Neverwinter Nights 2 (published by Atari), while it has client side copy protection which can be easily bypassed if need be, allows transfer of game to others.
I was under the impression that NWN2 had much more invasive DRM than Stardock games, although I admit I've forgotten what it actually was. I'll look it up if I ever feel the need to play another CRPG.
Personally I find Stardock's method more annoying than, for example, Neverwinter Nights 2 method as client side copy protection can always be bypassed unlike Stardock's style of not giving out updates from official sources without CD-key which cannot be transferred.
So you're basically saying that Stardock's rather simple check would be more effective against piracy than other methods?
"... if someone wants to do a policy where there's CD copy protection, but after the first month [consumers] can download a patch that gets rid of it [...] that's a perfectly good solution too."
No, it's not. You're selling me a crippled game on the promise that you'll fix it in the future. A month may as well turn into a century for all a promise is worth.
The solution is easy: Wait a month before buying the game. If the patch isn't availlable, wait another month. There are plenty of other games to play in the mean time.
I can't find anything about a change in direction with Impulse. As far as I can tell, it's just their old Stardock Central under a new name, which means it's only needed to install updates, not to actually run the game. Basically it does stuff for you without getting in your way. At least, that's what it sounds like to me. I've never used Impulse, only Stardock Central.
They pulled a nice bait-and-switch with Sins. If you want the latest patches, they make you install Impulse.
If you want patches, yes. Not to play the game itself. How exactly is that a problem?
I made the switch from AltaVista to Google when I discovered Google would consistently return pretty much what I was looking for on the first page. That was early 1999.
Same here. There'd been some search engine wars with Lycos and Webcrawler, I believe, and eventually I settled on AltaVista. But the AltaVista pages got way to cluttered, and suddenly Google shows up with a clean design and far better search results, and somehow they managed to stay on top since then.
This can be an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage. One size doesn't always fit all.
Very true. But doing the almost same thing in insanely different ways for almost the same use case seldom makes sense...:)
I've seen solutions like that, and it just ends up hampering productivity.
That is definitely true. Doing 80-90% of the use cases efficiently is often better than doing 100% slowly.
There's a fine balance between versatility and efficiency, and you can't really make broad, generalising statements about what's best. Well, you can, but it wouldn't be very useful.
Go to TPB, download Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, and play it. Beat the game. It gets better and better with every mission. Seriously, try it.
Now tell me if that wasn't the best RPG experience you've ever had.
It was not the best RPG experience I've ever had. Planescape: Torment was. Bloodlines was a very good second, however.
Theres very little in the game you could call goth or emo.
Apart from the styling, the clothes, the music, the characters and the plot.
It's mature, dark, funny, nihilistic, terrifying are all words I would use to describe it.
In other words: gothic.
Side note 2: the public ignored VTMB on release because it came out on the same day as HL2, and because it was full of bugs. The same is not true today.
True. A guy called Werner Stahl just won't stop releasing new patches for this game. The vast majority of the bugs have been fixed (although it's still not bug-free), a lot of hidden content has been made accessible, and I believe there are even new features. But he also has a pure bugfix patch without all the new features.
I'd agree that VtM has a nitch market, which if made with proper quality, would last for a long time.
I think it depends a lot on how the VtM game was made. It could be absolutely brilliant, or it could be just another WoW clone but now with vampires and werewolves.
There's plenty of room for intrigue between players, within clans and between clans. I think if done well, you'd get something much closer to EVE than to WoW.
The one really great thing about Django is that it's consistent. There is usually one way of doing things, instead of a million different ways that apply in different situations.
This can be an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage. One size doesn't always fit all.
Seriously tho, Django is so much better than some of the other options (read:java!)
You're now comparing a framwork with a language. For a meaningful comparison, compare Django with Wicket.
It's not very surprising that new web frameworks are better than JSP, Struts or JSF. I want to know how they measure up to stuff like Wicket or the latest Tapestry.
Also in some cases you're not allowed to ask for ID, the PCI (payment card industry) rules currently prohibit asking for id if the card is signed (can't do anything that might make using the card and building that balance up the least bit unpleasant!).
That's a stupid rule. Asking for ID would make credit cards a lot more secure. Still not actually secure, but at least the face now has to match the credit card number.
If you want them to check id when your card is used write SEE ID on the sig line (don't just leave it blank, that gets ignored mostly).
