This really blows. And I have no interest in WotCs electronic offerings. They have proved utterly inept at this before and show no signs of getting better. Besides which, pen-and-paper gaming is, for a lot of us, a welcome respite from too many hours in front of the damn computer. Dragon and Dungeon magazines were enjoyable to read, the artwork was good, and they had that underestimated advantage of being able to flip through a back issue and maybe see something you'd forgotten or missed the first read through. Not to mention they were great for those times when someone was taking way to long on their turn.
Also, these magazines were an entry point for a lot of talent, bot for designers, writers, and artists.
Porn already determined what the future will be, and have implemented it. On-line distribution, DRM-free, streaming or download, use of free trailers and even full movies via bittorrent to drive people to commercial pay sites, etc. They are so far ahead of Sony, et al, that the poor SOBs don't realize that they've already lost.
Years ago when I worked in a shop that used OS/2 (one late version of which included speech recognition), we used to play pranks on each other all the time using that 'feature'. Things like changing a startup sound to be two minutes of silence followed by a verbal shutdown command, or changing confirmation prompt sounds to be 'cancel'. Good fun. The random 'select all / delete / yes' was the best, though.
Much faster. Surprisingly so. I don't know what team has been writing the installers for MS lately, but they've been doing a damn good job. The Office 2007, SQL 2005 and now the Vista installs have been much improved.
I did a re-install on Vista the other night (not because I had to, but because I wanted to test differences between 64 and 32 bit). I slicked the partition, and started the re-install. I looked over at the screen a few minutes later, and it had progressed so far I wondered for a second if I'd forgotten to wipe the partition and it wasn't really re-copying all the files. So far, it's been under a half-hour from first boot to working system.
Note, however, that this is installing from DVD. I don't know if the performance/process is different installing off of CD.
It breaks WildTangent stuff?
Cool. There's a good reason to upgrade to Vista now.
There might be some other positive aspects. For one, I noticed last night a demo wouldn't install on my PC running Vista x64, because it's crappy copy-protection (and what morons put copy protection in a freakin demo?) couldn't install it's drivers because they were unsigned. Maybe at the least, if we're going to have to live with obnoxious copy protection in games, the developers of the crap will have to be a little more responsible and careful before just crudding up someone's PC.
Hardly. DVD had the fastest penetration of any consumer electronic device in history -- faster than cell phones, faster than VHS, faster than PCs. It had very little to do with DeCSS; it had to do with the three things.
(A) the players are much less complicated to produce than VCRs, so the retail price rapidly dropped to the point where you virtually got a DVD player with your happy meal.
(B) The retail price of DVDs started low and got lower. I bought my first DVD for $20, and nowadays you can find B-list titles, used DVDs, etc. for $5 or less. VHS, on the other hand, started really expensive -- most titles were $90 or up in the early years -- and only started getting cheap when DVD arrived on the scene.
(C) There was already an established model and infrastructure for rental. It didn't take too long when VHS started, but it did take several years before 'renting a video' became a universal experience. With DVD, that happened pretty much from day one. People didn't hesitate to adopt a format when they could get content on it quickly and cheaply from the start. And Netflix has done more for the adoption of DVD than DeCSS.
Not to say that DeCSS hasn't been a boon, but even now most consumers don't have the expertise/wherewhithal/inclination to copy DVDs. Most of the pirated discs on the subway were initially mass-produced copies, not home pirated versions.
Currently, European companies can't compete with Apple (either in hardware sales or with European based on-line services). This isn't about the consumer, it's about breaking an American company so that a European company can snag a slice of the pie.
Don't vampires have prior art on this? Vampire is exposed to solar energy, blood seperates water into hydrogen and oxygen, vampire bursts into flame. It explains everything.
If you've got product shortages, it makes a lot more sense to reserve as many units as you can for the PS3 (a device that will sell well) at the expense of stand-alone players, which aren't selling well at all.
