I said it many times. I boycotted this game due to drm, same with orange box and the like.
I bought Orange Box, mostly because Steam is a known animal, and I know it doesn't fuck up my computer. The only thing it requires from me is an Internet connection, and not even all the time. And on top of that, it provides a feature rare (especially among DRM-free games) -- I can download the game and install it as many times as I want, on as many computers as I want.
SecuROM, on the other hand, has a very good chance of fucking up your computer, and it's even being done on top of Steam (meaning no physical disc), which is already plenty of DRM. When there is a physical disc, it requires that disc to be present -- or so I assume, given the ROM in its name. And it limits the total number of installs to some ridiculously small number.
I can understand why people don't like Steam and its DRM, though, and that's just as sad -- Portal is the best game I've played in years.
Thought experiment: What if the DRM was "perfect?" That is, somehow, through magic, completely unobtrusive. The only thing it did (again, through magic) was keep you from installing the game on computers you didn't own.
...and thus, not completely unobtrusive.
You see, growing up, I shared a computer with my brother. I would think "perfect" DRM would allow him to buy his own games, and install them on this computer, even though the computer was actually mine. Why shouldn't that be allowed?
And, while using this computer, we only ever bought one copy of any given game, since, after all, only one of us could play it at a time. If the "perfect" DRM were able to magically distinguish which user was using the game, whoever bought the game would own it, and the other couldn't ever play it. Why shouldn't sharing be allowed?
For that matter, we'd often have LAN parties. Some of us would go in the other room and play Halo. We'd hook up four controllers to the Xbox and all play, using the same copy of the game, on the same console. At these same parties, we generally used a legit, Internet-facing Counter-Strike server, which meant that everyone needed to buy Counter-Strike, though it was only some $10 or $20. Why shouldn't partying with a small group of friends be allowed, without buying a copy for each of them?
My point is, unobtrusive DRM is an oxymoron -- not only because it's technically impossible, but because it's philosophically impossible to agree on a set of "perfect" criteria.
We all know that if I was to "share" the game with a thousand of my closest friends from all over the world, that would be piracy. And we all know that if I bought my own copy, for myself, and only ever played it myself, on my own laptop, that would be legit. But between those extremes, there's a lot of gray.
But I get it. You're wondering if there are any objections other than that it's obtrusive:
Would the situation be the same? That is, if this (non-existing), magic type of DRM existed that hindered only pirates and torrent leeches, would people still be against it?
Very likely, yes, unless you add one more component to your magical DRM: There must be no central point of control.
You see, right now, Valve can pretty much remotely disable any of my Steam games. And I'm sure one of those licenses I clicked through gives them the right to do that, and I'm not allowed to complain (or ask for my money back).
Even if there's no malevolence, what if Valve goes out of business? Where's the guarantee that the DRM will still work? Look at recent examples -- one of the music rental/subscription services went tits-up, and there was no way to get your music out of it -- the best they could do is give you some credits with another service. What if this new service doesn't have the same music?
So, let's take an example where perfect DRM exists: World of Warcraft. Or any MMO.
No disk-based protection needed -- in fact, download as many copies as you want, straight from their website. In fact, you can probably borrow a friend's computer, no problem.
But you're still going to pay the $15/mo (or whatever it is now), and you still have to be online, and you still have to connect to their servers.
Turns out, people don't really complain about the copy protection. And while there are a few pirate servers out there, Blizzard generally doesn't complain about them -- people will pay for the privilege to play on the actual Blizzard servers, where all their friends are.
But that's a special case, because all of the benefits of obtrusive (but not sloppy and dangerous) DRM are inherent in the current MMO model. If WoW goes out of business, you stop playing the game, full stop.
it could be argued that developers should work on perfecting DRM. Making it infallible stops piracy, and making it completely unobtrusive maximizes the number willing to pay and able to enjoy it.
