You're just adding to the point that I already made. The legends are public domain, I think they are on shaky ground if they want to jump on Microsoft for that part of it.
You would have enjoyed the RP servers, and paying close attention to some of the out of the way quests. The epic quests were really interesting if you did them all. Look at what they recently did with the new Trials of Atlantis expansion! It's not the fault of Mythic if someone chooses to spend their time ignoring the content, and smashes bunnies for another carrot instead. "The grind is in your mind."
... because when I first heard of it, I was immediately confused, because I didn't remember Mythic making any any MMO of the sort (I play DAoC).
But as far as the content, best of luck to them. DAoC was brilliant in that it didn't rely on some license for the core game (like Star Wars), but they also didn't just make something up out of the blue. Mythic took heavily from already-existing Norse mythology, Arthurian legends, Camelot, etc, and put it all together in a surprisingly good story. If somebody else does the same thing, what sort of legal leg do they have to stand on?
Oryx and Crake was a pretty decent number. Anyone who thinks that bio-engineering is out of control will eat this stuff up. Three cheers for pigoons and wolvogs!
No, THAT'S not even a problem. Voter apathy isn't necessarily a bad thing: it can be a sign that people are content, and don't feel the need to change the status quo. Compelling people to vote, either by law or by fine, takes a little bit away from your freedom of choice. Making it easier for people to vote is fine, but not for the sake of shaking the tree to get more voters out of it.
I see polititians getting on TV/radio and talking day-of election registration (hello kneee-jerk elections), or making Election Day a national holiday, etc... I think these people, like the folks behind e-voting, are trying to fix something that's not a problem to begin with.
The problem is that the order-taking/filling is just as distributed as the spammers themselves. There isn't a penis-pill warehouse the FBI can raid and shut down the whole operation. Small operators abound, and when you consider they can sell a $2 bottle of pills for $50, and take into account the zero cost of spamming... any idiot can do it.
It's like trying to smash hundreds of ants with your fingers. You can catch a few, but the rest are scattering all of the place, and none of them individually amount to anything important.
This one sounds familiar. Let's hope it goes the same way as the dot-com bomb. Early adopters will make money, then the litigation market saturates itself with people jumping on the bandwagon. They will run out of people to sue, then the bottom falls out of the whole deal, thousands upon thousand of IP lawyers will be out of a job, or will need to find other work. Years from now, with all of the chaff gone, the market matures, and reasonable people with good ideas are once again able to do business.
I don't find them mutually exclusive. I use iTunes to organize portions of my music library... the portions that go on my iPod. I might be missing something, but I don't find iTunes terribly useful for listening to single one-shot tracks.
I use Winamp for playing files with weird extensions, because there are so many nifty plugins that let me listen to PSFs, NSFs, etc. There's no reason to have a one-size-fits-all music player. I have Winamp 2, Winamp 3, and I use them both. Downloading Winamp 5 now, and we'll see how I like it.
Well, if you'd read the post I explicitly said it was my friend's iPod, and that I was fumbling with it in the dark. I've never seen an iPod manual, nor did I have the ability to consult my friend's manual at that time. And even if I did, it was dark. Sheesh, it isn't trolling or flamebait, just an experience I had.
Yes, I read the post in its entirety, that's also why I called it a worthless anecdote. What do you want? A backlight button/switch? That would overcomplicate the whole thing. There are no non-diagnostic functions that require you to do anything except push ONE of the four buttons, or hold ONE button down for a couple seconds. The brilliance of the UI is the simplicity. If you can't be bothered to do the simple groundwork, nobody else will do it for you.
Sure, you didn't have access to the manual, but that's a non-issue. If you didn't have anything interesting to say in the first place, why post something half-assed?
It's the "Menu" button, and you'd see that from 10 seconds of flipping thru the manual. Not the mention that you can have it turn on automatically, or turn off after a few seconds. The iPod has a lot of customizability. Not only is the parent a worthless anecdote, it's a misrepresentation of the facts. Does that make it a Troll or Flamebait?
What if they provide average or medicore service? They get nothing? I won't claim that the tipping analogy is perfect (or even good), but I hope you get the point. Five bucks gets you three months of warm fuzzies. I post here, and I don't care about plums, I just like helping a site I like to succeed. I don't expect Rob Malda to come shovel my driveway. I've spent more on worse, and I'll bet you have too.
