The credit card is to keep 12 year olds out of the game. Believe me, it makes the game a LOT better when you don't have little teens scampering about asking ASL and shooting you with home-made guns (which you make in-game... you can make anything, really, even stuff that annoys the piss out of people.)
They had an experiment that just got done where they took the credit requirement out... almost overnight the maturity level plummeted as morons straight from Counterstrike would come up and shoot people off their property at mach 12. Yeah, it's not very fun.
Of course, we came up with our own ways of disposal... launching them into the upper atmosphere is a good one:)
But seriously... if more games required a credit card for use, the world would be better off. SL is a nice haven from the retards that troll the majority of online games.
I'm glad someone's deciding to finally act on this. Ink cartridges should not be costing 20,30,40 dollars. It's ink... the technology has been around for several hundred years. Now granted, printer technology has only been around 20 years, but still, it's not like it's rocket science (or rocket fuel, for that matter:)
You're assuming, of course, that the RIAA is just the Big Five... but if you mosey to the website, you find like 300 labels that are affiliated with the RIAA.
That was my UIN (still is, incidentally, on Trillian). Man, those were the days.
I remember being able to log in and not be spammed to death by random people (either "ASL?! I WANT TO SEX YUO" or sales for penis pumps). I also loved the interface, where sending messages was more "e-mail" than "instant messaging". It let people come up with more eloquent responses to one another, rather than firing off one liners. NOw everyone gets impatient or thinks you went offline if you take more than 30 seconds to reply to anything.
Did I mention the program was relatively bloatfree back in those days? You know, before they turned it into a Swiss Army Knife with stupid features no one uses. Activelists? Come on now.
Ahh, but then everyone I knew switched to MSN (duude, it's soo simpler!), and the days of eloquent messaging were gone, washed away by that fucking butterfly.
Sigh...
*puts an away message on Trillian and goes to work*
Perhaps I'm just an eternal optimist...
on
NARA Goes Online
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
But I think this shows that certain parts of the US government isn't all bad. Sure, there are some rotten apples, and quite a few of them are leading these 4 years (*coughAshcroftcough*), but at least the ENTIRE beaucracy isn't totally corrupt as to believe the US Constitution is moot. Which you might believe if you read all the latest comments on Slashdot.
Maybe this just shows that an entire beauracracy cannot become totally evil, or totally good.
Then why were they forced to take the Scientology bashers' pages off?
If it has to include something, it should include everything else as well.
Re:Just because you tolerate that garbage...
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 1
Let's use a car as an analogy. The consumer doesn't need to rip out the engine and rebuild it to guarantee that it won't violently explode on I-75 next week. It works "out of the box", so to speak, with the right features enabled/included.
The point is that Realplayer is an annoyance, a hefty memory hog that does nothing but cause problems. I personally refuse to install Real technologies on my system, because they're a friggin hassle to a) setup and b) remove.
If a site wants me to use Realplayer, I just close the site. Everyone else should too.
..and then everyone else does it on the network, and then - LO AND BEHOLD - you can't download any files because no one is sharing, for fear of legal retribution. The p2p network shuts down, you end up with some spyware, and it's a done deal. The Man wins.:)
prevents p2p networks from just switching ports? That's most likely how they're going to be blocking access. And eventually, they're going to be blocking legitimite uploading (ie online gaming, file transfer between friends, web pages, etc.), which is going to piss off a LOT of people.
I, for one, send quite a bit of music up the pipe to my web page. The ftp port isn't on the regular FTP port of 21. What if my ISP decided to block the port I was using because it was a p2p port? They'd have lost a customer, that's for sure.
Severely limiting people's downloads and uploads isn't exactly hurrying the welcoming of broadband with open arms.
Define a "decent" website. A decent website to me is something that provides the information/entertainment I want, period. I don't need fancy cookie-enabled menu-driven java taskbars with the optional cup holder, annoying flash animations, ANY animations, or images for that matter. I would be perfectly happy with the web if 99% of the pages online were just text. I read, I play, I do whatever.