But more relevantly, are you saying that the only solution to a slippery slope is to run in the opposite direction? That if you find yourself in a slippery slope towards alcoholism, you've got no recourse but to swear off all sins of the flesh and join a monastery? That since we're on such a slippery slope to torture, we should stop interrogating prisoners altogether, since yelling loudly and asking scary questions is a form of torture?
Hey, it's no more a strawman than you've drawn of me.
So forgive my rudeness, but as to boycotting "Bad" DRM for "good" DRM?
It's a way to push back, while still playing, I don't know, any games at all. Boycotting all DRM means you're either cheating yourself of quite a lot of entertainment, or you're pirating -- and either way, you're also contributing to a statistic by which they convince themselves that they're losing sales to piracy, and so the cycle continues.
Instead, prove to them that people will buy a game with light DRM, or no DRM at all.
Or, if your solution is consoles, allow me to enjoy a long and hearty laugh while you try to justify living the endgame of Trusted Computing.
I find it easier to lug a book around on the subway then trying to connect to the unavailable internet on a lap heater.
The Internet is also cacheable. You're not going to get the entire thing, but chances are, there's some resource you can download and take with you. (Example: Screencasts. Easily several hours, and sometimes much more effective than a book -- though I usually prefer to have text available.)
That, and the Internet is getting more available all the time.
to think a single class in computers at the high school level would prepare a student to enter a professional workforce seems a stretch.
Depends what kind of work.
A programming job? No way. Best you can do is teach them how to use Google, and give them lists of your own favorite resources, then cut them loose.
But what I would really love to see is something which teaches slightly-more-than-basic skills to people who need a computer to work, but whose job description doesn't really include "computers". From secretaries to stockbrokers, it would be extremely helpful if the average desk jockey knew enough that they didn't need a full-time IT department protecting them from themselves.
Not that IT departments shouldn't exist, or shouldn't care about security. I just don't see why they should be protecting employees from themselves, when they could be spending that time dealing with real threats, the kind that couldn't have been prevented with a little common sense on the part of some airhead advertising exec.
It's been mentioned that Google's approach to security -- that is, secure the network, and let the individual employee be responsible for their own security -- could only work at Google. I don't see why -- it's really not that fscking hard to be secure, even on Windows. With all the other crap they teach in high school -- does that secretary even need to know algebra? -- they could at least teach a bit more about computers than "This is a mouse" and "This is Microsoft Word".
In the interest of fairness, as my designer friend told me, it's not the developers who want DRM and activation (most hate it) it's the publishers.
Given that Valve has gone independent, Steam is quite obviously a development shop's idea of what DRM should be.
I actually don't have a problem with Steam, since at least it seems to work, and after playing through single-player, I'm going to mostly want it for Internet-enabled games, like Counter-Strike.
And then there's things like playgreenhouse.com, which seems to need single-activation. I really could care less, then -- I'm going to be online at least once to patch it, adding an activation step is pretty harmless.
No, where I draw the line is adding a layer on top of Steam -- and having that layer actually damage your OS.
I would say, don't boycott all DRM. Instead, boycott the truly damaging DRM in favor of stuff you can live with.
I think DRM has been covered extensively enough about this game,
Has it been removed?
No? Then it hasn't been covered extensively enough.
focus on what they did RIGHT?
Unfortunately, because of the DRM, at least one customer won't be able to see what they did right. I know I would have loved to play the game, but I flat refuse to buy it because of that DRM -- so that's another potential customer, ready to pay full price ($60 even), but I don't know what they did right, because of the DRM.
Hear that, developers? It doesn't matter how hard you work, or how many long hours and weekends you put in. It doesn't matter how much you love your project, or how much of a piece of art it is. None of that matters if people actually avoid playing your game because of the DRM on it.
Life is too short, and there are too many games that don't treat me like a criminal for me to waste my time on yours.
Not going to look into this in too much depth yet, but it sounds quite a lot like Heroku -- only less beginner-oriented, and without trying to do server-side javascript.
You don't really understand the addictive nature of these games.
Don't I?