As for the dupe/spelling checker, the code may or may not be trivial, but it's not a matter of code: it's a matter of system resources. If the cost of running whatever scripting and back-end work exceeds what you would get from it, it's a no-go for implementation. Simple economics.
Who modded the parent Insightful? I picked up a/. sub for the same reason I tip the waiter/waitress when I go out to dinner. Sure, I could pick up my own food, refill my own glass, and bus my own table, but I'd rather spend my time enjoying my food and chatting with people, so here's a few bucks for your trouble, kid. I have no qualms about paying for a service, nor do I feel so entitled that I demand things that my subscription couldn't pay for.
On the other hand, a subscription as a gift seems patently asinine to me. I can't think of any of my friends who wouldn't sock me in the face for getting them a lame gift like ad-free/. for Christmas.:D
Bigger companies find themselves prey to clever entrepreneurs like the original owners of Acacia's digital media patents, who skillfully anticipate the direction of certain technologies and then quietly wait for someone else to commercialize a related product. If they guess right, they can demand lucrative licensing fees.
Intel's Grove derides such patent holders for showing little interest in producing goods with their inventions in favor of demanding licensing fees from others. "We call them trolls," he said.
You think Slashdot could call prior art on trolls?
Except the loading times are an embarassment to Square. The FF and CT ports are the only classic games where I can get a soda while waiting for a battle to start, or for the status screen to come up.
Well, since he probably didn't write it anyway, the follow-up letters are only limited by the stamina of SCO's PR department when it comes to spitting out legalese. It's in their best interest to avoid getting into tiffs that expose their flabby case, so I expect them to avoid Linus like the plague, except to offhandedly insult him.
...or artificialy grown organs. I think medicine is in for revolution.
Sounds a little bit too much like pigoons to me. It seems with every leap forward in bioengineering, we're getting closer to that despressing future-world we're always reading about in dystopic novels.
Presumably because near everyone has a CD drive these days, and perhaps there is some troubleshooting software on the CD should your DVD writer not work perfectly.
Deja vu, MSN
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I distinctly remember Microsoft doing something similar with their $400 rebate for signing up for three years of MSN. They dropped it after a year or two. AOL's deal seems more financially risky to me, I wonder how they can pull it off.
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."
-- Bill Gates, from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates)
Slashdot Mirror
You're just adding to the point that I already made. The legends are public domain, I think they are on shaky ground if they want to jump on Microsoft for that part of it.
You would have enjoyed the RP servers, and paying close attention to some of the out of the way quests. The epic quests were really interesting if you did them all. Look at what they recently did with the new Trials of Atlantis expansion! It's not the fault of Mythic if someone chooses to spend their time ignoring the content, and smashes bunnies for another carrot instead. "The grind is in your mind."
... because when I first heard of it, I was immediately confused, because I didn't remember Mythic making any any MMO of the sort (I play DAoC).
But as far as the content, best of luck to them. DAoC was brilliant in that it didn't rely on some license for the core game (like Star Wars), but they also didn't just make something up out of the blue. Mythic took heavily from already-existing Norse mythology, Arthurian legends, Camelot, etc, and put it all together in a surprisingly good story. If somebody else does the same thing, what sort of legal leg do they have to stand on?
Oryx and Crake was a pretty decent number. Anyone who thinks that bio-engineering is out of control will eat this stuff up. Three cheers for pigoons and wolvogs!
No, THAT'S not even a problem. Voter apathy isn't necessarily a bad thing: it can be a sign that people are content, and don't feel the need to change the status quo. Compelling people to vote, either by law or by fine, takes a little bit away from your freedom of choice. Making it easier for people to vote is fine, but not for the sake of shaking the tree to get more voters out of it.
I see polititians getting on TV/radio and talking day-of election registration (hello kneee-jerk elections), or making Election Day a national holiday, etc... I think these people, like the folks behind e-voting, are trying to fix something that's not a problem to begin with.
The solution to speed up coding software isn't necessarily to throw more developers at it, though. This is why I hate management.
The problem is that the order-taking/filling is just as distributed as the spammers themselves. There isn't a penis-pill warehouse the FBI can raid and shut down the whole operation. Small operators abound, and when you consider they can sell a $2 bottle of pills for $50, and take into account the zero cost of spamming... any idiot can do it.
It's like trying to smash hundreds of ants with your fingers. You can catch a few, but the rest are scattering all of the place, and none of them individually amount to anything important.
