It suffers from the "reverse blip" problem, which drove me nuts with all of Logitech's mice. But damn that thing has been solid and reliable.
Schwab
I guess I'm a finger mouser. However, I have relatively long hands (I can strike ten keys apart on a piano keyboard), and I also use airplane controls (inverted Y) on all my FPS games. So the issues of the mouse's body jamming into my palm don't really come up. (I'm guessing the original Razer Boomslang drove you crazy.)
Schwab
But what I find almost as puzzling is how swiftly people jump to recommend Logitech. Granted, this was a while ago, but I've used Logitech mice in the past, and all of them seemed to suffer from a problem I called, "the reverse blip." This is a circumstance where, if you're moving the mouse very finely (such as when trying to line up items on the screen, or point at a particular pixel), the pointer occasionally jumps one pixel in the wrong direction before heading in the direction you've actually been pushing. This only happens during direction changes. I could never quite get it to happen at will, but it happened often enough that it drove me nuts. And it was only Logitech mice that did this.
Additionally, Logitech's "drivers" were becoming more a study in graphic design and bundleware rather than an efficient, usable user interface. I was always worrying, "What the hell else are they installing in my machine? Why is it taking six megs of disk space to install a mouse driver?"
So I've kinda gone off Logitech, and Razer so far hasn't done anything to piss me off.
Schwab