It's not a physical addiction. You, on the other hand, seem unable to make that distinction:
Game companies and tobacco companies are not inherently good organizations.
Tobacco companies make a product which is physically addictive, which causes actual withdrawal, and which kills you if you keep it up.
Game companies make a product which, contrary to popular opinion, you can actually pick up for a few hours, and then put away. It's no more inherently addictive than television.
They're inherently amoral ones, dutiful only to the dollar.
You've just described the majority of capitalist corporations.
Punctuated content.
Let's be clear, then. What do you mean by "punctuated content"?
What does that have to do with anything?
If all of your friends are addicted to the game, that is their problem, and no reason you have to be.
You're confusing mob mentality
Sounds like you didn't finish your thought here.
There are a lot of things you simply cannot do adequately in 10 hours a week, actually. Raiding. PvP. High-level instances. Crafting.
Does your work on these things magically go away if you don't reach that magical number of 20 hours a week? Does that ore disappear out of your bank?
By your logic, sports are addictive, because to be in the olympics, you have to devote a huge chunk of your life to your sport. But that's no reason you can't go swimming on your own -- nothing will force you to keep swimming 12 hours a day.
Because for it, Firefox being a top-tier application that was very successful - we now have 200 million users around the world - it could not afford to have Firefox run slowly on Vista.
I like that pronoun for Microsoft.
Not "them", or "they", and certainly not "he" or "she", but "it".
The game is built by a set of humans collectively organized into a business. They not only do try to do something besides sit there and ask you to play,
Certainly, they try. But there's only so much they can do. At the end of the day, there's still just the game, and it still just sits there until you do something about it.
You sound like you're an addict, just looking for someone else to blame for your own lack of self-control.
in the case of the majors, they have a legal requirement (to their public shareholders) to encourage you to become completely addicted to the game so that you keep playing and keep paying.
Actually, no, the most they would have is a legal requirement to make the most money they can. Keeping in mind that you can't keep paying if you're so addicted you're out of a job, I would imagine they'd much rather build a casual MMO, if that's possible.
As for moderation, I played WoW for years, and the one thing I noticed in that time was there were very few people playing "in moderation".
Your turn -- don't be intentionally stupid. In the immortal words of every mother, "If your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you?"
play til you got bored, or play constantly (definition in this particular case: 20+ hours a week).
Or, if you play 10 hours a week, it only takes you twice as long to do the same things. Is that so horrible?
Sounds like a lot, but it basically means you'd be playing the game instead of watching a movie. If the game isn't as interesting as a movie, that says the game isn't interesting to you -- not that there's some magical requirement to play constantly.
there's a stack of shit ten miles deep that the developers are trying to bog you down with
Actually, no, the idea there is that if you have the time, there will be more to do.
Everest is there, but you don't have to climb it. I really don't get why it fills you with such vitrol that it's there, and that some people do spend significant chunks of their life trying to climb it.
I haven't played WoW very seriously, but from what I've seen, at least some classes need to be pretty focused, and have quite a lot of things to keep track of -- more buttons than exist on any console controller.
I guess I don't see how raids from your couch would be fun. After all, MMOs aren't the only genre that a keyboard and mouse is better for -- and especially if you're actually fighting other humans, why would you deliberately cripple yourself?
I can see exploration from the couch, or soloing.
Good idea, though, with the "centralized content" -- not entirely original, but good to see it catching on.
Then again, I'm really not sure I want to see people inevitably logging in just to text... txtspk is even worse than 13-year-old WoW griefers, if that's possible.
Punctuated entertainment that doesn't try to consume every second of every day of your life.
You're anthropomorphizing. How can a (your words) fucking videogame do anything other than sit there and wait to be played? How can it "try" to do anything?
Here's a novel idea: Play the same MMO everyone else plays, in moderation.
Python is my choice for the intermediate position.
I guess that's the part I don't get. What, exactly, is the intermediate position? What's a use case where Python's speed advantage actually matters, yet the speed advantage of something faster (like C) doesn't?