This one sounds familiar. Let's hope it goes the same way as the dot-com bomb. Early adopters will make money, then the litigation market saturates itself with people jumping on the bandwagon. They will run out of people to sue, then the bottom falls out of the whole deal, thousands upon thousand of IP lawyers will be out of a job, or will need to find other work. Years from now, with all of the chaff gone, the market matures, and reasonable people with good ideas are once again able to do business.
:P
Maybe we should be rooting for SCO.
Ahh yes, I love the smart playlists. But Winamp is still better for random songs that I was to listen to without adding to the clutter in my library.
I don't find them mutually exclusive. I use iTunes to organize portions of my music library... the portions that go on my iPod. I might be missing something, but I don't find iTunes terribly useful for listening to single one-shot tracks.
I use Winamp for playing files with weird extensions, because there are so many nifty plugins that let me listen to PSFs, NSFs, etc. There's no reason to have a one-size-fits-all music player. I have Winamp 2, Winamp 3, and I use them both. Downloading Winamp 5 now, and we'll see how I like it.
Heh yeah, but then I don't get any subscriber bonuses, nor does my subscription ever actually run out. ;)
Well, if you'd read the post I explicitly said it was my friend's iPod, and that I was fumbling with it in the dark. I've never seen an iPod manual, nor did I have the ability to consult my friend's manual at that time. And even if I did, it was dark. Sheesh, it isn't trolling or flamebait, just an experience I had.
Yes, I read the post in its entirety, that's also why I called it a worthless anecdote. What do you want? A backlight button/switch? That would overcomplicate the whole thing. There are no non-diagnostic functions that require you to do anything except push ONE of the four buttons, or hold ONE button down for a couple seconds. The brilliance of the UI is the simplicity. If you can't be bothered to do the simple groundwork, nobody else will do it for you.
Sure, you didn't have access to the manual, but that's a non-issue. If you didn't have anything interesting to say in the first place, why post something half-assed?
Do you think they'd earn more from the ads?
I wish they'd let us see them regardless. This place actually has relevant ads that I find interesting, oddly enough.
It's the "Menu" button, and you'd see that from 10 seconds of flipping thru the manual. Not the mention that you can have it turn on automatically, or turn off after a few seconds. The iPod has a lot of customizability. Not only is the parent a worthless anecdote, it's a misrepresentation of the facts. Does that make it a Troll or Flamebait?
What if they provide average or medicore service? They get nothing? I won't claim that the tipping analogy is perfect (or even good), but I hope you get the point. Five bucks gets you three months of warm fuzzies. I post here, and I don't care about plums, I just like helping a site I like to succeed. I don't expect Rob Malda to come shovel my driveway. I've spent more on worse, and I'll bet you have too.
As for the dupe/spelling checker, the code may or may not be trivial, but it's not a matter of code: it's a matter of system resources. If the cost of running whatever scripting and back-end work exceeds what you would get from it, it's a no-go for implementation. Simple economics.
Who modded the parent Insightful? I picked up a /. sub for the same reason I tip the waiter/waitress when I go out to dinner. Sure, I could pick up my own food, refill my own glass, and bus my own table, but I'd rather spend my time enjoying my food and chatting with people, so here's a few bucks for your trouble, kid. I have no qualms about paying for a service, nor do I feel so entitled that I demand things that my subscription couldn't pay for.
/. for Christmas. :D
On the other hand, a subscription as a gift seems patently asinine to me. I can't think of any of my friends who wouldn't sock me in the face for getting them a lame gift like ad-free
Except the loading times are an embarassment to Square. The FF and CT ports are the only classic games where I can get a soda while waiting for a battle to start, or for the status screen to come up.
Well, since he probably didn't write it anyway, the follow-up letters are only limited by the stamina of SCO's PR department when it comes to spitting out legalese. It's in their best interest to avoid getting into tiffs that expose their flabby case, so I expect them to avoid Linus like the plague, except to offhandedly insult him.
Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma:
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love's as good as soma.
Seems as though it's a good use for computers too dated to do much else. Lord knows there are enough of them.
I distinctly remember Microsoft doing something similar with their $400 rebate for signing up for three years of MSN. They dropped it after a year or two. AOL's deal seems more financially risky to me, I wonder how they can pull it off.
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."
-- Bill Gates, from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates)