OK, I did find an interview saying they plan on yearly expansions. Sigh.
I've been reading diabloii.net off and on since Diablo 2 was released, even though I don't play it anymore. Lately, they've had some news about Hellgate, Mythos (whoo, I got into the alpha), and Diablo 3 rumors. The latest one seems to clinch it:
Do you think the ramifications of this book impact in the storyline of Diablo 3 the game?
Knaak: This is a pure collaboration between myself and Chris/Blizzard. All that is written is passed by him and the others there. This will be canon and has adjusted earlier info. The ramifications here will be used for any future project... and I ain't writing for a dead game.:)
There's times when I cry about WoW then I realize its exactly the game I hoped for playing all the other MMOs that came before it.
Really? Sure, WoW is the culmination of the hack-and-slash MMORPGs in the vein of EverQuest. It fills one niche very well. But are your hopes really that low? There's still no worthy successor for fans of Ultima Online circa 1997-2000. Horizons should have been, but apparently management infighting doomed it to irrelevance. Ten years after UO, and I can't name a single MMOG that even attempts something as simple as player housing. I play Guild Wars now and then, since I don't have to pay a monthly fee, and the holiday events are spectacular. But otherwise there's absolutely nothing now and, as far as I know, nothing in development that's remotely exciting to me. I hope I'm wrong.
Ever since Warcraft II, Blizzard seems to have a tradition of exactly one expansion per game. Hopefully they'll stick to it. There have been many good indications that they're working on Diablo 3, at least.
A-fucking-men. Oblivion is highly-polished garbage compared to the kind of potential Daggerfall hinted at. Granted, it's got some nice *content*, but it's bolted on top of the worst game system I've ever encountered in an RPG. Diablo II has more character customization depth. I don't know how anyone can trust Bethsoft to make a decent game. Expect another Monkey Island 4.
Well, maybe you haven't learned this in school yet, but they speak different languages in London and Paris
If you've traveled around Europe at all, you should know that pretty much everyone but the oldest generation speaks good English. Especially at a multinational corporation like Google. So I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that the conference was being conducted in English.
Not quite. Think of it as an encryption algorithm like PGP, in which data can be encrypted with multiple public keys, then decrypted by any one of the corresponding private keys. If the HDDVD data on a new disc is not encrypted with a key that has been revoked, it obviously can't be decrypted by that key. That's my understanding of it, anyway.
Yeah. Though IMO, Acrobat's OCR feature is only a toy at the moment, since the tools for manual intervention are awful. So you get things like images being interpreted as text, frequent mistakes not marked as "suspect", and total butchery of anything with umlauts, accents, etc. It does a nice job of deskewing scanned pages of text, though.
Not even the best commercial software (ABBYY, OmniPage) can do more than a half-assed job of that. If you want accurate, well-formatted results, expect to do a lot of manual work.
Exactly. If you're sending around "sensitive data" unencrypted, you're crazy. PGP and GnuPG have various plugins and GUIs that make it very easy; Enigmail is particularly good.
AdBlock used to offer an option of loading but not displaying the ads, though I don't see it in AdBlock Plus. It's effectively impossible to detect that, unless you do something like Salon, which grants a "day pass" for watching an ad. Just add a simple captcha to the end of the ad if you really want to be a dick about it.
But the future of Internet advertising is with astroturfing, viral ad campaigns, etc. That can't be blocked with any technical solution.
Hey, you can't get away with borrowing Futurama jokes on Slashdot!
Leela: Fry, you're wasting your life sitting in front of that TV. You need to get out and see the world.
Fry: But this is HDTV. It's got better resolution than the real world.
Or if you're selling one of these programs and don't know assembly, run your source through a randomized obfuscator for each copy you sell. This has the added benefit of Blizzard doing your copy protection for you: if one copy is leaked to the public by a customer, it'll get banned. Heh.
Hmm. I kinda doubt it's that simple. It's not hard to write a bit of assembly that tosses NOPs randomly around your code every time you run it (in memory and/or on disk), thus altering any hash. Or just alters a few bytes where an unused static variable is stored. If circumventing Warden was that easy, Blizzard would be screwed.
well, as to your first question, the game already has a built-in macro system, so I don't think blizzard would take issue with this.
I only played WoW for a month, but the built-in macros are extremely limited by design. For example: except for a few special circumstances, one cannot cast two spells in succession with one key press. Complex macros just aren't allowed within the game. So if you circumvent that with the aid of some hardware, are you cheating? I don't know. Unless you want to give periodic Turing tests or captchas to every player, I don't see how automated playing will ever be eliminated.
At least this post didn't get modded up. The number of recent apostrophe-abusing posts at +5 is embarrassing. What in the world compels a person to use an apostrophe to pluralize arbitrary words? I hope they're just lazy children, but I don't know. How do you get by when you're barely literate in just one language?
Re:Comma chameleon, come and go, come and go
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 2, Funny
At least the submitter didn't write "I AM A FISH" five hundred times.
I didn't say "most people"; I said educated people who read books (and not just airport novels) for pleasure. I have no idea where I first came across the word, but it was before I graduated high school.