Notice the thundering absence of complaints since they abandoned IE on the Mac.
Notice that nothing actually depended on IE for the Mac -- and that new Macs actually ship with an alternative. (This has barely begun to happen on PCs.)
Being "closer" to compliant just means that devs have to goo through all their code to insert special cases yet again
Unless, y'know, it just works this time, or close enough that you slap a "Get Firefox" banner on the site and call it a day.
Whereas with IE6, your page would actually become completely unusable.
Because you do not have to maintain a website that is broken by IE7, you choose to ignore the massive cost of maintaining a third incompatible browser.
Give me something I can sink my teeth into, then. What, specifically, is causing you more grief in IE7 than it does in IE6?
Regarding your link, apparently Intranet sites are incompatible by default. Do you run an intranet? Do you know of anyone who both runs an intranet and is incapable of overriding that default, site-wide?
Given how obtuse you are, you're either an idiot, or, as I surmised earlier, an troll.
There's a similar problem with politics today -- the assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong, and that they are therefore either ignorant or evil. I like Obama, and he's probably got my vote, but in his speech at the DNC, he said something very like this: "I don't think John McCain doesn't care. I think he doesn't know."
I trust I've already made a significant case that I'm not an astroturfer, and you haven't pursued that further. And if I may be so bold, I'm too well spoken to be a complete idiot, or a troll. (I could have rickrolled you three posts ago and been done with it, and it's unlikely anyone but you is reading this -- a troll would've quit, don't you think?)
Creationism is, at it's core "Gee this is difficult, God must have done it".
Actually, I was led to believe that the core of Creationism is "OMG! Science disagrees with what the Bible says! Science disagrees with GOD! God must be right!"
Intelligent Design is very much what you described, but it's an attempt, at the very least, to divorce it from the circular "It must be God because God says so" argument.
Evolution is not capable of being tested by experimentation, at least not without time travel capability.
Are you saying we can't extrapolate anything about the past from the present?
Earth may as well be six thousand years old, then -- else how do we observe the Big Bang? How do we observe carbon decaying at the same rate in the past as it does now?
Ruby's nice, but it's slow compared to Python. If you're doing something where that doesn't matter, then Ruby's a nice choice.
If I'm doing something where that does matter, I'll write C extensions to do the heavy lifting, or I'll write the whole thing in C/C++.
And for that matter, all my personal projects target the experimental Ruby 1.9, which beats Python in a few benchmarks.
Also, Ruby's libraries seem to be more specialized towards web development than Python's.
Maybe. I haven't tried to do much else with it for awhile -- though I frequently see and hear of other projects.
Then again, the closest thing Python has to a package management system... EasyInstall sucks. So how am I going to get ahold of those other Python libraries in the first place?
And the main reason I use Ruby is, if I end up having to write these libraries myself, it won't be too painful. I think it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to try that in Python.
More of the same. Unfortunately, no actual citation links, which means I'd have to go find the appropriate journals (likely physical archives) to verify those statistics...
Which, again, misses the point. They're statistics. Even if I assume all of the statistics are true, all that tells me is to be careful who I trust -- and my mother could've told me that.
just because someone has an opinion, does not mean they want the government to implement that opinion.
It does if that opinion is about what government should or shouldn't do.
Even if it's not such an opinion, it is cause for concern. Would you elect a racist as president, even if they don't want the government to implement that opinion?
Slashdot Mirror
I said it many times. I boycotted this game due to drm, same with orange box and the like.
I bought Orange Box, mostly because Steam is a known animal, and I know it doesn't fuck up my computer. The only thing it requires from me is an Internet connection, and not even all the time. And on top of that, it provides a feature rare (especially among DRM-free games) -- I can download the game and install it as many times as I want, on as many computers as I want.
SecuROM, on the other hand, has a very good chance of fucking up your computer, and it's even being done on top of Steam (meaning no physical disc), which is already plenty of DRM. When there is a physical disc, it requires that disc to be present -- or so I assume, given the ROM in its name. And it limits the total number of installs to some ridiculously small number.
