I disagree. I think humanity is more than ready, and it would do us an enormous amount of good. Ready? Lot of people in the west can't tolerate gays, lesbians, blacks, arabs, dogs, cats, Windows and whatnot. We have the most powerful nation on the planet with 92% of it's citizens believe in some magical man up in the sky. We kill each other over silly things like who's God can beat up who's God. We lie, cheat, don't trust anyone and are insanely greedy.
Imagine some aliens sending us some peaceful message, but these aliens look grotesque by our standards. Guess what? The neocons, China and Russia declare "War on Aliens", we'll jihad their asses. Unfortunately, we humans are extremely intolerant, and nowhere near ready to meet aliens. Not even close.
Moore's 'documentaries' put words into peoples mouths, twists facts.. and try to force people to think the way moore thinks.. which is pretty much going right against what he claims to be standing for. Maybe some of his earlier work but Sicko too? Not according to some.
God doesn't intentionally hide and make it difficult to believe in Him So looking at all the atrocities happening on our planet it is not difficult to believe in God? I would venture out to say, that it's the exact cause why it is so difficult for many to believe in God.
I never heard any mainstream religion explain the cruelties of life on Earth. Wars, natural disasters, disease, genocides and whatnot. What kind of good and benevolent God sits around and does nothing while people suffer every second on this planet? That's why I personally find the existence of a good and benevolent God so difficult, in fact I don't believe God, as described in mainstream religions exists.
Who, really, is getting hurt by gold-farming? I mean, we're talking about a game, after all. And it's not even a game with PRIZES. It's not even a game you can WIN. What could the gold farmers possibly be taking away from other players, besides time? Time which they are spending on a GAME that they aren't obligated to play.
There is much more than meets the eye about the negative effects of gold farming.
In MMO games there is a lot of space shared by players. If player X is killing mobs in the same area as me, we'll have to share or fight for spawns, that's fine if we both use ingame tools. Now enter gold farmer with bots, insane knowledge of spawn patterns and times, and you won't find mobs to kill. In WoW for example, you can go around in zones and mine ore for your weapon that you want to craft as a blacksmith. Good luck, gold farmers are on ore veins the moment they appear. Gold farmers make it nearly impossible in many cases for legitimate players to collect items/resources/gold for themselves because gold farmers can (and do) monopolize entire regions of the game. People who played WoW can surely remember zones like Tyr's Hand being perma camped 24h a day by gold farmers.
Also, every time an exploit or bug is found, gold farmers exploit it massively and force the game company to bring down servers and fix them causing downtime for players. Not to mention you can kiss the game economy good bye. How many games have had their economy ruined because of gold farmers. Gold farmers abusing bugs/exploits not just flood the economy, they have no problems in griefing players (Final Fantasy Online) and monopolizing game content (WoW). Even if they get banned, they are back operating within hours. To them a ban from game is the cost of doing business, just like Microsoft and lawsuits against it.
And finally, in game currency can be used to gain advantage in PvP (buying gear, potions, consumables). PvP is competitive, maybe you don't care because it's a "game" but some people care because they want a leveled playing field. You know, having a game that's fair and fun...
Gold farmers are a cancer to MMO games. Some people might not care, but these people negatively impact everyone's enjoyment of the game, be it because they destroy economies or hack or monopolize content. It's not healthy for games.
Whether you like him or not, believe what he says or not, you have to agree that Michael Moore is influential.
If you are for P2P, I'm not sure if this is the guy you would want on the other side of the debate.
I wouldn't be suprised if Michael Moore ends up one day dead by a bullet ordered by the "Healthcare" industry. I know there is some propaganda in his "documentaries", but you can't really lie about someone dying of cancer when (insert random insurance company) refused to pay for treatment. The personal stories in Sicko are really eye opening.
Sicko is the most depressing documentary I ever watched, I got sick to my stomach watching some of the scenes. Even if 50% of it it's true, the US should be asking serious questions about their own healthcare system.
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Get your blind hatred out of the way for a second, and you might realize that there are more than just windows boxes hooked up to the tubes.
All the windows boxes dissapear, so the bot-lovers would start targeting linux and OSX.
Don't think that just because there isn't a very active threat against those platforms doesn't mean that one isn't possible.
I think you are wrong, well at least in part. Windows is a big bot problem. The main reason is because everyone and their dog runs Windows as administrator. It is much harder to root a Linux/Mac machine because those users don't use their PCs as root/administrators.
This sort of statement assumes that all Christians are born into Christianity. This couldn't be further from the truth. No one is born into this world as a Christian. A person must CHOOSE to have faith in God.