Really. Do people read books anymore? "Pidgin" isn't exactly an obscure word. I would be surprised to find any educated native speaker who didn't know it.
And the clever cracking groups will grab a key and not tell anyone, just keep using it to make releases. It'll be amusing to watch and see what happens, though. Will they keep playing whack-a-mole when they can find which key has been extracted? Will they finally realize it's just not worth the effort? Or will they end up revoking all software player keys and forcing you to buy and use the hardware players? I'm betting on the latter.
A drop in overall percentage doesn't necessarily mean a drop in users. It could easily mean that Windows is growing, and the Mac market is stagnating before a new release.
I don't know how you think that addresses the GP's needs. I use the split features of vim, KDE's multiple desktops, KDevelop or Eclipse, etc. But it simply doesn't compare to having the API reference on one monitor and your editor in the other, or any number of similar situations where you want to be able to look at two things without switching back and forth constantly.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been reading diabloii.net off and on since Diablo 2 was released, even though I don't play it anymore. Lately, they've had some news about Hellgate, Mythos (whoo, I got into the alpha), and Diablo 3 rumors. The latest one seems to clinch it:
Ever since Warcraft II, Blizzard seems to have a tradition of exactly one expansion per game. Hopefully they'll stick to it. There have been many good indications that they're working on Diablo 3, at least.
A-fucking-men. Oblivion is highly-polished garbage compared to the kind of potential Daggerfall hinted at. Granted, it's got some nice *content*, but it's bolted on top of the worst game system I've ever encountered in an RPG. Diablo II has more character customization depth. I don't know how anyone can trust Bethsoft to make a decent game. Expect another Monkey Island 4.
It's strange. In the past few days, I've seen a few of my fairly mild posts get modded down. "Troll" and "flamebait" don't mean "you're not nice."
Someone else mentioned that current discs include many keys that haven't yet been issued. It's actually pretty well-thought-out for a DRM scheme.
Not quite. Think of it as an encryption algorithm like PGP, in which data can be encrypted with multiple public keys, then decrypted by any one of the corresponding private keys. If the HDDVD data on a new disc is not encrypted with a key that has been revoked, it obviously can't be decrypted by that key. That's my understanding of it, anyway.
Yeah. Though IMO, Acrobat's OCR feature is only a toy at the moment, since the tools for manual intervention are awful. So you get things like images being interpreted as text, frequent mistakes not marked as "suspect", and total butchery of anything with umlauts, accents, etc. It does a nice job of deskewing scanned pages of text, though.
Not even the best commercial software (ABBYY, OmniPage) can do more than a half-assed job of that. If you want accurate, well-formatted results, expect to do a lot of manual work.
Exactly. If you're sending around "sensitive data" unencrypted, you're crazy. PGP and GnuPG have various plugins and GUIs that make it very easy; Enigmail is particularly good.
AdBlock used to offer an option of loading but not displaying the ads, though I don't see it in AdBlock Plus. It's effectively impossible to detect that, unless you do something like Salon, which grants a "day pass" for watching an ad. Just add a simple captcha to the end of the ad if you really want to be a dick about it.
But the future of Internet advertising is with astroturfing, viral ad campaigns, etc. That can't be blocked with any technical solution.
China has much bigger issues than being a "nanny state".
Or if you're selling one of these programs and don't know assembly, run your source through a randomized obfuscator for each copy you sell. This has the added benefit of Blizzard doing your copy protection for you: if one copy is leaked to the public by a customer, it'll get banned. Heh.
Hmm. I kinda doubt it's that simple. It's not hard to write a bit of assembly that tosses NOPs randomly around your code every time you run it (in memory and/or on disk), thus altering any hash. Or just alters a few bytes where an unused static variable is stored. If circumventing Warden was that easy, Blizzard would be screwed.
At least this post didn't get modded up. The number of recent apostrophe-abusing posts at +5 is embarrassing. What in the world compels a person to use an apostrophe to pluralize arbitrary words? I hope they're just lazy children, but I don't know. How do you get by when you're barely literate in just one language?
At least the submitter didn't write "I AM A FISH" five hundred times.
I didn't say "most people"; I said educated people who read books (and not just airport novels) for pleasure. I have no idea where I first came across the word, but it was before I graduated high school.
Really. Do people read books anymore? "Pidgin" isn't exactly an obscure word. I would be surprised to find any educated native speaker who didn't know it.
And the clever cracking groups will grab a key and not tell anyone, just keep using it to make releases. It'll be amusing to watch and see what happens, though. Will they keep playing whack-a-mole when they can find which key has been extracted? Will they finally realize it's just not worth the effort? Or will they end up revoking all software player keys and forcing you to buy and use the hardware players? I'm betting on the latter.
A drop in overall percentage doesn't necessarily mean a drop in users. It could easily mean that Windows is growing, and the Mac market is stagnating before a new release.
I don't know how you think that addresses the GP's needs. I use the split features of vim, KDE's multiple desktops, KDevelop or Eclipse, etc. But it simply doesn't compare to having the API reference on one monitor and your editor in the other, or any number of similar situations where you want to be able to look at two things without switching back and forth constantly.