This sounds like very good advice. I might do that if I ever visit the US. (Ofcourse then they might not recognise the validity of my foreign ID.)
For many people in Europe, on the other hand, the only reason to own a credit card at all is for internet purchases and for when they go on vacation to the US.
I don't think I've ever used my credit card for anything other than internet purchases. In most countries, you can do most things with cash, and you can get cash at an ATM.
The only country I've been that had no ATMs on every street corner was Mali. There was a rumour that there was a bank in Timbuctoo where you could withdraw cash with a Visa creditcard. Hoping it would also work with Mastercard, this could have become my first non-internet use of my creditcard, but the service had already been cancelled by order of a Moroccan bank.
So basically when my PIN card doesn't work, neither does my credit card. But then, I've never been in the US. It's probably different there. Most things are.
These are companies that you can not avoid, and can not fight. No one who wants to function can boycott them, and without SERIOUS fallout no lawmaker can touch them.
Yet there are people who are not so vulnerable to them, and that's people. If consumer organisations and blogs focus on this, and people like like you and me talk about it, media will pick up on it, and the credit card companies have no way to do anything about it.
Not to mention the public is surprsingly accepting of 'it should be illegal to show how bad a product is!'
Yeah, that's a problem. It's a very harmful attitude, and needs to change. It should be illegal to hide how bad a product is.
For the Mythbusters it's more like shooting fish in a barrel.
For Mythbusters it'd be like blowing up fish in a barrel.
Re:Great, just when we'd almost standardised....
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
Firefox is taken up by Corporations? Haven't seen it at any sites yet
We have several large customers that want their website to work well in Firefox (which is just as well, because we prefer to test in Firefox), some of them have firefox on their desktop, and many corporate websites make use of the extra features that Firefox offers. My next employer, for example, makes a living building Firefox extensions for eBay, Amazon, and that sort of companies.
There's definitely corporate interest in Firefox (although it's obviously not nearly as big as their interest in IE).
Progress won't stop, but it's the sort of progress that would have been nice when it mattered.
What do you mean? Has progress suddenly ceased to matter? I'm quite happy with the last 10 years of progress in browser technology.
If you're doing websites that are FF-happy but IE-unfriendly (which there are lots of already), that's going to make you look super-cool at the expense of lost business...but the main problem here is *we're back to the incompatible browser fun*.
We've never left the "incompatible browser fun".
IE6 was a piece of crap because IE6 was (and IE7 is) the 'primary target'. You can sidestep a lot of that simply by running IE 64bit.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here, but IE6 was a piece of crap because it was built in the "piece of crap"-age of web browsers, and hasn't been improved since. Other browsers have improved quite a lot in those 10 years, and that's why they're better.
And as for features and design - well, MS do have a rep for stealing all the best bits...
But for 10 years they didn't, and that's why they fell behind. The only reason why IE marketshare remained big is that most people get IE standard with their PC, and aren't even aware of alternatives. Very few people who are aware of other browsers choose IE over those other browsers.
And how about this - if FF is so cool, why are the others (Apple, hell, Chrome) trying so hard to take a market share that's supposedly already won?
Nothing has been won yet. Like I said, progress is continuing. This is the big benefit of competition in an open market. (Well, almost open; MS does have an unfair advantage with oblivious used knowing nothing beyond the blue 'e' on their desktop.)
I guess the point I'm making (thanks for the troll points, slashdot)is that Windows (and then IE) unified everything - seperating browsers out again? Hmmm, that'll run smoothly.
Are you implying that IE6 runs more smoothly than, say, Opera? The only advantage of a browser integrated with the rest of the OS is for malware pushers. For normal users, there's simply no need for that. There's a need for a practical, user friendly, standards-compliant browser that performs well and doesn't crash.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
I hope you defrag regularly. Your swap file is going to mash your hard drive good and proper.
I don't, but I just blame the slow disk speed on Windows.
Anyway, as long as I use Opera, it's not so bad. Opera with 80 tabs is about 300 MB. Chrome gets there with only a handful tabs.
Re:These articles still don't answer my question
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Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
Firefox's old architecture is starting to show.
True, but since Chrome is open source, Firefox can simply steal the bits they need to get back on track.
The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information.
The 1970s called, they want their definition of the Internet back.
Ever since the first CGI was written, the Internet (or specifically the Web) has been about more than just conveying information.