I hate most website designs now. Everyone thinks that cramming as much information onto a 17 inch monitor will solve all design woes. But that's not it at all. I want your information, and I don't care how you give it to me, as long as it's done efficiently and well. If you can save bandwidth costs by having the text zipped up and emailed to me, so be it. The last thing I want to do is be called a thief because I didn't want to wade through 304 "HOT ANAL SEX ACTION ONLY AT CLASSMATES.COM" pop-up ads that spawn pop up ads that spawn pop up ads.
People should NOT make money from their websites, unless people WANT to give it to them. Making your potential customer HAVE to listen to your advertiser's garbage is going to piss them off long before they even see your damned page, decent or not.
True, 99.9% of Web users don't write thank yous or attaboys. If everyone wrote a thank you note to the author of every web site they found useful, the sheer amount of email would break every mail server in the country, not to mention slow productivity to a crawl.
Or should thousands of people in the world just work their butts off to give YOU stuff for free?
It's called good will. Look it up someday. That's what the web was founded on. I give you some, hopefully you give some back. If not... at least you gained some knowledge.
So you support only one Microsoft OS, and it's not even a good one.
I'd support DOS over Windows 98 any day. At least with DOS you could at least hack around any problems Win98 had in case it went wonky (which it usually did).
But it was a good learning tool. Most of the friends I have that "grew up" on Windows 95 are completely lost once the taskbar and Start button disappear. If you ran DOS, you HAD to know what to do if Duke3d required more memory, or if you needed to load himem.sys.
Granted, it doesn't match the horror stories of you old timers coding in binary on the ENIAC blindfolded with only one can of Mountain Dew to get you through the day, but it's how I learned, and I feel better because of it.:)
...I grew up on that thing:) Ever since my uncle plopped me down in front of his 386SX to play Doom shareware (I know, I'm a youngin), I've been a computer geek ever since.
Even after going from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, I still found it better to do 80% of my stuff from the command line. Windows 98 SE finally kicked me off of that habit:/
Sigh, command lines... so fun, so minimalist. I don't like my start menu:\
The only way the FTC can go after spam is for fraud and other things already illegal. It's not illegal simply to advertise via email (yet, anyway). They're doing the best they can with the rules that they're allowed to govern in.
At least they are one division of government that doesn't try to overstep its bounds:)
Rez is also out for Dreamcast, if you want to get it. You have to import it, but it's worth it. You can snag a used DC for like 50 bucks nowadays anyhow.
Good to know that the guy finally released the source code. It was depressing watching all the "elite" slashdotters on here blasting his idea away, debasing him with a bunch of random equations and "laws of physics". Now that it's open source, you can all move your feet to your mouth:)
...when I see it. And ten bucks says it's a worthless pile of crap.
The books are among my favorite to read, but I don't really think it would make a good American Hollywood Movie. It's all about the subtle British humor. And American audiences don't like narration much, which you would have to do in the movie, I would imagine. And do alot of it.
A hollywood director, with hollywood actors, doing a hollywood movie, about a British cult-classic book. It's going to be on par with Battlefield Earth, I bet.
...how long it would take for such things to happen.
Something with such mass-market appeal like "The Sims" is perfect fodder for product placement. Shame they couldn't just have product placement and keep the game free instead of a pay-per-month basis.
Name an application that requires as a minimum spec anything over 1 ghz. Most consumer-end products use maybe half that (Battlefield 1942, for instance, requires a 500 mhz with a 3d card... that was top of the line 3 years ago, but still).
I think it's just a case of hardware outpacing software. Even the most fervant Ubergeek doesn't need the fastest processor anymore... my 1.4 ghz Athlon runs everything just fine, thank you very much. I should be able to run everything coming down the pike for the next year or two, in any case.
And by the time I get around to upgrading again, 2+ ghz processors will (in theory) be dirt cheap:)
Lordfly
The first usage of "pr0n" according to google...
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
The credit card is to keep 12 year olds out of the game. Believe me, it makes the game a LOT better when you don't have little teens scampering about asking ASL and shooting you with home-made guns (which you make in-game... you can make anything, really, even stuff that annoys the piss out of people.)
