Ehm, fine, but the "no offense" line was addressed to the AC who replied to you. He has obviously never loaded a C64 game from tape.:-)
Wolfenstein 3D was a nice one, and even much more interesting because it was banned in Germany (just for the use of nazi symbols, disregarding that you kill the nazis in the game). And btw: even on my iPhone 3G it does not take 10 minutes to load.:-)
btw, someone here who remembers "Escape from Wolfenstein"? Yes, the thing which had monochrome graphics, but speech output ("Halt, Ausweis!"), which was kind of revolutionary on 8 bit machines back in these times.
If an AI cheats on you, and the game description contained nothing like "cheating AI" then why don't you give the game back, get refunded and buy a game with a decent AI?
Just 13 hours? I'd really feel ripped of, if I paid the 50 to 60 Euros a PS3 game costs, and then found out that they just sold me some beginner levels for the price of a full game. The games I grew up with usually took much more time to get through. Games like "The Bard's Tale" or "Pirates!" provided fun for several weeks while playing from one to ten hours each day. And even simpler ones like "Airborne Ranger" could not be finished in just 13 hours (maybe except for people using a walkthrough).
The problem is this: Nowadays they waste so much of the budget just for fancy eyecandy, and don't get that mostly this makes the games worse, not better. If they'd just cut their eyecandy budget by a quarter and add that to the gameplay guys' budget instead, there would be much better and longer lasting games.
I don't want to offend, but it seems you never played games on the old 8-bit home computers like the C64. I don't recall exactly, but loading a not so small game from the tape drive without a speeder really took around that ten minutes, maybe even more. Much less than an actual gaming rig needs to start a game. But we didn't really care, or did we?
Back in the 8-bit days we got a copy of "Turbo Tape" or bought a (maybe pimped) disk drive to make the games load faster. Nowadays we buy some more RAM, a faster HDD or even an RAID0 made of four SSDs. What's the difference?
And how I do! Just two days ago I told a friend about xkcd and browsed to exactly that "exploits of a mum" strip later that day because of it. It always makes me laughing so hard, that's the kind of girl to marry!
I doubt it. Accepting email (and then ignoring it) costs the "speculants and cybersquatters" nothing - they just point them all at the same mail server just as they do with the web servers.
Oh my. Just imagine this: guy wants to register $HISNAME-software.com that is taken by a domain grabber. Guy goes to some kind of ombudsman who gives the thing a closer look and easily sees that the running mailserver is just an alibi. Domain will be transferred, grabber maybe fined.
Sure, you could never really get all of them, if we make sure not to have "false positives", but why shouldn't we at least get rid of the big ones, where it is easy to proove?
Plus, why is putting up a page of advertisements not "using"?
Oh, "registering a domain in order to treat it as a good to be sold", maybe with an added "especially when not making any real use in terms of running stuff like websites, mail, ssh, VPN,..." seems like a good starter to me.
And in your case, I would suspect that - assuming your business is not selling domains - your (businesses') name or what you do and the domain name give clear evidence that you had no malicious intent.
So what? That scheme would be obvious enough. They would have to come up with more complexity in the generated pages, register the domains to many different real people and so on. Maybe we'll have to add fines for "professional" parkers in the recipe.
OK, I admit that it's no sooo easy. But it would be a huge advancement to the situation now without being technically unrealistic.
And there is one thing I forgot: any abuse of domain tasting must be severely punished.
I know that WWW ist just one of many services. And a definition of "use" (or better of what kind of behaviour leads to losing the domain) that eliminates most of the speculants and cybersquatters but doesn't hurt other people shouldn't be too difficult to find.
And if it's only done on request by someone with serious interest in using the domain, there would be no need to "visit millions of websites".
The easy solution would be a "use it or lose it" rule where the ownership of a domain that is just parked will be revoked when someone else would like to register it.
Although with the "evil corp" example, I'd argue people should be keeping their systems safe from evil corporations as well as evil crime syndicates
Are you safe from someone secretly breaking into your house and infecting your machine? And do you really only use software that is 100% proven to be not exploitable on machines with net connection? C'mon, it has to stay reasonable. You can't expect everyone to go online with Linux Live CDs or from a VM that is reverted to a clean snapshot after the session. Which are about the only ways to really stay clean.
Those people need to be kicked off the net until they can demonstrate that they can play nicely with the rest of us.
Although the BOFH in me would like that, thoroughly fining them would be enough. And if we really had a law that would allow to ban people from the net for incompetence, how long would it take that it would be abused to cut off government critical voices and the like? Or some evil corp gets the machine of a critical blogger infected and he's offline. Not with me.