Tell that to indoctrinated children who have no notions about many things in life who are brainwashed by their parents and they are pretty much "born" into Christianity. I was "born" into it. I was taken to church, brainwashed, fed bullshit by my parents, pastors and my family. I did not choose my religion, I was forced into it by people around me.
When I finally was old enough to think for myself, and luckily I still could, I chose freedom. You are being delusional if you think the vast majority of Christians today are Christians by choice.
If that poll doesn't send shivers down your spine, I don't know what could. 53% don't care if their president doesn't believe in evolution. 53%. 53% are basically saying: scientific method = garbage. 53%.
66% believe that God created humans in the last 10,000 years. 66%. Unreal.
This should open eyes at Microsoft, that gamers, those with fairly recent hardware can't really run Windows Vista that well. 70%+ have 1 gig or less RAM. Definitely an interesting set of data.
"Linux has far better hardware support than any other OS out there. "
bullshit, and you know it. wireless drivers, onboard drivers, 3d accerleration. they all SUCK to install on linux. not to mention specialised stuff like hdtv tuners.
Troll, but I'll bite.
Installing XP SP2 on either of my PCs (standard Asus board, Athlon X2) requires: - Video driver (7600 GS) - Audio (on board) - Sata RAID (I can skip this and go with Window's builtin raid, but I'll lose the ability to put my C: drive on Raid0). - Network - Chipset
Feisty: - Video Driver (if I really want it!, the nvidia driver is ok, of course upgrading to a proprietary driver = 3 mouse clicks + 1 password).
PS: Wireless worked out of the box for my laptop, something that didn't on Windows XP SP2.
For me radio was dead once the internet came into force. I no longer bother discovering new bands by listening to radio when I can do same thing on MySpace, Pandora or Last.fm. Lot of indie bands allow streaming off the internet of songs and some allow the streaming of entire albums. Why waste time at 2 AM for some obscure radio station to play music I might be interested in? I can listen/discover stuff whenever I want on the internet.
IMO this is a last ditch cash grab attempt by the RIAA before they realize the obvious: radio is dying.
It's pretty easy to criticize when things go wrong. But in order for something like an MMO to be completed and succeed, a tremendous number of things need to go right.
I find Sigil very easy to criticize. ONE QA!? What the hell? Let me repeat that, one single QA. One person to test the entire game. For projects far less complex we use 10 times the number of QA people Sigil used. It's beyond mind boggling that a project of Vanguard's complexity has one single person doing QA. If that is not worth criticising, I don't know what is. I won't even mention the fake demos Sigil showed Microsoft. The internal bickerings and whatnot.
Sigil screwed up from the start. Very bad management. They could probably write a book about how not to lead a company.
They're just trying to get them some press. Unfortunately Linux gamers are an edge case. People needing video card support on Linux above vanilla SVGA as a whole is an edge case.
Having solid drivers isn't just "an edge case". Go install the default ATI or Nvidia driver on a recent linux distro then upgrade it to a non open source one from the company. It's like day and night. I noticed a huge difference between having a default driver vs company made one, silly things like dragging a console with transparent background is no longer a pain, it's smooth. The desktop feels fast and I don't even have any 3d desktop installed.
Then you got things like multiple monitor support. My Feisty install without closed source drivers just wouldn't work. It kept resetting the screen resolution after reboots, wouldn't recognize my second monitor, I couldn't even force it, it was a black screen. Once I installed the closed source driver, shazam! All my video worries are gone. Now I am happily using a 2560 x 1024 dual monitor setup with hardware acceleration.
Also you got 3d desktops like Beryl. With eye candy being a major selling point in some operating systems, 3d features will become important if desktop linux wants to get more popular. I hope all graphic card companies will develop good drivers for Linux.
-- Make it EASY to install an alternate desktop such as KDE, replacing the crappy Explorer
As a longtime and now ex LiteStep user, you can replace the Explorer shell very easy. If I recall correctly, it takes about 2 very simple registry key changes (just tell windows what shell to load in the HKLM hive and fire up explorer in separate process). Been a long time since I used LiteStep, so I could have missed a few things.
To get a popular alternative desktop running on Windows, it needs to stop mimicking Explorer. Stardock's stuff is nice, but it's eye candy on the same old way of using the desktop. KDE is in the same boat, it tries to imitate Explorer too much (yes it has tons of useful features that Explorer lacks).
Maybe desktop designers need to revisit the ideas of task bar, system tray, desktop icons and whatnot and try to come up with something different. Until then, all desktops do pretty much the same thing with one having better eye candy than other and one having a few extra features that the other lacks.
While this maybe true, digg's voting is also very poweful (and I say this as someone who has had a slashdot account for a long time and checks it far more than digg). As mentioned in the editorial, bogus or lame stories get buried pretty quickly.
Adios karma!
As an ex-Digg user, I noticed a totally different trend. These days the top stories are lame videos or pictures. Digg is no longer about news, it's about what people think are cool videos and pictures. Digg is worthless to find news. Not to mention the comment section, I lose 20 IQ every time I read something there. At least on Slashdot you can find interesting stories and some very insightful commentaries. Digg also has zillions of blog spams, people posting their worthless blog posts where they link another article and whatnot.
I installed Feisty this week and it's the first time I install a Linux distro and everything works. Wireless, Video, everything. Finally restricted codecs, drivers and other restricted software is 2 clicks away. Ubuntu is definitely shaping up to something much more user friendly than other/previous. I didn't had to hack any text files nor recompile anything, VMWare Player installed and 3d driver too with a few clicks.
Fair enough, but the point was that they couldn't get into this business, even if it existed, because piracy (and I doubt that their claim is substantively false) intervened.
Ironically, thanks to downloading my CD collection grew from about 30 CDs to 500+ since the age of MP3s. Also, maybe 10 of those CDs are from RIAA labels. People still buy CDs, not to mention people still go to concerts. The RIAA is to blame here by pushing worthless crap down on our throats.
A lot of small bands are doing fine. Their business is profitable, granted the are not multi zillionaires. The key to their success is great music, something lacking in the RIAA dominated world.
The industry wouldn't be dying if they'd look at music as art, not as a product to be consumed. It's their own damn fault. Oh and suing your customers might be a bad idea also.
You would think they could have just installed a *cough* Hacked copy of Vista
I think the goal of this was to show that the DRM protection can be bypassed. If they run stuff at kernel level, unsigned, it means they can "sniff" stuff going to the video card, thus in theory they could rip protected HD content. If I am not mistaken, to run stuff at kernel level requires code signed by MS to prevent HD content ripping.
Kubuntu out of the box doesn't work. Upgrading either xine or Amarok, no use either. And older version of xine has patches for FLAC fix but I couldn't get it working on latest Kubuntu releases.
Haven't tried Amarok on Ubuntu, I don't like Gnome.:(
FLAC playback doesn't work in Amarok at the moment. You have to use an older version along with older xine libraries. I wouldn't recommend Amarok until they fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's forgotten by the people of the USA, not Bush and Co.It seems to me that this is completely forgotten by the Bush government.
Imagine some aliens sending us some peaceful message, but these aliens look grotesque by our standards. Guess what? The neocons, China and Russia declare "War on Aliens", we'll jihad their asses. Unfortunately, we humans are extremely intolerant, and nowhere near ready to meet aliens. Not even close.
I never heard any mainstream religion explain the cruelties of life on Earth. Wars, natural disasters, disease, genocides and whatnot. What kind of good and benevolent God sits around and does nothing while people suffer every second on this planet? That's why I personally find the existence of a good and benevolent God so difficult, in fact I don't believe God, as described in mainstream religions exists.
I completely agree. Seriously.
...
Who, really, is getting hurt by gold-farming? I mean, we're talking about a game, after all. And it's not even a game with PRIZES. It's not even a game you can WIN. What could the gold farmers possibly be taking away from other players, besides time? Time which they are spending on a GAME that they aren't obligated to play.
There is much more than meets the eye about the negative effects of gold farming.
In MMO games there is a lot of space shared by players. If player X is killing mobs in the same area as me, we'll have to share or fight for spawns, that's fine if we both use ingame tools. Now enter gold farmer with bots, insane knowledge of spawn patterns and times, and you won't find mobs to kill. In WoW for example, you can go around in zones and mine ore for your weapon that you want to craft as a blacksmith. Good luck, gold farmers are on ore veins the moment they appear. Gold farmers make it nearly impossible in many cases for legitimate players to collect items/resources/gold for themselves because gold farmers can (and do) monopolize entire regions of the game. People who played WoW can surely remember zones like Tyr's Hand being perma camped 24h a day by gold farmers.
Also, every time an exploit or bug is found, gold farmers exploit it massively and force the game company to bring down servers and fix them causing downtime for players. Not to mention you can kiss the game economy good bye. How many games have had their economy ruined because of gold farmers. Gold farmers abusing bugs/exploits not just flood the economy, they have no problems in griefing players (Final Fantasy Online) and monopolizing game content (WoW). Even if they get banned, they are back operating within hours. To them a ban from game is the cost of doing business, just like Microsoft and lawsuits against it.
And finally, in game currency can be used to gain advantage in PvP (buying gear, potions, consumables). PvP is competitive, maybe you don't care because it's a "game" but some people care because they want a leveled playing field. You know, having a game that's fair and fun
Gold farmers are a cancer to MMO games. Some people might not care, but these people negatively impact everyone's enjoyment of the game, be it because they destroy economies or hack or monopolize content. It's not healthy for games.
Whether you like him or not, believe what he says or not, you have to agree that Michael Moore is influential.
If you are for P2P, I'm not sure if this is the guy you would want on the other side of the debate.
I wouldn't be suprised if Michael Moore ends up one day dead by a bullet ordered by the "Healthcare" industry. I know there is some propaganda in his "documentaries", but you can't really lie about someone dying of cancer when (insert random insurance company) refused to pay for treatment. The personal stories in Sicko are really eye opening.
Sicko is the most depressing documentary I ever watched, I got sick to my stomach watching some of the scenes. Even if 50% of it it's true, the US should be asking serious questions about their own healthcare system.
But hey, socialist healthcare is evil right?
Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Get your blind hatred out of the way for a second, and you might realize that there are more than just windows boxes hooked up to the tubes.
All the windows boxes dissapear, so the bot-lovers would start targeting linux and OSX.
Don't think that just because there isn't a very active threat against those platforms doesn't mean that one isn't possible.
I think you are wrong, well at least in part. Windows is a big bot problem. The main reason is because everyone and their dog runs Windows as administrator. It is much harder to root a Linux/Mac machine because those users don't use their PCs as root/administrators.
This sort of statement assumes that all Christians are born into Christianity. This couldn't be further from the truth. No one is born into this world as a Christian. A person must CHOOSE to have faith in God.
Tell that to indoctrinated children who have no notions about many things in life who are brainwashed by their parents and they are pretty much "born" into Christianity. I was "born" into it. I was taken to church, brainwashed, fed bullshit by my parents, pastors and my family. I did not choose my religion, I was forced into it by people around me.
When I finally was old enough to think for myself, and luckily I still could, I chose freedom. You are being delusional if you think the vast majority of Christians today are Christians by choice.
If so many US citizens are aware of this bullshit going on in their country, why is nothing done?
Only 53% of them believe evolution, that's why.
If that poll doesn't send shivers down your spine, I don't know what could. 53% don't care if their president doesn't believe in evolution. 53%. 53% are basically saying: scientific method = garbage. 53%.
66% believe that God created humans in the last 10,000 years. 66%. Unreal.
It's mind boggling.
This should open eyes at Microsoft, that gamers, those with fairly recent hardware can't really run Windows Vista that well. 70%+ have 1 gig or less RAM. Definitely an interesting set of data.
If you're into hardcore gaming then you're probably running a PS3 or an Xbox on the side anyway.
Let me know when good RTS, MMO and strategy games come to consoles. Until then, I'll stick with my PC!
"Linux has far better hardware support than any other OS out there. "
bullshit, and you know it. wireless drivers, onboard drivers, 3d accerleration. they all SUCK to install on linux. not to mention specialised stuff like hdtv tuners.
Troll, but I'll bite.
Installing XP SP2 on either of my PCs (standard Asus board, Athlon X2) requires:
- Video driver (7600 GS)
- Audio (on board)
- Sata RAID (I can skip this and go with Window's builtin raid, but I'll lose the ability to put my C: drive on Raid0).
- Network
- Chipset
Feisty:
- Video Driver (if I really want it!, the nvidia driver is ok, of course upgrading to a proprietary driver = 3 mouse clicks + 1 password).
PS: Wireless worked out of the box for my laptop, something that didn't on Windows XP SP2.
Your mileage might vary!
For me radio was dead once the internet came into force. I no longer bother discovering new bands by listening to radio when I can do same thing on MySpace, Pandora or Last.fm. Lot of indie bands allow streaming off the internet of songs and some allow the streaming of entire albums. Why waste time at 2 AM for some obscure radio station to play music I might be interested in? I can listen/discover stuff whenever I want on the internet.
IMO this is a last ditch cash grab attempt by the RIAA before they realize the obvious: radio is dying.
It's pretty easy to criticize when things go wrong. But in order for something like an MMO to be completed and succeed, a tremendous number of things need to go right.
...
I find Sigil very easy to criticize. ONE QA!? What the hell? Let me repeat that, one single QA. One person to test the entire game. For projects far less complex we use 10 times the number of QA people Sigil used. It's beyond mind boggling that a project of Vanguard's complexity has one single person doing QA. If that is not worth criticising, I don't know what is. I won't even mention the fake demos Sigil showed Microsoft. The internal bickerings and whatnot.
Sigil screwed up from the start. Very bad management. They could probably write a book about how not to lead a company.
One QA!? Jebus
They're just trying to get them some press. Unfortunately Linux gamers are an edge case. People needing video card support on Linux above vanilla SVGA as a whole is an edge case.
Having solid drivers isn't just "an edge case". Go install the default ATI or Nvidia driver on a recent linux distro then upgrade it to a non open source one from the company. It's like day and night. I noticed a huge difference between having a default driver vs company made one, silly things like dragging a console with transparent background is no longer a pain, it's smooth. The desktop feels fast and I don't even have any 3d desktop installed.
Then you got things like multiple monitor support. My Feisty install without closed source drivers just wouldn't work. It kept resetting the screen resolution after reboots, wouldn't recognize my second monitor, I couldn't even force it, it was a black screen. Once I installed the closed source driver, shazam! All my video worries are gone. Now I am happily using a 2560 x 1024 dual monitor setup with hardware acceleration.
Also you got 3d desktops like Beryl. With eye candy being a major selling point in some operating systems, 3d features will become important if desktop linux wants to get more popular. I hope all graphic card companies will develop good drivers for Linux.
-- Make it EASY to install an alternate desktop such as KDE, replacing the crappy Explorer
As a longtime and now ex LiteStep user, you can replace the Explorer shell very easy. If I recall correctly, it takes about 2 very simple registry key changes (just tell windows what shell to load in the HKLM hive and fire up explorer in separate process). Been a long time since I used LiteStep, so I could have missed a few things.
To get a popular alternative desktop running on Windows, it needs to stop mimicking Explorer. Stardock's stuff is nice, but it's eye candy on the same old way of using the desktop. KDE is in the same boat, it tries to imitate Explorer too much (yes it has tons of useful features that Explorer lacks).
Maybe desktop designers need to revisit the ideas of task bar, system tray, desktop icons and whatnot and try to come up with something different. Until then, all desktops do pretty much the same thing with one having better eye candy than other and one having a few extra features that the other lacks.
SWG set in the KotOR would have been perfect.
If you want to beleive rumors, Bioware is supposedly working on a Star Wars MMOG set in the KotOR time line.
While this maybe true, digg's voting is also very poweful (and I say this as someone who has had a slashdot account for a long time and checks it far more than digg). As mentioned in the editorial, bogus or lame stories get buried pretty quickly.
Adios karma!
As an ex-Digg user, I noticed a totally different trend. These days the top stories are lame videos or pictures. Digg is no longer about news, it's about what people think are cool videos and pictures. Digg is worthless to find news. Not to mention the comment section, I lose 20 IQ every time I read something there. At least on Slashdot you can find interesting stories and some very insightful commentaries. Digg also has zillions of blog spams, people posting their worthless blog posts where they link another article and whatnot.
Digg has almost no content worth reading.
Power Shell?
I installed Feisty this week and it's the first time I install a Linux distro and everything works. Wireless, Video, everything. Finally restricted codecs, drivers and other restricted software is 2 clicks away. Ubuntu is definitely shaping up to something much more user friendly than other/previous. I didn't had to hack any text files nor recompile anything, VMWare Player installed and 3d driver too with a few clicks.
The "real" Spinal Tap exists.
Fair enough, but the point was that they couldn't get into this business, even if it existed, because piracy (and I doubt that their claim is substantively false) intervened.
Ironically, thanks to downloading my CD collection grew from about 30 CDs to 500+ since the age of MP3s. Also, maybe 10 of those CDs are from RIAA labels. People still buy CDs, not to mention people still go to concerts. The RIAA is to blame here by pushing worthless crap down on our throats.
A lot of small bands are doing fine. Their business is profitable, granted the are not multi zillionaires. The key to their success is great music, something lacking in the RIAA dominated world.
The industry wouldn't be dying if they'd look at music as art, not as a product to be consumed. It's their own damn fault. Oh and suing your customers might be a bad idea also.
You would think they could have just installed a *cough* Hacked copy of Vista
I think the goal of this was to show that the DRM protection can be bypassed. If they run stuff at kernel level, unsigned, it means they can "sniff" stuff going to the video card, thus in theory they could rip protected HD content. If I am not mistaken, to run stuff at kernel level requires code signed by MS to prevent HD content ripping.
Kubuntu out of the box doesn't work. Upgrading either xine or Amarok, no use either. And older version of xine has patches for FLAC fix but I couldn't get it working on latest Kubuntu releases.
:(
Haven't tried Amarok on Ubuntu, I don't like Gnome.
FLAC playback doesn't work in Amarok at the moment. You have to use an older version along with older xine libraries. I wouldn't recommend Amarok until they fix it.