:)
They had an experiment that just got done where they took the credit requirement out... almost overnight the maturity level plummeted as morons straight from Counterstrike would come up and shoot people off their property at mach 12. Yeah, it's not very fun.
Of course, we came up with our own ways of disposal... launching them into the upper atmosphere is a good one
But seriously... if more games required a credit card for use, the world would be better off. SL is a nice haven from the retards that troll the majority of online games.
probably tastes better too :P
I'm glad someone's deciding to finally act on this. Ink cartridges should not be costing 20,30,40 dollars. It's ink... the technology has been around for several hundred years. Now granted, printer technology has only been around 20 years, but still, it's not like it's rocket science (or rocket fuel, for that matter :)
You're assuming, of course, that the RIAA is just the Big Five... but if you mosey to the website, you find like 300 labels that are affiliated with the RIAA.
That was my UIN (still is, incidentally, on Trillian). Man, those were the days.
I remember being able to log in and not be spammed to death by random people (either "ASL?! I WANT TO SEX YUO" or sales for penis pumps). I also loved the interface, where sending messages was more "e-mail" than "instant messaging". It let people come up with more eloquent responses to one another, rather than firing off one liners. NOw everyone gets impatient or thinks you went offline if you take more than 30 seconds to reply to anything.
Did I mention the program was relatively bloatfree back in those days? You know, before they turned it into a Swiss Army Knife with stupid features no one uses. Activelists? Come on now.
Ahh, but then everyone I knew switched to MSN (duude, it's soo simpler!), and the days of eloquent messaging were gone, washed away by that fucking butterfly.
Sigh...
*puts an away message on Trillian and goes to work*
But I think this shows that certain parts of the US government isn't all bad. Sure, there are some rotten apples, and quite a few of them are leading these 4 years (*coughAshcroftcough*), but at least the ENTIRE beaucracy isn't totally corrupt as to believe the US Constitution is moot. Which you might believe if you read all the latest comments on Slashdot.
Maybe this just shows that an entire beauracracy cannot become totally evil, or totally good.
But that's just me rambling, I guess.
josh
Seeing as the advertising revenue has gone down the can in recent months, how can they expect to make money?
Are people willing to pay for instant messaging?
Josh
Then why were they forced to take the Scientology bashers' pages off?
If it has to include something, it should include everything else as well.
Let's use a car as an analogy. The consumer doesn't need to rip out the engine and rebuild it to guarantee that it won't violently explode on I-75 next week. It works "out of the box", so to speak, with the right features enabled/included.
The point is that Realplayer is an annoyance, a hefty memory hog that does nothing but cause problems. I personally refuse to install Real technologies on my system, because they're a friggin hassle to a) setup and b) remove.
If a site wants me to use Realplayer, I just close the site. Everyone else should too.
That's just Shatner's acting.
..and then everyone else does it on the network, and then - LO AND BEHOLD - you can't download any files because no one is sharing, for fear of legal retribution. The p2p network shuts down, you end up with some spyware, and it's a done deal. The Man wins. :)
Josh
prevents p2p networks from just switching ports? That's most likely how they're going to be blocking access. And eventually, they're going to be blocking legitimite uploading (ie online gaming, file transfer between friends, web pages, etc.), which is going to piss off a LOT of people.
I, for one, send quite a bit of music up the pipe to my web page. The ftp port isn't on the regular FTP port of 21. What if my ISP decided to block the port I was using because it was a p2p port? They'd have lost a customer, that's for sure.
Severely limiting people's downloads and uploads isn't exactly hurrying the welcoming of broadband with open arms.
Josh
Since getting cable internet last year, my phone service has gone out about a dozen times. Cable? twice.
Josh
Define a "decent" website. A decent website to me is something that provides the information/entertainment I want, period. I don't need fancy cookie-enabled menu-driven java taskbars with the optional cup holder, annoying flash animations, ANY animations, or images for that matter. I would be perfectly happy with the web if 99% of the pages online were just text. I read, I play, I do whatever.