Because for those of us who end up building a lot of boxes, it's a damn sight quicker than having to go through the auto-update process, which generally requires several reboots and restarts as the server works its way through the list of fixes. Especially when the client has a slow internet pipe. A service pack, or at least a roll-up, would make that a lot easier.
And yes, I know there are ways to make your own roll-up, but I'd rather have one that Microsoft has it least nominally tested rather than something I did myself. I don't mind for my personal PCs, but when it's a customer, I'd just as soon be able to tell them its Microsoft's fault that the service pack broke something.
I think there are some exceptions for federal workers doing stuff for the CFC (Combined Federal Campaign), which is kind of a mass fundraiser targetting all government employees. It's an attempt to minimize the number of different distractions and confine it to a single period. Also, I used to work for a non-profit that soley benefitted military personnel. They weren't allowed to do fundraising among the military, but the military conducted a fundraiser on their behalf every year.
I'd be tempted to leave the form allowing a website to be entered, with a text warning in big, bold, letters warning people not to put anything in that box during the registration process, and then blacklist the IP of anyone that ignored the warning.
FTA: "The standard calls for link reliability of at least 95 percent...."
I think that's shooting kinda low, guys. My current setup has a link reliability of 99.99%. The only time it fails is when I go running across the room to eject the p0rn from the DVD player and trip over a cable. OTOH, if they can guarantee it will always fail during commercials, maybe they're on to something.
Which, if you think about it, is stupid. You'd be far more likely to remember what was on the screen if you took the time to aim and shoot at it. Otherwise, you just learn to tune out the 'red glow' monitors cause they don't show anything important and you can't blow em up.
The 'pick a class up front and stick with it' part is new in the past month or so. It used to be you picked a basic class, then that branched into two (sometimes one good, one evil) at 10th level, and then you each of those two split again at 20th.
It was pretty neat, and gave you a sense of progress. Unfortunately, they decided that it was too confusing for newbies and scrapped it in February.
And yet, after going from a Novell environment to a Windows environment, I'd trade certain body parts to have some of the Novell tools back in lieu of the crap that Microsoft ships. It's amazing how much stuff you could do even in pre-3.11 Netware out of the box that you still can't do with native Windows tools.
That's pretty much what Dungeons and Dragons Online is. MMO in the city, so you can meet up with others, trade, etc. But the dungeons are instanced classic dungeon crawls, you and your party alone against the dark. The game is SLTMMORPG (Somewhat-less-than Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)
Or why the Dell reps attempt to bribe our IT department with cash and free laptops if they'll continue to purchase only Dell equipment.
How do I get in on that? I have customers that will only buy Dell no matter how much I try to persuade them otherwise. If it's inevitable, I may as well lay back and enjoy it.
Opera (or at least recent builds) does the same thing regarding caching. I have a dozen or so tabs open now and Opera 9b2 is using 90MB of RAM and 125 of virtual memory.
None of this will matter until there are real consequences to anti-social behavior. That requires a couple things. First, you need the people running the game to care enough to *publicly* boot people for being asshats on a regular basis. Secondly, once that is done, you need a way to prevent the asshat from just opening another account or creating another character.
I've thought for a long time what the MM market needed was a third-party identity broker. Call it 'Good Guys, Inc'. You apply for a GGI account. GGI does a check, verifies you are who you say you are, address, SSN, whatever, and issues you a GGI #.
You buy Worlds of Evercrack, and enter the CD key that came with the game into your GGI account. You login to a GGI-enabled game server, and it uses the gamekey to lookup your GGI account and verifies that that key belongs to a member in good standing. Or, if you've been banned (from that game, or anther game, or whatever they want to check), it boots you or forces you to play on a server comprised of other asshats.
Not infallible, but maybe if it booted the jerks (and ninja-looters, and bots, and pro farmers) from not only that game, but potentially other games that used the service as well, things might start to improve. Or at least segregate the people who want to play the game from those that want to beat up on other players.