I can understand why people don't like Steam and its DRM, though, and that's just as sad -- Portal is the best game I've played in years.
Thought experiment: What if the DRM was "perfect?" That is, somehow, through magic, completely unobtrusive. The only thing it did (again, through magic) was keep you from installing the game on computers you didn't own.
...and thus, not completely unobtrusive.
You see, growing up, I shared a computer with my brother. I would think "perfect" DRM would allow him to buy his own games, and install them on this computer, even though the computer was actually mine. Why shouldn't that be allowed?
And, while using this computer, we only ever bought one copy of any given game, since, after all, only one of us could play it at a time. If the "perfect" DRM were able to magically distinguish which user was using the game, whoever bought the game would own it, and the other couldn't ever play it. Why shouldn't sharing be allowed?
For that matter, we'd often have LAN parties. Some of us would go in the other room and play Halo. We'd hook up four controllers to the Xbox and all play, using the same copy of the game, on the same console. At these same parties, we generally used a legit, Internet-facing Counter-Strike server, which meant that everyone needed to buy Counter-Strike, though it was only some $10 or $20. Why shouldn't partying with a small group of friends be allowed, without buying a copy for each of them?
My point is, unobtrusive DRM is an oxymoron -- not only because it's technically impossible, but because it's philosophically impossible to agree on a set of "perfect" criteria.
We all know that if I was to "share" the game with a thousand of my closest friends from all over the world, that would be piracy. And we all know that if I bought my own copy, for myself, and only ever played it myself, on my own laptop, that would be legit. But between those extremes, there's a lot of gray.
But I get it. You're wondering if there are any objections other than that it's obtrusive:
Would the situation be the same? That is, if this (non-existing), magic type of DRM existed that hindered only pirates and torrent leeches, would people still be against it?
Very likely, yes, unless you add one more component to your magical DRM: There must be no central point of control.
You see, right now, Valve can pretty much remotely disable any of my Steam games. And I'm sure one of those licenses I clicked through gives them the right to do that, and I'm not allowed to complain (or ask for my money back).
Even if there's no malevolence, what if Valve goes out of business? Where's the guarantee that the DRM will still work? Look at recent examples -- one of the music rental/subscription services went tits-up, and there was no way to get your music out of it -- the best they could do is give you some credits with another service. What if this new service doesn't have the same music?
So, let's take an example where perfect DRM exists: World of Warcraft. Or any MMO.
No disk-based protection needed -- in fact, download as many copies as you want, straight from their website. In fact, you can probably borrow a friend's computer, no problem.
But you're still going to pay the $15/mo (or whatever it is now), and you still have to be online, and you still have to connect to their servers.
Turns out, people don't really complain about the copy protection. And while there are a few pirate servers out there, Blizzard generally doesn't complain about them -- people will pay for the privilege to play on the actual Blizzard servers, where all their friends are.
But that's a special case, because all of the benefits of obtrusive (but not sloppy and dangerous) DRM are inherent in the current MMO model. If WoW goes out of business, you stop playing the game, full stop.
it could be argued that developers should work on perfecting DRM. Making it infallible stops piracy, and making it completely unobtrusive maximizes the number willing to pay and able to enjoy it.
sheit?
And I would say, don't ban all torture. Instead, ban the truly damaging torture in favor of stuff like waterboarding.
So, really, when you buy a game with DRM, and it requires you to enter an activation code, once, while you have an Internet connection...
That's like someone virtually drowning you?!
Whether it's politics or software...we've seen where this slippery slope leads, and the endgame sucks.
Yes, it does. So do blatant fallacies.
But more relevantly, are you saying that the only solution to a slippery slope is to run in the opposite direction? That if you find yourself in a slippery slope towards alcoholism, you've got no recourse but to swear off all sins of the flesh and join a monastery? That since we're on such a slippery slope to torture, we should stop interrogating prisoners altogether, since yelling loudly and asking scary questions is a form of torture?