Heh. Even the very first web page ever already included a photo of a band. I think that set a trend.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
And, by the way: WTF!?! 38 tabs open!?! You get what you deserve with that number of tabs. That's crazy sh*t man!
38 tabs is nothing. At times I've gone beyond 100. I'm afraid I've stopped bookmarking stuff. Open it in a tab and Opera will remember it for me.
So far, Opera is still the only browser where you can get away with behaviour like that. Although it does help to kill and restart it every couple of days or weeks (depending on just how crazy your browsing is).
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
4. FireBug (nothing like this on ANY other browser, not even Safari's inbuilt "Develop" menu options comes close for debugging)
The IE Developer Toolbar actually offers some of this functionality too. It's not quite as good as firebug ofcourse, but I'm quite happy with it nonetheless. IE was in desperate need of better developer tools.
I just fired up vanilla versions of both IE8, Chrome, and Process Explorer and opened the same two tabs: the Facebook login page and Wikipedia (English).
Process Explorer tells me IE8 is using 389652 KB of memory. Chrome is using 260668 KB of memory. Both have three processing running.
Ouch! That's what Opera uses with about 80 tabs open (after a fresh start, admittedly). Firefox usually gets there around 30 tabs (probably more with FF3). This kind of memory usage for only two tabs is pretty extreme.
Now I upped the ante to 9 tabs, which for brevity, I won't list. IE8 with 6 processes was using 958524 KB and Chrome with 11 processes was using 783840 KB.
9 tabs and you risk running out of system memory? I was hoping Chrome would be a good heavy-duty browser like Opera, and possibly a fine successor, but these numbers suggest they have quite a bit of work to do.
IE8 even moreso ofcourse, but I don't think anyone is surprised by that.
Slashdot Mirror
Neverwinter Nights 2 (published by Atari), while it has client side copy protection which can be easily bypassed if need be, allows transfer of game to others.
I was under the impression that NWN2 had much more invasive DRM than Stardock games, although I admit I've forgotten what it actually was. I'll look it up if I ever feel the need to play another CRPG.
Personally I find Stardock's method more annoying than, for example, Neverwinter Nights 2 method as client side copy protection can always be bypassed unlike Stardock's style of not giving out updates from official sources without CD-key which cannot be transferred.
So you're basically saying that Stardock's rather simple check would be more effective against piracy than other methods?
"... if someone wants to do a policy where there's CD copy protection, but after the first month [consumers] can download a patch that gets rid of it [...] that's a perfectly good solution too."
No, it's not. You're selling me a crippled game on the promise that you'll fix it in the future. A month may as well turn into a century for all a promise is worth.
The solution is easy: Wait a month before buying the game. If the patch isn't availlable, wait another month. There are plenty of other games to play in the mean time.
"I can't remember the last time I actually saw someone browsing in the PC games section in the last year."
Who actually buys PC games in a retail store anymore?
I don't. They rarely have the games I want. Instead, they carry all sorts of terrible crap I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole.
That's exactly the route Stardock is taking.
I can't find anything about a change in direction with Impulse. As far as I can tell, it's just their old Stardock Central under a new name, which means it's only needed to install updates, not to actually run the game. Basically it does stuff for you without getting in your way. At least, that's what it sounds like to me. I've never used Impulse, only Stardock Central.
They pulled a nice bait-and-switch with Sins. If you want the latest patches, they make you install Impulse.
If you want patches, yes. Not to play the game itself. How exactly is that a problem?
What about Troika? Even after they went out of business the developers kept releasing patches for VTM.
They did? I'm aware of only one official patch, and tons of fan-made bugfix patches.
I made the switch from AltaVista to Google when I discovered Google would consistently return pretty much what I was looking for on the first page. That was early 1999.
Same here. There'd been some search engine wars with Lycos and Webcrawler, I believe, and eventually I settled on AltaVista. But the AltaVista pages got way to cluttered, and suddenly Google shows up with a clean design and far better search results, and somehow they managed to stay on top since then.
So why on earth did everyone do that in the nineties? And why has no one told the marketing departments of this world that the nineties are over?
I think Google dropped its exclamation mark quite some time ago. Perhaps around the time they could afford a marketing department?
It's just Yahoo! that's the odd one out now, but being the odd one out can also be useful from a marketing point of view.
This can be an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage. One size doesn't always fit all.