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I think your Palm is probably more into onanism, actually.
This really blows. And I have no interest in WotCs electronic offerings. They have proved utterly inept at this before and show no signs of getting better. Besides which, pen-and-paper gaming is, for a lot of us, a welcome respite from too many hours in front of the damn computer. Dragon and Dungeon magazines were enjoyable to read, the artwork was good, and they had that underestimated advantage of being able to flip through a back issue and maybe see something you'd forgotten or missed the first read through. Not to mention they were great for those times when someone was taking way to long on their turn. Also, these magazines were an entry point for a lot of talent, bot for designers, writers, and artists.
Porn already determined what the future will be, and have implemented it. On-line distribution, DRM-free, streaming or download, use of free trailers and even full movies via bittorrent to drive people to commercial pay sites, etc. They are so far ahead of Sony, et al, that the poor SOBs don't realize that they've already lost.
Thanks for the links. I knew they'd gone to an image-oriented process, but it was still impressive to see how efficient and seamless it was.
Years ago when I worked in a shop that used OS/2 (one late version of which included speech recognition), we used to play pranks on each other all the time using that 'feature'. Things like changing a startup sound to be two minutes of silence followed by a verbal shutdown command, or changing confirmation prompt sounds to be 'cancel'. Good fun. The random 'select all / delete / yes' was the best, though.
Much faster. Surprisingly so. I don't know what team has been writing the installers for MS lately, but they've been doing a damn good job. The Office 2007, SQL 2005 and now the Vista installs have been much improved.
I did a re-install on Vista the other night (not because I had to, but because I wanted to test differences between 64 and 32 bit). I slicked the partition, and started the re-install. I looked over at the screen a few minutes later, and it had progressed so far I wondered for a second if I'd forgotten to wipe the partition and it wasn't really re-copying all the files. So far, it's been under a half-hour from first boot to working system.
Note, however, that this is installing from DVD. I don't know if the performance/process is different installing off of CD.
It breaks WildTangent stuff? Cool. There's a good reason to upgrade to Vista now.
There might be some other positive aspects. For one, I noticed last night a demo wouldn't install on my PC running Vista x64, because it's crappy copy-protection (and what morons put copy protection in a freakin demo?) couldn't install it's drivers because they were unsigned. Maybe at the least, if we're going to have to live with obnoxious copy protection in games, the developers of the crap will have to be a little more responsible and careful before just crudding up someone's PC.
Hardly. DVD had the fastest penetration of any consumer electronic device in history -- faster than cell phones, faster than VHS, faster than PCs. It had very little to do with DeCSS; it had to do with the three things.
(A) the players are much less complicated to produce than VCRs, so the retail price rapidly dropped to the point where you virtually got a DVD player with your happy meal.
(B) The retail price of DVDs started low and got lower. I bought my first DVD for $20, and nowadays you can find B-list titles, used DVDs, etc. for $5 or less. VHS, on the other hand, started really expensive -- most titles were $90 or up in the early years -- and only started getting cheap when DVD arrived on the scene.
(C) There was already an established model and infrastructure for rental. It didn't take too long when VHS started, but it did take several years before 'renting a video' became a universal experience. With DVD, that happened pretty much from day one. People didn't hesitate to adopt a format when they could get content on it quickly and cheaply from the start. And Netflix has done more for the adoption of DVD than DeCSS.
Not to say that DeCSS hasn't been a boon, but even now most consumers don't have the expertise/wherewhithal/inclination to copy DVDs. Most of the pirated discs on the subway were initially mass-produced copies, not home pirated versions.
Currently, European companies can't compete with Apple (either in hardware sales or with European based on-line services). This isn't about the consumer, it's about breaking an American company so that a European company can snag a slice of the pie.
Don't vampires have prior art on this? Vampire is exposed to solar energy, blood seperates water into hydrogen and oxygen, vampire bursts into flame. It explains everything.
If you've got product shortages, it makes a lot more sense to reserve as many units as you can for the PS3 (a device that will sell well) at the expense of stand-alone players, which aren't selling well at all.
Because for those of us who end up building a lot of boxes, it's a damn sight quicker than having to go through the auto-update process, which generally requires several reboots and restarts as the server works its way through the list of fixes. Especially when the client has a slow internet pipe. A service pack, or at least a roll-up, would make that a lot easier. And yes, I know there are ways to make your own roll-up, but I'd rather have one that Microsoft has it least nominally tested rather than something I did myself. I don't mind for my personal PCs, but when it's a customer, I'd just as soon be able to tell them its Microsoft's fault that the service pack broke something.
I think there are some exceptions for federal workers doing stuff for the CFC (Combined Federal Campaign), which is kind of a mass fundraiser targetting all government employees. It's an attempt to minimize the number of different distractions and confine it to a single period. Also, I used to work for a non-profit that soley benefitted military personnel. They weren't allowed to do fundraising among the military, but the military conducted a fundraiser on their behalf every year.
I'd be tempted to leave the form allowing a website to be entered, with a text warning in big, bold, letters warning people not to put anything in that box during the registration process, and then blacklist the IP of anyone that ignored the warning.
FTA: "The standard calls for link reliability of at least 95 percent...." I think that's shooting kinda low, guys. My current setup has a link reliability of 99.99%. The only time it fails is when I go running across the room to eject the p0rn from the DVD player and trip over a cable. OTOH, if they can guarantee it will always fail during commercials, maybe they're on to something.
He could always start a second career running Thanksgiving promotions for radio stations.
Which, if you think about it, is stupid. You'd be far more likely to remember what was on the screen if you took the time to aim and shoot at it. Otherwise, you just learn to tune out the 'red glow' monitors cause they don't show anything important and you can't blow em up.
The 'pick a class up front and stick with it' part is new in the past month or so. It used to be you picked a basic class, then that branched into two (sometimes one good, one evil) at 10th level, and then you each of those two split again at 20th.
It was pretty neat, and gave you a sense of progress. Unfortunately, they decided that it was too confusing for newbies and scrapped it in February.
And yet, after going from a Novell environment to a Windows environment, I'd trade certain body parts to have some of the Novell tools back in lieu of the crap that Microsoft ships. It's amazing how much stuff you could do even in pre-3.11 Netware out of the box that you still can't do with native Windows tools.
That's pretty much what Dungeons and Dragons Online is. MMO in the city, so you can meet up with others, trade, etc. But the dungeons are instanced classic dungeon crawls, you and your party alone against the dark. The game is SLTMMORPG (Somewhat-less-than Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game)
Why should your inability to raise non-psychopathic children result in my not being able to own a firearm for self-defense?
Opera (or at least recent builds) does the same thing regarding caching. I have a dozen or so tabs open now and Opera 9b2 is using 90MB of RAM and 125 of virtual memory.
None of this will matter until there are real consequences to anti-social behavior. That requires a couple things. First, you need the people running the game to care enough to *publicly* boot people for being asshats on a regular basis. Secondly, once that is done, you need a way to prevent the asshat from just opening another account or creating another character.
I've thought for a long time what the MM market needed was a third-party identity broker. Call it 'Good Guys, Inc'. You apply for a GGI account. GGI does a check, verifies you are who you say you are, address, SSN, whatever, and issues you a GGI #.
You buy Worlds of Evercrack, and enter the CD key that came with the game into your GGI account. You login to a GGI-enabled game server, and it uses the gamekey to lookup your GGI account and verifies that that key belongs to a member in good standing. Or, if you've been banned (from that game, or anther game, or whatever they want to check), it boots you or forces you to play on a server comprised of other asshats.
Not infallible, but maybe if it booted the jerks (and ninja-looters, and bots, and pro farmers) from not only that game, but potentially other games that used the service as well, things might start to improve. Or at least segregate the people who want to play the game from those that want to beat up on other players.