Hey, it's no more a strawman than you've drawn of me.
So forgive my rudeness, but as to boycotting "Bad" DRM for "good" DRM?
It's a way to push back, while still playing, I don't know, any games at all. Boycotting all DRM means you're either cheating yourself of quite a lot of entertainment, or you're pirating -- and either way, you're also contributing to a statistic by which they convince themselves that they're losing sales to piracy, and so the cycle continues.
Instead, prove to them that people will buy a game with light DRM, or no DRM at all.
Or, if your solution is consoles, allow me to enjoy a long and hearty laugh while you try to justify living the endgame of Trusted Computing.
I also am a big fan of unchaining from the desk.
Laptop. Or an iPhone.
I find it easier to lug a book around on the subway then trying to connect to the unavailable internet on a lap heater.
The Internet is also cacheable. You're not going to get the entire thing, but chances are, there's some resource you can download and take with you. (Example: Screencasts. Easily several hours, and sometimes much more effective than a book -- though I usually prefer to have text available.)
That, and the Internet is getting more available all the time.
to think a single class in computers at the high school level would prepare a student to enter a professional workforce seems a stretch.
Depends what kind of work.
A programming job? No way. Best you can do is teach them how to use Google, and give them lists of your own favorite resources, then cut them loose.
But what I would really love to see is something which teaches slightly-more-than-basic skills to people who need a computer to work, but whose job description doesn't really include "computers". From secretaries to stockbrokers, it would be extremely helpful if the average desk jockey knew enough that they didn't need a full-time IT department protecting them from themselves.
Not that IT departments shouldn't exist, or shouldn't care about security. I just don't see why they should be protecting employees from themselves, when they could be spending that time dealing with real threats, the kind that couldn't have been prevented with a little common sense on the part of some airhead advertising exec.
It's been mentioned that Google's approach to security -- that is, secure the network, and let the individual employee be responsible for their own security -- could only work at Google. I don't see why -- it's really not that fscking hard to be secure, even on Windows. With all the other crap they teach in high school -- does that secretary even need to know algebra? -- they could at least teach a bit more about computers than "This is a mouse" and "This is Microsoft Word".
In the interest of fairness, as my designer friend told me, it's not the developers who want DRM and activation (most hate it) it's the publishers.
Given that Valve has gone independent, Steam is quite obviously a development shop's idea of what DRM should be.
I actually don't have a problem with Steam, since at least it seems to work, and after playing through single-player, I'm going to mostly want it for Internet-enabled games, like Counter-Strike.
And then there's things like playgreenhouse.com, which seems to need single-activation. I really could care less, then -- I'm going to be online at least once to patch it, adding an activation step is pretty harmless.
No, where I draw the line is adding a layer on top of Steam -- and having that layer actually damage your OS.
I would say, don't boycott all DRM. Instead, boycott the truly damaging DRM in favor of stuff you can live with.
I think DRM has been covered extensively enough about this game,
Has it been removed?
No? Then it hasn't been covered extensively enough.
focus on what they did RIGHT?
Unfortunately, because of the DRM, at least one customer won't be able to see what they did right. I know I would have loved to play the game, but I flat refuse to buy it because of that DRM -- so that's another potential customer, ready to pay full price ($60 even), but I don't know what they did right, because of the DRM.
Hear that, developers? It doesn't matter how hard you work, or how many long hours and weekends you put in. It doesn't matter how much you love your project, or how much of a piece of art it is. None of that matters if people actually avoid playing your game because of the DRM on it.
Life is too short, and there are too many games that don't treat me like a criminal for me to waste my time on yours.
http://xkcd.com/374/
Not going to look into this in too much depth yet, but it sounds quite a lot like Heroku -- only less beginner-oriented, and without trying to do server-side javascript.
You don't really understand the addictive nature of these games.
Don't I?