Very true. But doing the almost same thing in insanely different ways for almost the same use case seldom makes sense... :)
I've seen solutions like that, and it just ends up hampering productivity.
That is definitely true. Doing 80-90% of the use cases efficiently is often better than doing 100% slowly.
There's a fine balance between versatility and efficiency, and you can't really make broad, generalising statements about what's best. Well, you can, but it wouldn't be very useful.
Go to TPB, download Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, and play it. Beat the game. It gets better and better with every mission. Seriously, try it.
Now tell me if that wasn't the best RPG experience you've ever had.
It was not the best RPG experience I've ever had. Planescape: Torment was. Bloodlines was a very good second, however.
Theres very little in the game you could call goth or emo.
Apart from the styling, the clothes, the music, the characters and the plot.
It's mature, dark, funny, nihilistic, terrifying are all words I would use to describe it.
In other words: gothic.
Side note 2: the public ignored VTMB on release because it came out on the same day as HL2, and because it was full of bugs. The same is not true today.
True. A guy called Werner Stahl just won't stop releasing new patches for this game. The vast majority of the bugs have been fixed (although it's still not bug-free), a lot of hidden content has been made accessible, and I believe there are even new features. But he also has a pure bugfix patch without all the new features.
I'd agree that VtM has a nitch market, which if made with proper quality, would last for a long time.
I think it depends a lot on how the VtM game was made. It could be absolutely brilliant, or it could be just another WoW clone but now with vampires and werewolves.
There's plenty of room for intrigue between players, within clans and between clans. I think if done well, you'd get something much closer to EVE than to WoW.
As far I know, not only religious people use the term "soul". Psychologists use it too,
Not to mention musicians.
The one really great thing about Django is that it's consistent. There is usually one way of doing things, instead of a million different ways that apply in different situations.
This can be an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage. One size doesn't always fit all.
Seriously tho, Django is so much better than some of the other options (read:java!)
You're now comparing a framwork with a language. For a meaningful comparison, compare Django with Wicket.
It's not very surprising that new web frameworks are better than JSP, Struts or JSF. I want to know how they measure up to stuff like Wicket or the latest Tapestry.
Also in some cases you're not allowed to ask for ID, the PCI (payment card industry) rules currently prohibit asking for id if the card is signed (can't do anything that might make using the card and building that balance up the least bit unpleasant!).
That's a stupid rule. Asking for ID would make credit cards a lot more secure. Still not actually secure, but at least the face now has to match the credit card number.
If you want them to check id when your card is used write SEE ID on the sig line (don't just leave it blank, that gets ignored mostly).
This sounds like very good advice. I might do that if I ever visit the US. (Ofcourse then they might not recognise the validity of my foreign ID.)
In the US, it would be very difficult.
For many people in Europe, on the other hand, the only reason to own a credit card at all is for internet purchases and for when they go on vacation to the US.
I don't think I've ever used my credit card for anything other than internet purchases. In most countries, you can do most things with cash, and you can get cash at an ATM.
The only country I've been that had no ATMs on every street corner was Mali. There was a rumour that there was a bank in Timbuctoo where you could withdraw cash with a Visa creditcard. Hoping it would also work with Mastercard, this could have become my first non-internet use of my creditcard, but the service had already been cancelled by order of a Moroccan bank.
So basically when my PIN card doesn't work, neither does my credit card. But then, I've never been in the US. It's probably different there. Most things are.
Visa?
Mastercard?
Discover?
These are companies that you can not avoid, and can not fight. No one who wants to function can boycott them, and without SERIOUS fallout no lawmaker can touch them.
Yet there are people who are not so vulnerable to them, and that's people. If consumer organisations and blogs focus on this, and people like like you and me talk about it, media will pick up on it, and the credit card companies have no way to do anything about it.
Not to mention the public is surprsingly accepting of 'it should be illegal to show how bad a product is!'
Yeah, that's a problem. It's a very harmful attitude, and needs to change. It should be illegal to hide how bad a product is.
For the Mythbusters it's more like shooting fish in a barrel.
For Mythbusters it'd be like blowing up fish in a barrel.
Firefox is taken up by Corporations? Haven't seen it at any sites yet
We have several large customers that want their website to work well in Firefox (which is just as well, because we prefer to test in Firefox), some of them have firefox on their desktop, and many corporate websites make use of the extra features that Firefox offers. My next employer, for example, makes a living building Firefox extensions for eBay, Amazon, and that sort of companies.