I don't get this. What keeps you from just buying the (unlocked) smartphone that you want and where you want and using that with a simple prepaid SIM card which works in the Verizon net? Maybe from a reseller, not directly from Verizon (if you have such in the USA).
Yes. But that doesn't mean that I'd ever let anyone except closest friends take my credit card out of my sight.
I'm from Germany, and the usage of credit cards is not so widespread here as in the USA. If it's not a business related dinner, or some kind of bigger event, most people here usually pay cash in restaurants. And as I know how much the CC companies charge those poor shop owners, I tend to use a credit card only when paying in cash or with the bank card (don't know if there's something similar in the US, you use it to draw money from ATMs or pay in shops, works all over Europe, often even in shops who wouldn't accept Amex or Visa) is not possible.
I like this rule that forbids to give the card out of your hands. Hopefully it will put some common sense in some heads and I can stop shaking my head over all those idiots who willingly give their credit cards out of their hands and let people do stuff they can't see with it, but then wonder about their crazy bills.
And banks don't "need" an ID card or copies of an ID card to open an account. Any method which can prove that you are the guy who opened the account would do it.
Taking into account all those faked and/or incompetent reviews: you'd better read more than one. Or get first hand information from a source that you know you can trust.
Really? When I want to have sex with a woman, she's always too busy for meeting me. Thanks to the article, I know now, that they are doing stuff on facebook or texting with a girlfriend. Hm, maybe I should start doing drugs.
... to poorly done content bought on some kind of media. It's always wise to give something a look before buying it, regardless of it being virtual or "real" goods. Unfinished or badly done software has been sold since software is being sold. The only chance to fix this, is that people stop buying such shit.
Investment is putting money in the hands of people who CAN create wealth, but don't have enough money to do so on their own.
Often it's little more complex: it is putting money in the hands of people who will give a little of that money to the people who do the actual work and/or own the resources needed to create that wealth and keep the rest for themselves.
So true. Our whole civilization is built on math. Those who don't understand that will not be able to rise above worker bee, it is hard enough to do that anyway.
There's numerous people like artists or models to prove that wrong. If it's not clear now, think of GWB.
Slashdot Mirror
Ehm, fine, but the "no offense" line was addressed to the AC who replied to you. He has obviously never loaded a C64 game from tape. :-)
Wolfenstein 3D was a nice one, and even much more interesting because it was banned in Germany (just for the use of nazi symbols, disregarding that you kill the nazis in the game). And btw: even on my iPhone 3G it does not take 10 minutes to load. :-)
btw, someone here who remembers "Escape from Wolfenstein"? Yes, the thing which had monochrome graphics, but speech output ("Halt, Ausweis!"), which was kind of revolutionary on 8 bit machines back in these times.
If an AI cheats on you, and the game description contained nothing like "cheating AI" then why don't you give the game back, get refunded and buy a game with a decent AI?
Just 13 hours? I'd really feel ripped of, if I paid the 50 to 60 Euros a PS3 game costs, and then found out that they just sold me some beginner levels for the price of a full game. The games I grew up with usually took much more time to get through. Games like "The Bard's Tale" or "Pirates!" provided fun for several weeks while playing from one to ten hours each day. And even simpler ones like "Airborne Ranger" could not be finished in just 13 hours (maybe except for people using a walkthrough).
The problem is this: Nowadays they waste so much of the budget just for fancy eyecandy, and don't get that mostly this makes the games worse, not better. If they'd just cut their eyecandy budget by a quarter and add that to the gameplay guys' budget instead, there would be much better and longer lasting games.
Grmbl.
s/less/longer/
I don't want to offend, but it seems you never played games on the old 8-bit home computers like the C64. I don't recall exactly, but loading a not so small game from the tape drive without a speeder really took around that ten minutes, maybe even more. Much less than an actual gaming rig needs to start a game. But we didn't really care, or did we?
Back in the 8-bit days we got a copy of "Turbo Tape" or bought a (maybe pimped) disk drive to make the games load faster. Nowadays we buy some more RAM, a faster HDD or even an RAID0 made of four SSDs. What's the difference?
remember little Bobby tables?
And how I do! Just two days ago I told a friend about xkcd and browsed to exactly that "exploits of a mum" strip later that day because of it. It always makes me laughing so hard, that's the kind of girl to marry!
I doubt it. Accepting email (and then ignoring it) costs the "speculants and cybersquatters" nothing - they just point them all at the same mail server just as they do with the web servers.
Oh my. Just imagine this: guy wants to register $HISNAME-software.com that is taken by a domain grabber. Guy goes to some kind of ombudsman who gives the thing a closer look and easily sees that the running mailserver is just an alibi. Domain will be transferred, grabber maybe fined.
Sure, you could never really get all of them, if we make sure not to have "false positives", but why shouldn't we at least get rid of the big ones, where it is easy to proove?
Plus, why is putting up a page of advertisements not "using"?
Because of the missing content?!
Oh, "registering a domain in order to treat it as a good to be sold", maybe with an added "especially when not making any real use in terms of running stuff like websites, mail, ssh, VPN, ..." seems like a good starter to me.
And in your case, I would suspect that - assuming your business is not selling domains - your (businesses') name or what you do and the domain name give clear evidence that you had no malicious intent.
So what? That scheme would be obvious enough. They would have to come up with more complexity in the generated pages, register the domains to many different real people and so on. Maybe we'll have to add fines for "professional" parkers in the recipe.
OK, I admit that it's no sooo easy. But it would be a huge advancement to the situation now without being technically unrealistic.
And there is one thing I forgot: any abuse of domain tasting must be severely punished.
I know that WWW ist just one of many services. And a definition of "use" (or better of what kind of behaviour leads to losing the domain) that eliminates most of the speculants and cybersquatters but doesn't hurt other people shouldn't be too difficult to find.
And if it's only done on request by someone with serious interest in using the domain, there would be no need to "visit millions of websites".
The easy solution would be a "use it or lose it" rule where the ownership of a domain that is just parked will be revoked when someone else would like to register it.
Although with the "evil corp" example, I'd argue people should be keeping their systems safe from evil corporations as well as evil crime syndicates
Are you safe from someone secretly breaking into your house and infecting your machine? And do you really only use software that is 100% proven to be not exploitable on machines with net connection? C'mon, it has to stay reasonable. You can't expect everyone to go online with Linux Live CDs or from a VM that is reverted to a clean snapshot after the session. Which are about the only ways to really stay clean.
Those people need to be kicked off the net until they can demonstrate that they can play nicely with the rest of us.
Although the BOFH in me would like that, thoroughly fining them would be enough. And if we really had a law that would allow to ban people from the net for incompetence, how long would it take that it would be abused to cut off government critical voices and the like? Or some evil corp gets the machine of a critical blogger infected and he's offline. Not with me.
I don't get this. What keeps you from just buying the (unlocked) smartphone that you want and where you want and using that with a simple prepaid SIM card which works in the Verizon net? Maybe from a reseller, not directly from Verizon (if you have such in the USA).
Yes. But that doesn't mean that I'd ever let anyone except closest friends take my credit card out of my sight.
I'm from Germany, and the usage of credit cards is not so widespread here as in the USA. If it's not a business related dinner, or some kind of bigger event, most people here usually pay cash in restaurants. And as I know how much the CC companies charge those poor shop owners, I tend to use a credit card only when paying in cash or with the bank card (don't know if there's something similar in the US, you use it to draw money from ATMs or pay in shops, works all over Europe, often even in shops who wouldn't accept Amex or Visa) is not possible.
I like this rule that forbids to give the card out of your hands. Hopefully it will put some common sense in some heads and I can stop shaking my head over all those idiots who willingly give their credit cards out of their hands and let people do stuff they can't see with it, but then wonder about their crazy bills.
And banks don't "need" an ID card or copies of an ID card to open an account. Any method which can prove that you are the guy who opened the account would do it.
Taking into account all those faked and/or incompetent reviews: you'd better read more than one. Or get first hand information from a source that you know you can trust.
Really? When I want to have sex with a woman, she's always too busy for meeting me. Thanks to the article, I know now, that they are doing stuff on facebook or texting with a girlfriend. Hm, maybe I should start doing drugs.
... to poorly done content bought on some kind of media. It's always wise to give something a look before buying it, regardless of it being virtual or "real" goods. Unfinished or badly done software has been sold since software is being sold. The only chance to fix this, is that people stop buying such shit.
Investment is putting money in the hands of people who CAN create wealth, but don't have enough money to do so on their own.
Often it's little more complex: it is putting money in the hands of people who will give a little of that money to the people who do the actual work and/or own the resources needed to create that wealth and keep the rest for themselves.
Personally I'm not much interested in someone's motivations for committing a crime
So you don't care if someone's motivation for killing is self-defense?
Killing someone in self-defense is not a crime.
... that you don't get to see ads if you fail the captcha? I am certainly fine with that!
So true. Our whole civilization is built on math. Those who don't understand that will not be able to rise above worker bee, it is hard enough to do that anyway.
There's numerous people like artists or models to prove that wrong. If it's not clear now, think of GWB.
87 year old ladies don't spring out of nowhere.
You've obviously never been to Florida, don't you?
Finally someone mentions Baxter! I'm surprised that I had to scroll down half of the page, I expected to see him mentioned much earlier and often.