I hate most website designs now. Everyone thinks that cramming as much information onto a 17 inch monitor will solve all design woes. But that's not it at all. I want your information, and I don't care how you give it to me, as long as it's done efficiently and well. If you can save bandwidth costs by having the text zipped up and emailed to me, so be it. The last thing I want to do is be called a thief because I didn't want to wade through 304 "HOT ANAL SEX ACTION ONLY AT CLASSMATES.COM" pop-up ads that spawn pop up ads that spawn pop up ads.
People should NOT make money from their websites, unless people WANT to give it to them. Making your potential customer HAVE to listen to your advertiser's garbage is going to piss them off long before they even see your damned page, decent or not.
True, 99.9% of Web users don't write thank yous or attaboys. If everyone wrote a thank you note to the author of every web site they found useful, the sheer amount of email would break every mail server in the country, not to mention slow productivity to a crawl.
Or should thousands of people in the world just work their butts off to give YOU stuff for free?
It's called good will. Look it up someday. That's what the web was founded on. I give you some, hopefully you give some back. If not... at least you gained some knowledge.
Lordfly
So you support only one Microsoft OS, and it's not even a good one.
I'd support DOS over Windows 98 any day. At least with DOS you could at least hack around any problems Win98 had in case it went wonky (which it usually did).
Lordfly
But it was a good learning tool. Most of the friends I have that "grew up" on Windows 95 are completely lost once the taskbar and Start button disappear. If you ran DOS, you HAD to know what to do if Duke3d required more memory, or if you needed to load himem.sys.
:)
Granted, it doesn't match the horror stories of you old timers coding in binary on the ENIAC blindfolded with only one can of Mountain Dew to get you through the day, but it's how I learned, and I feel better because of it.
Lordfly
And we can only do that with a stake, some garlic, and a silver bullet minigun.
Lordfly
...I grew up on that thing :) Ever since my uncle plopped me down in front of his 386SX to play Doom shareware (I know, I'm a youngin), I've been a computer geek ever since.
:/
:\
Even after going from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, I still found it better to do 80% of my stuff from the command line. Windows 98 SE finally kicked me off of that habit
Sigh, command lines... so fun, so minimalist. I don't like my start menu
Lordfly
The only way the FTC can go after spam is for fraud and other things already illegal. It's not illegal simply to advertise via email (yet, anyway). They're doing the best they can with the rules that they're allowed to govern in.
:)
At least they are one division of government that doesn't try to overstep its bounds
josh
Rez is also out for Dreamcast, if you want to get it. You have to import it, but it's worth it. You can snag a used DC for like 50 bucks nowadays anyhow.
Lordfly
Good to know that the guy finally released the source code. It was depressing watching all the "elite" slashdotters on here blasting his idea away, debasing him with a bunch of random equations and "laws of physics". Now that it's open source, you can all move your feet to your mouth :)
Lordfly
...when I see it. And ten bucks says it's a worthless pile of crap.
The books are among my favorite to read, but I don't really think it would make a good American Hollywood Movie. It's all about the subtle British humor. And American audiences don't like narration much, which you would have to do in the movie, I would imagine. And do alot of it.
A hollywood director, with hollywood actors, doing a hollywood movie, about a British cult-classic book. It's going to be on par with Battlefield Earth, I bet.
Lordfly
...how long it would take for such things to happen.
Something with such mass-market appeal like "The Sims" is perfect fodder for product placement. Shame they couldn't just have product placement and keep the game free instead of a pay-per-month basis.
Name an application that requires as a minimum spec anything over 1 ghz. Most consumer-end products use maybe half that (Battlefield 1942, for instance, requires a 500 mhz with a 3d card... that was top of the line 3 years ago, but still).
:)
I think it's just a case of hardware outpacing software. Even the most fervant Ubergeek doesn't need the fastest processor anymore... my 1.4 ghz Athlon runs everything just fine, thank you very much. I should be able to run everything coming down the pike for the next year or two, in any case.
And by the time I get around to upgrading again, 2+ ghz processors will (in theory) be dirt cheap
Lordfly
Hmm. Pr0n.