They went to the trouble to include a native Mac client, but they ignored Linux. It's a nice effort to get back to the reputation of the old Blizzard, but it still seems a little half-hearted. It's a cruel criticism, I know, but even Microsoft is taking Linux seriously these days, so I'm not sure why big game studios are still dismissive.
“It’s a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense.”
No, it doesn't. Explain how unicellular animals became multicellular without cooperation. Explain how humanity went from hunter-gatherer to landing a probe on a comet without cooperation. No doubt there are exploiters (we have all kinds of infections and parasites), but evolution has given us detectors (immune systems) to combat them.
If someone claims that selfishness is a virtue, demand that they provide actual evolutionary evidence from Mother Nature who has had billions of years of experimental history to investigate their claim. It's time that we collectively responded to Ayn Rand libertarians who would rather live in their imagined apocalyptic hellscape than reality. Demand that they face explain why Mother Nature permits only limited exploitation. Life is relentlessly harsh, sure, but nowhere do I see systems that have evolved in a zero-sum universe. It all seems ever-so-slightly positive-sum, which permits a variety of cooperative strategies to flourish.
"privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep"
I consider myself a privacy advocate, but I'm also a computer programmer who desperately wishes for a national ID number unique to every citizen. Last year, I advocated for voter ID cards here in Minnesota ( http://mellowtigger.dreamwidth.org/237086.html ) because it seemed like a way to bypass the usual conservative opposition to government ID cards. Finally, conservatives' fear of "furriners" overtaking the country might exceed their fear of religious mumbo jumbo about numbers of the Beast. I'll take progress however I can get it, and voter/immigration paranoia seems like the way I can finally get a national ID number.
Details change so fast in the tech sector that nobody's skills stay current. Everybody always learns new technologies, skills, and practices to stay useful and relevant. Spending more time in the programming field only means that you have a larger collection of familiar toolkits to rely upon, not that your existing toolkit is the best fit for the task at hand. One of the reasons that I like the programming field is because there's always something new to learn. I like earning a living while still at "school".
Powershell is just a heavily object-oriented scripting language that combines ideas from a number of places - there's nothing particularly new or unusual about that.
Since it's such a trivially unoriginal thing to do, then surely you can name an equivalent on unix systems? I've wanted to explain to people that it's like this, but I've never had a this that I could point to. Your example(s) would help me a lot.
When exactly was the last time Microsoft came up with a new idea that wasn't aping its competitors?
PowerShell.
I've spent time on the job writing unix scripts, but I still have a hard time explaining why this script language is so much better than bash or similar alternatives. I have to rely on the explanation that doesn't really explain: pipes pass objects instead of strings. My other name for PowerShell is "the only thing Microsoft ever did right".
Divestiture is unsubtle. That contrast is good, since the harm done by supporting corrupt institutions is often quite subtle.
I avoid shows that I once loved just because they show up on FOX tv channel. I avoid movies at the theater if they come with the FOX studio logo. The misinformation deliberately promulgated by FOX news taints the whole institution. Doing the equivalent of "The More You Know" public service pieces does not erase the harm done by their other programming. You don't get to say harmful things and follow it immediately with "Oh, you know I'm just kidding, right?" You can't play both sides and maintain the high moral ground. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lingering-lies
Even if I am not personally polled by Nielsen, my participation in the culture that enhances/encourages viewing of FOX products still matters because it has a non-zero influence on the people around me. Eventually that influence does reach Nielsen as the herd slowly moves toward giving attention to any tv program. Higher Nielsen ratings translate to higher advertisement revenue for the institution. Divestiture is an effective political effort because it calls attention to this point of how seemingly unrelated things really do affect each other.
There's a reason that sports team loyalty is sometimes referred to as a religion.
When anybody asks me if I like [team x], I just tell them that I'm an atheist.
Yowza, that's worrying. You say there's been little to no Antarctic warming for a few years as if that's a good thing.
Me, I see it as all that energy being dumped into a state change: ice into water. I look at the same information and see an ominous warning signal that global warming is about to take a sudden change for the worse as soon as the state change is complete.
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic?
"Certain employees produce chunks of data - whether words or software code - that later pop up in other messages. The people copied most often, Cataphora concludes, are thought leaders."
- quote from the article
"Oh my god! Did you hear what Larry did? He told Mark that our blue-spotted widget is garbage and that hiding behind the good reviews that Mark paid for isn't going to keep our investors in the dark for long. Can you believe it? Do you know if Sarah or the q/a team has heard yet? Can you imagine what the boss is going to say when he gets word of this? Wow!
- email from A.N.Y. corporation
This concept has been a real-life concern for many years already. Some autistics fear the consequences of "curing" autism. They have a rather angry relationship with groups like Cure Autism Now. These activists feel that the only way to offer such a cure would be to erase the person that now exists in their body.