There's definitely corporate interest in Firefox (although it's obviously not nearly as big as their interest in IE).
Progress won't stop, but it's the sort of progress that would have been nice when it mattered.
What do you mean? Has progress suddenly ceased to matter? I'm quite happy with the last 10 years of progress in browser technology.
If you're doing websites that are FF-happy but IE-unfriendly (which there are lots of already), that's going to make you look super-cool at the expense of lost business...but the main problem here is *we're back to the incompatible browser fun*.
We've never left the "incompatible browser fun".
IE6 was a piece of crap because IE6 was (and IE7 is) the 'primary target'. You can sidestep a lot of that simply by running IE 64bit.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here, but IE6 was a piece of crap because it was built in the "piece of crap"-age of web browsers, and hasn't been improved since. Other browsers have improved quite a lot in those 10 years, and that's why they're better.
And as for features and design - well, MS do have a rep for stealing all the best bits...
But for 10 years they didn't, and that's why they fell behind. The only reason why IE marketshare remained big is that most people get IE standard with their PC, and aren't even aware of alternatives. Very few people who are aware of other browsers choose IE over those other browsers.
And how about this - if FF is so cool, why are the others (Apple, hell, Chrome) trying so hard to take a market share that's supposedly already won?
Nothing has been won yet. Like I said, progress is continuing. This is the big benefit of competition in an open market. (Well, almost open; MS does have an unfair advantage with oblivious used knowing nothing beyond the blue 'e' on their desktop.)
I guess the point I'm making (thanks for the troll points, slashdot)is that Windows (and then IE) unified everything - seperating browsers out again? Hmmm, that'll run smoothly.
Are you implying that IE6 runs more smoothly than, say, Opera? The only advantage of a browser integrated with the rest of the OS is for malware pushers. For normal users, there's simply no need for that. There's a need for a practical, user friendly, standards-compliant browser that performs well and doesn't crash.
I hope you defrag regularly. Your swap file is going to mash your hard drive good and proper.
I don't, but I just blame the slow disk speed on Windows.
Anyway, as long as I use Opera, it's not so bad. Opera with 80 tabs is about 300 MB. Chrome gets there with only a handful tabs.
Firefox's old architecture is starting to show.
True, but since Chrome is open source, Firefox can simply steal the bits they need to get back on track.
I was like OMG!!!
I predict that some day "to be like" will replace "to say".
The sole purpose of the internet is to provide a medium(s) that convey data/information.
The 1970s called, they want their definition of the Internet back.
Ever since the first CGI was written, the Internet (or specifically the Web) has been about more than just conveying information.
Heh. Even the very first web page ever already included a photo of a band. I think that set a trend.
And, by the way: WTF!?! 38 tabs open!?! You get what you deserve with that number of tabs. That's crazy sh*t man!
38 tabs is nothing. At times I've gone beyond 100.
I'm afraid I've stopped bookmarking stuff. Open it in a tab and Opera will remember it for me.
So far, Opera is still the only browser where you can get away with behaviour like that. Although it does help to kill and restart it every couple of days or weeks (depending on just how crazy your browsing is).
4. FireBug (nothing like this on ANY other browser, not even Safari's inbuilt "Develop" menu options comes close for debugging)
The IE Developer Toolbar actually offers some of this functionality too. It's not quite as good as firebug ofcourse, but I'm quite happy with it nonetheless. IE was in desperate need of better developer tools.
I just fired up vanilla versions of both IE8, Chrome, and Process Explorer and opened the same two tabs: the Facebook login page and Wikipedia (English).
Process Explorer tells me IE8 is using 389652 KB of memory. Chrome is using 260668 KB of memory. Both have three processing running.
Ouch! That's what Opera uses with about 80 tabs open (after a fresh start, admittedly). Firefox usually gets there around 30 tabs (probably more with FF3). This kind of memory usage for only two tabs is pretty extreme.
Now I upped the ante to 9 tabs, which for brevity, I won't list. IE8 with 6 processes was using 958524 KB and Chrome with 11 processes was using 783840 KB.
9 tabs and you risk running out of system memory? I was hoping Chrome would be a good heavy-duty browser like Opera, and possibly a fine successor, but these numbers suggest they have quite a bit of work to do.
IE8 even moreso ofcourse, but I don't think anyone is surprised by that.
I guess I'll stick to Opera and Firefox for now.