It's not a physical addiction. You, on the other hand, seem unable to make that distinction:
Game companies and tobacco companies are not inherently good organizations.
Tobacco companies make a product which is physically addictive, which causes actual withdrawal, and which kills you if you keep it up.
Game companies make a product which, contrary to popular opinion, you can actually pick up for a few hours, and then put away. It's no more inherently addictive than television.
They're inherently amoral ones, dutiful only to the dollar.
You've just described the majority of capitalist corporations.
Punctuated content.
Let's be clear, then. What do you mean by "punctuated content"?
What does that have to do with anything?
If all of your friends are addicted to the game, that is their problem, and no reason you have to be.
You're confusing mob mentality
Sounds like you didn't finish your thought here.
There are a lot of things you simply cannot do adequately in 10 hours a week, actually. Raiding. PvP. High-level instances. Crafting.
Does your work on these things magically go away if you don't reach that magical number of 20 hours a week? Does that ore disappear out of your bank?
By your logic, sports are addictive, because to be in the olympics, you have to devote a huge chunk of your life to your sport. But that's no reason you can't go swimming on your own -- nothing will force you to keep swimming 12 hours a day.
Because for it, Firefox being a top-tier application that was very successful - we now have 200 million users around the world - it could not afford to have Firefox run slowly on Vista.
I like that pronoun for Microsoft.
Not "them", or "they", and certainly not "he" or "she", but "it".
The game is built by a set of humans collectively organized into a business. They not only do try to do something besides sit there and ask you to play,
Certainly, they try. But there's only so much they can do. At the end of the day, there's still just the game, and it still just sits there until you do something about it.
You sound like you're an addict, just looking for someone else to blame for your own lack of self-control.
in the case of the majors, they have a legal requirement (to their public shareholders) to encourage you to become completely addicted to the game so that you keep playing and keep paying.
Actually, no, the most they would have is a legal requirement to make the most money they can. Keeping in mind that you can't keep paying if you're so addicted you're out of a job, I would imagine they'd much rather build a casual MMO, if that's possible.
As for moderation, I played WoW for years, and the one thing I noticed in that time was there were very few people playing "in moderation".
Your turn -- don't be intentionally stupid. In the immortal words of every mother, "If your friends all jumped off a cliff, would you?"
play til you got bored, or play constantly (definition in this particular case: 20+ hours a week).
Or, if you play 10 hours a week, it only takes you twice as long to do the same things. Is that so horrible?
Sounds like a lot, but it basically means you'd be playing the game instead of watching a movie. If the game isn't as interesting as a movie, that says the game isn't interesting to you -- not that there's some magical requirement to play constantly.
there's a stack of shit ten miles deep that the developers are trying to bog you down with
Actually, no, the idea there is that if you have the time, there will be more to do.
Everest is there, but you don't have to climb it. I really don't get why it fills you with such vitrol that it's there, and that some people do spend significant chunks of their life trying to climb it.
Just install whatever webserver you were going to use. If you're nervous, configure it to only listen on localhost.
I haven't played WoW very seriously, but from what I've seen, at least some classes need to be pretty focused, and have quite a lot of things to keep track of -- more buttons than exist on any console controller.
I guess I don't see how raids from your couch would be fun. After all, MMOs aren't the only genre that a keyboard and mouse is better for -- and especially if you're actually fighting other humans, why would you deliberately cripple yourself?
I can see exploration from the couch, or soloing.
Good idea, though, with the "centralized content" -- not entirely original, but good to see it catching on.
Then again, I'm really not sure I want to see people inevitably logging in just to text... txtspk is even worse than 13-year-old WoW griefers, if that's possible.
Punctuated entertainment that doesn't try to consume every second of every day of your life.
You're anthropomorphizing. How can a (your words) fucking videogame do anything other than sit there and wait to be played? How can it "try" to do anything?
Here's a novel idea: Play the same MMO everyone else plays, in moderation.
Python is my choice for the intermediate position.
I guess that's the part I don't get. What, exactly, is the intermediate position? What's a use case where Python's speed advantage actually matters, yet the speed advantage of something faster (like C) doesn't?
We really need a mod for "citation needed".
May as well slap it "offtopic" for now, unless there's some connection I missed between video drivers and global warming...
It's the DNS server that's not responding!
We've all seen Slashdot take down webservers, but a DNS server? That's impressive!
Notice the thundering absence of complaints since they abandoned IE on the Mac.
Notice that nothing actually depended on IE for the Mac -- and that new Macs actually ship with an alternative. (This has barely begun to happen on PCs.)
Being "closer" to compliant just means that devs have to goo through all their code to insert special cases yet again
Unless, y'know, it just works this time, or close enough that you slap a "Get Firefox" banner on the site and call it a day.
Whereas with IE6, your page would actually become completely unusable.
Because you do not have to maintain a website that is broken by IE7, you choose to ignore the massive cost of maintaining a third incompatible browser.
Give me something I can sink my teeth into, then. What, specifically, is causing you more grief in IE7 than it does in IE6?
Regarding your link, apparently Intranet sites are incompatible by default. Do you run an intranet? Do you know of anyone who both runs an intranet and is incapable of overriding that default, site-wide?
Given how obtuse you are, you're either an idiot, or, as I surmised earlier, an troll.
There's a similar problem with politics today -- the assumption that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong, and that they are therefore either ignorant or evil. I like Obama, and he's probably got my vote, but in his speech at the DNC, he said something very like this: "I don't think John McCain doesn't care. I think he doesn't know."
I trust I've already made a significant case that I'm not an astroturfer, and you haven't pursued that further. And if I may be so bold, I'm too well spoken to be a complete idiot, or a troll. (I could have rickrolled you three posts ago and been done with it, and it's unlikely anyone but you is reading this -- a troll would've quit, don't you think?)
Creationism is, at it's core "Gee this is difficult, God must have done it".
Actually, I was led to believe that the core of Creationism is "OMG! Science disagrees with what the Bible says! Science disagrees with GOD! God must be right!"
Intelligent Design is very much what you described, but it's an attempt, at the very least, to divorce it from the circular "It must be God because God says so" argument.
Evolution is not capable of being tested by experimentation, at least not without time travel capability.
Are you saying we can't extrapolate anything about the past from the present?
Earth may as well be six thousand years old, then -- else how do we observe the Big Bang? How do we observe carbon decaying at the same rate in the past as it does now?
If you don't have the full evidence, you don't have any. That's science.
Science is an irrational and illogical insistence that no evidence counts?
Yes, that's what you said -- because it's impossible to have "the full evidence". For anything.
Ruby's nice, but it's slow compared to Python. If you're doing something where that doesn't matter, then Ruby's a nice choice.
If I'm doing something where that does matter, I'll write C extensions to do the heavy lifting, or I'll write the whole thing in C/C++.
And for that matter, all my personal projects target the experimental Ruby 1.9, which beats Python in a few benchmarks.
Also, Ruby's libraries seem to be more specialized towards web development than Python's.
Maybe. I haven't tried to do much else with it for awhile -- though I frequently see and hear of other projects.
Then again, the closest thing Python has to a package management system... EasyInstall sucks. So how am I going to get ahold of those other Python libraries in the first place?
And the main reason I use Ruby is, if I end up having to write these libraries myself, it won't be too painful. I think it wouldn't be nearly as much fun to try that in Python.
More of the same. Unfortunately, no actual citation links, which means I'd have to go find the appropriate journals (likely physical archives) to verify those statistics...
Which, again, misses the point. They're statistics. Even if I assume all of the statistics are true, all that tells me is to be careful who I trust -- and my mother could've told me that.
just because someone has an opinion, does not mean they want the government to implement that opinion.
It does if that opinion is about what government should or shouldn't do.
Even if it's not such an opinion, it is cause for concern. Would you elect a racist as president, even if they don't want the government to implement that opinion?