This dilemma was well presented in 2001 in the book "The Speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon.
If chat logs were handed over to someone who is not SOE, then this transaction is a huge breach of privacy. Phone numbers, addresses, userids and passwords, admisison of illegal acts (smoking pot, drinking underage, sex underage, etc) all of these things are surely in the chat logs.
I cancelled my EQ2 subscription about 3 weeks ago because of my own financial concerns. (The economy bites, if you hadn't noticed.) I told my guild about it and that I intended to return once it looks like I had some stability in my economic situation (no rent increases, no layoffs at work, etc). This announcement, though... it guarantees that I won't be returning to EQ2. I think I'm ready to swear off SOE offerings altogether.
Is it time that we went back to pc gaming without network ties? That's what I've been doing with my playtime since cancelling my online subscription. I've rediscovered some old favorites. Maybe a smart game studio will see this change as a developing trend to take advantage of. I'm ready for more (good) pc games.
When's the last time that you saw a dungeon delver where you got to fully customize your entire party for its adventure? The last I can remember is Wizardry 8 which released back in 2001. I guess it's time to pull it off my dusty shelf and install it for more fun game time without exposing my personal habits so somebody else can profit from selling my information.
True. I am 41 years old, and I still have a baby tooth in my mouth. I was born without the adult tooth in this one position that would have pushed the baby tooth out of place eventually.
I had the baby tooth capped (to even it out its height with my other teeth) around age 15, and it's still doing fine.
The game crashed, what makes you assume it was the DRM?
The game was stable up until the space stage, then it started crashing on me and caused me to lose many hours of progress. Buried in the crash logs was mention of a particular dll. I went searching for an explanation of what that file was for. Turns out, there was already an article written that explained that dll, SecureROM, and its relation to Spore.
http://www.arsgeek.com/2008/09/09/how-to-remove-securom-spore-dasmx86dll-issues-and-some-great-drm-free-alternatives/
But what's keeping all those gamers out there who don't pirate their games from standing up and saying they pay for what they play? From making not being a pirate a point of pride?
I paid for Spore. The DRM crashed my game. The seemingly incomplete game was enjoyable for as much as it accomplished. But I feel like a sucker for having paid money on it. I don't feel pride; I feel a small twinge of something akin to shame. I helped Electronic Arts dumb down a game (so they can piecemeal add-ons to eventually yield a complete game, sometime in the future) and distribute it with DRM (which interfered in my gameplay, which the pirated version would not have done). I helped them because I can't control my addiction to gaming.
That's why the cultural front would be a losing battle. To do the "legal" thing, I have to feel slightly embarrassed and used and out of control.
I thought RFID was detectable only within a few feet. How are they managing to get data across an entire show area? Are there super-detectors available now, or did they just spend a lot of money to dot every square meter of the floor (or ceiling) with its own short range detector?
I'm now on my 4th support ticket with EA, and I still don't have a working program installed on my computer. Next time, I'm only buying the disc version.
I thought the download was available on the 18th. Wrong, it's available at 12 noon on the 18th. *sigh* Why make a program available starting in the middle of the day?
The EA Download Manager isn't downloading the full version. Because I have the trial version installed already. Uninstall that.
Fyi, your instructions to uninstall don't work. The trial version was not listed under Start / Programs. I had to use the control panel's program manager to uninstall it.
Now the download manager works, but the full game install is asking for a CD code that was not part of the emails that you sent me.
Criminy. The game (even though just the creature creator, and even though just the trial version (so far)) is still great fun.
No. While I agree with the concept of protecting the commercial interests of actual creative people (rather than a production/distribution/label layer that just siphons funds from the creative folk), I still disagree with the claim that "Every copy found anywhere is a loss of a sale!"
No. I think that (and I'd like to see a reputable study done) most "stolen" material would never have been a sale anyway. I remember the days of taking a cassette tape recorder up to the radio speaker to copy songs because people couldn't afford to buy the vinyl album. It was never going to be a sale, and the copy damaged no one's property. Just like people checking out books, music, and video at the local library. They weren't going to be buying a copy anyway, so why would anyone consider their experience of new content to be an intellectual (imaginary) property theft?
I started reading the article but when I got to this bit I realized they had nothing useful to say: But... that wasn't the author writing, that was the author quoting Paul Graham. If you had bothered to continue reading, or at least skipping past the quote to read the next sentence that the author offered, you would have discovered...
I disagree with Mr Graham on this one. You gave up too soon. *wag finger disapprovingly* Bad programmer, bad!
Slashdot Mirror
They went to the trouble to include a native Mac client, but they ignored Linux. It's a nice effort to get back to the reputation of the old Blizzard, but it still seems a little half-hearted. It's a cruel criticism, I know, but even Microsoft is taking Linux seriously these days, so I'm not sure why big game studios are still dismissive.
“It’s a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense.”
No, it doesn't. Explain how unicellular animals became multicellular without cooperation. Explain how humanity went from hunter-gatherer to landing a probe on a comet without cooperation. No doubt there are exploiters (we have all kinds of infections and parasites), but evolution has given us detectors (immune systems) to combat them.
If someone claims that selfishness is a virtue, demand that they provide actual evolutionary evidence from Mother Nature who has had billions of years of experimental history to investigate their claim. It's time that we collectively responded to Ayn Rand libertarians who would rather live in their imagined apocalyptic hellscape than reality. Demand that they face explain why Mother Nature permits only limited exploitation. Life is relentlessly harsh, sure, but nowhere do I see systems that have evolved in a zero-sum universe. It all seems ever-so-slightly positive-sum, which permits a variety of cooperative strategies to flourish.
"privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep"
I consider myself a privacy advocate, but I'm also a computer programmer who desperately wishes for a national ID number unique to every citizen. Last year, I advocated for voter ID cards here in Minnesota ( http://mellowtigger.dreamwidth.org/237086.html ) because it seemed like a way to bypass the usual conservative opposition to government ID cards. Finally, conservatives' fear of "furriners" overtaking the country might exceed their fear of religious mumbo jumbo about numbers of the Beast. I'll take progress however I can get it, and voter/immigration paranoia seems like the way I can finally get a national ID number.
Details change so fast in the tech sector that nobody's skills stay current. Everybody always learns new technologies, skills, and practices to stay useful and relevant. Spending more time in the programming field only means that you have a larger collection of familiar toolkits to rely upon, not that your existing toolkit is the best fit for the task at hand. One of the reasons that I like the programming field is because there's always something new to learn. I like earning a living while still at "school".
Powershell is just a heavily object-oriented scripting language that combines ideas from a number of places - there's nothing particularly new or unusual about that.
Since it's such a trivially unoriginal thing to do, then surely you can name an equivalent on unix systems? I've wanted to explain to people that it's like this, but I've never had a this that I could point to. Your example(s) would help me a lot.
When exactly was the last time Microsoft came up with a new idea that wasn't aping its competitors?
PowerShell. I've spent time on the job writing unix scripts, but I still have a hard time explaining why this script language is so much better than bash or similar alternatives. I have to rely on the explanation that doesn't really explain: pipes pass objects instead of strings. My other name for PowerShell is "the only thing Microsoft ever did right".
If all we're pursuing is optimization of current technologies, then no, we're not going to experience the "magic" of totally new concepts.
Divestiture is unsubtle. That contrast is good, since the harm done by supporting corrupt institutions is often quite subtle.
I avoid shows that I once loved just because they show up on FOX tv channel. I avoid movies at the theater if they come with the FOX studio logo. The misinformation deliberately promulgated by FOX news taints the whole institution. Doing the equivalent of "The More You Know" public service pieces does not erase the harm done by their other programming. You don't get to say harmful things and follow it immediately with "Oh, you know I'm just kidding, right?" You can't play both sides and maintain the high moral ground.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lingering-lies
A science show does not counteract Fox News. It's really very important, so it deserves repeating.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=lingering-lies
Even if I am not personally polled by Nielsen, my participation in the culture that enhances/encourages viewing of FOX products still matters because it has a non-zero influence on the people around me. Eventually that influence does reach Nielsen as the herd slowly moves toward giving attention to any tv program. Higher Nielsen ratings translate to higher advertisement revenue for the institution. Divestiture is an effective political effort because it calls attention to this point of how seemingly unrelated things really do affect each other.
There's a reason that sports team loyalty is sometimes referred to as a religion. When anybody asks me if I like [team x], I just tell them that I'm an atheist.
Why not track the parents instead? Why not require that the adults check in 5 times a day, insisting that they know what their spawn are up to.
Yowza, that's worrying. You say there's been little to no Antarctic warming for a few years as if that's a good thing. Me, I see it as all that energy being dumped into a state change: ice into water. I look at the same information and see an ominous warning signal that global warming is about to take a sudden change for the worse as soon as the state change is complete. Maybe I'm just being pessimistic?
"Certain employees produce chunks of data - whether words or software code - that later pop up in other messages. The people copied most often, Cataphora concludes, are thought leaders."
- quote from the article
"Oh my god! Did you hear what Larry did? He told Mark that our blue-spotted widget is garbage and that hiding behind the good reviews that Mark paid for isn't going to keep our investors in the dark for long. Can you believe it? Do you know if Sarah or the q/a team has heard yet? Can you imagine what the boss is going to say when he gets word of this? Wow!
- email from A.N.Y. corporation
This concept has been a real-life concern for many years already. Some autistics fear the consequences of "curing" autism. They have a rather angry relationship with groups like Cure Autism Now. These activists feel that the only way to offer such a cure would be to erase the person that now exists in their body. This dilemma was well presented in 2001 in the book "The Speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon.
If chat logs were handed over to someone who is not SOE, then this transaction is a huge breach of privacy. Phone numbers, addresses, userids and passwords, admisison of illegal acts (smoking pot, drinking underage, sex underage, etc) all of these things are surely in the chat logs. I cancelled my EQ2 subscription about 3 weeks ago because of my own financial concerns. (The economy bites, if you hadn't noticed.) I told my guild about it and that I intended to return once it looks like I had some stability in my economic situation (no rent increases, no layoffs at work, etc). This announcement, though... it guarantees that I won't be returning to EQ2. I think I'm ready to swear off SOE offerings altogether. Is it time that we went back to pc gaming without network ties? That's what I've been doing with my playtime since cancelling my online subscription. I've rediscovered some old favorites. Maybe a smart game studio will see this change as a developing trend to take advantage of. I'm ready for more (good) pc games. When's the last time that you saw a dungeon delver where you got to fully customize your entire party for its adventure? The last I can remember is Wizardry 8 which released back in 2001. I guess it's time to pull it off my dusty shelf and install it for more fun game time without exposing my personal habits so somebody else can profit from selling my information.
True. I am 41 years old, and I still have a baby tooth in my mouth. I was born without the adult tooth in this one position that would have pushed the baby tooth out of place eventually. I had the baby tooth capped (to even it out its height with my other teeth) around age 15, and it's still doing fine.
The game crashed, what makes you assume it was the DRM?
The game was stable up until the space stage, then it started crashing on me and caused me to lose many hours of progress. Buried in the crash logs was mention of a particular dll. I went searching for an explanation of what that file was for. Turns out, there was already an article written that explained that dll, SecureROM, and its relation to Spore. http://www.arsgeek.com/2008/09/09/how-to-remove-securom-spore-dasmx86dll-issues-and-some-great-drm-free-alternatives/
But what's keeping all those gamers out there who don't pirate their games from standing up and saying they pay for what they play? From making not being a pirate a point of pride?
I paid for Spore. The DRM crashed my game. The seemingly incomplete game was enjoyable for as much as it accomplished. But I feel like a sucker for having paid money on it. I don't feel pride; I feel a small twinge of something akin to shame. I helped Electronic Arts dumb down a game (so they can piecemeal add-ons to eventually yield a complete game, sometime in the future) and distribute it with DRM (which interfered in my gameplay, which the pirated version would not have done). I helped them because I can't control my addiction to gaming.
That's why the cultural front would be a losing battle. To do the "legal" thing, I have to feel slightly embarrassed and used and out of control.
But they won't be, will they?
- the disappointed
I seriously doubt that humans were holding on to each other for lifetimes before the dawn of religions.
When "lifetime" means death by age 30, then lifelong fidelity becomes much easier to achieve.
You can't live off past glory forever.
You haven't read the latest copyright law rewrites, have you?
I thought RFID was detectable only within a few feet. How are they managing to get data across an entire show area? Are there super-detectors available now, or did they just spend a lot of money to dot every square meter of the floor (or ceiling) with its own short range detector?
So someone's bright idea is to poison the sea to save the sky? *blink* *blink* With help like this.... *sigh*
- I thought the download was available on the 18th. Wrong, it's available at 12 noon on the 18th. *sigh* Why make a program available starting in the middle of the day?
- The EA Download Manager isn't downloading the full version. Because I have the trial version installed already. Uninstall that.
- Fyi, your instructions to uninstall don't work. The trial version was not listed under Start / Programs. I had to use the control panel's program manager to uninstall it.
- Now the download manager works, but the full game install is asking for a CD code that was not part of the emails that you sent me.
Criminy. The game (even though just the creature creator, and even though just the trial version (so far)) is still great fun.No. While I agree with the concept of protecting the commercial interests of actual creative people (rather than a production/distribution/label layer that just siphons funds from the creative folk), I still disagree with the claim that "Every copy found anywhere is a loss of a sale!"
No. I think that (and I'd like to see a reputable study done) most "stolen" material would never have been a sale anyway. I remember the days of taking a cassette tape recorder up to the radio speaker to copy songs because people couldn't afford to buy the vinyl album. It was never going to be a sale, and the copy damaged no one's property. Just like people checking out books, music, and video at the local library. They weren't going to be buying a copy anyway, so why would anyone consider their experience of new content to be an intellectual (imaginary) property theft?