I REALLY wish they did this here in the USA. I have a 3 yr old son and live opposite a kids play park. The park has been totally ruined by f***ing retards who walk their dogs there and dont bother to pick up their sh1t when they think no-one is watching. It makes me mad thinking about those dog owners who just don't care about passing some potentially really nasty diseases onto kids.
Wow the RIAA could really be hoist by their own petard. Ray I hope you countersue those bastards with everything you can think of. In fact how about beating them at their own game and tying them up with masses of labour-intensive legal red tape for years?
I'm a software developer who has been involved in interviewing other prospective software developers for our company for a while now.
I've been highly surprised by the high proportion of applicants we get with excellent resumes claiming years of good development experience, yet even gentle questioning soon uncovers their general technical knowledge and actual ability is massively below what their resumes would have you believe.
Clearly there are a large proportion of people out there who are just blatantly lying on their resumes and hoping their bluff won't get found out until they get a job offer.
One guy who claimed on his resume that he had decades of working as a software developer in C and C++ didn't even realise that the source code needs to be compiled before it can be executed. No joke.
If someone chooses to writes on their resume that C++ programming is their primary skill set then a few simple questions about classes, exception handling etc, is fair game in my opinion. You'd be surprised how many interviewees resent being asked technical questions though. Its no coincidence that the most resentful ones are nearly always the most clueless.
Amazing how Microsoft always get found out with this 'hidden phone home' stuff, they always make some really lame excuse, and nobody ever actually does anything about it.
Its dissapointing that even though laptops have largely taken over from desktops for general personal computing use, still no laptop even comes close to the price/performance and especially upgradability of an atx case system.
If your primary motivation is high-GPU games like crysis, you're still way better served by a conventional PC box rather than a laptop.
>>What is needed is a DRM classification system similar to the ratings system,
Thats a really good idea. Unfortunately I don't see the labels willingly implementing this as it uncovers info they don't want customers to realise before they get their money. The labels don't care about the customers realising after they get it home as they have their money and most stores have a no-refund policy on software anyway so customers are stuck with it.
On that basis though, I'm surprised there hasn't been a class-action lawsuit against some of the worst offenders (bioshock, spore) for failing to sufficiently describe on the outside of the box all the nasty shit they do install on your PC.
This is a tiny compromise, and doesn't do anything to address the legitimate concerns voiced by everyone over Spore and other DRM-infested games.
Apart from the fact that I have to reinstall windows every few months because I frequrently upgrade my hardware, and that windows is so badly architected that it gets slower and fills up more and more diskspace on its own over time, I have a moral issue too: Why should I ever have to seek someone elses permission to use a product I already paid for?
Consequently I refuse to buy any software that has any installation counters/limits at all because of the fear that at sometime in the future its down the continued existence of EA and some arbitrary corporate decisions that allow me to reinstall my own game.
You may think that EA won't ever stop you reinstalling Spore or other DRM'd games if you make a ligitimate case, but thats probaby exactly what all those customres who bought DRM'd music from Microsofts MSN music store thought too. Then Microsoft arbitrarily changed their DRM scheme and left millions of customres unable to play music files they had paid for. My point is we've already seen one giant corp do it.
Pirate Bay was not really an option for me before, but this kind of DRM is really making it one.
> 'The Guru role is to help sell Windows-based PCs. It is not to be an alternative tech support channel for Microsoft as this has no financial return beyond improved customer satisfaction,' Baker said. One reason: Windows Gurus could end up 'lightning rods for customers' frustrations with Vista.'"
His statement is so transparently ridiculous it makes me wonder how he thinks its even possible for someone to read that then go ahead and buy Vista. Unlike Apple geniusses, These MS gurus cannot be considered beneficial to customers in any way.
If Microsoft were actually concerned about customer satisfaction as he says, these gurus would also answer existing customers technical questions. He's clearly admitting these people are not actually technical gurus, they are sales droids that are there to wallpaper over vistas cracks with pre-programmed marketspeak, thats all. The fact he acknowledges they could become lighting rods underlines the implication that Vista really is a load of overhyped crap.
His statment clearly shows that Microsoft's strategy still has not changed. They only work hard on promoting some wallpaper-thin image of their products, rather than spend any time actually providing real help or support that people need. Once someone falls for the pitch and buys vista, MS are clearly leaving them out in the cold to struggle and eventually discover what thay have actually wasted their money on.
>>> "vendors are trying hard to make it affordable and "outspeed" each other"
Yeah...by introducing limits on customers usage of bandwidth and the most popular protocols. This is NOT a net win (pun intended) for end-users. I'd rather have slower link with unrestricted access than have a theoretically faster link that I can't use to do what I want.
>> DRM SecuROM type tactics are killing pc gaming more than piracy.
Yeah I get the feeling that this is actually what EA are trying to make happen. They like console games bacuse:
a) they can charge $60 instead of $45
b) they seem to (mistakenly) think its harder to crack/copy console games.
c) they probably don't have to work as hard to develop a console game than a good PC game as they're not usually as deep. I'm guessing they can also probably re-use more code from their other old console games than you can get away with for PC games.
d) they can get the same customer buying the same game more than once because console games more frequently require the media to be in the drive to play... hence more damaged media.
Honestly, DRM affects and concerns me much more in my day-to-day life than those other things. We have already have charities for things like world hunger. Where is the mechanism for cohesive public action against DRM?
>> When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical
As far as I can see there really aren't any, at least for conventional desktop PC use. The most obvious one would be performance, except suprisingly when comapred with the fastest of todays mechanical drives there's not much if any performance advantage. In some cases SSDs are actually worse.
There's still a lot of other disadvanteges to SSDs, like a more limited number of write operations, only small storage sizes available, and much higher cost per Gb.
Someone wake me up when there's a 1TB SSD for $250 that can do unlimited rewrite ops.
My qualification to have an opinion: I paid good money for this and played it to the end.
My opinion: from all the hype I was expecting something much much more and was very dissapointed.
I found Bioshock to be a fairly dull semi-on-rails shooter with an unimaginative, awkward and badly scripted plot. There were so many great possibilities plot-wise that they completely missed out on. There were parts of the plot that just made no sense and many annoying and stupidly unrealistic holes in the gameplay like when you kill a big daddy (Which was ludicrously tedious as it took so long and all your ammo but otherwise was easy) then you could walk away and turn around and the same one would be right back. Very cheap and cheesy.
The majority of reviews were ranting about the fantastic graphics but I was suprised at how obviously low-res and fake the views out of the windows were (I mean REALLY blocky scaled up 2D bitmaps instead of 3D rendered objects even though I was playing on highest poss. graphics settings). The developers have no excuse for adopting the same cpu-cheap approach to doing background scenery that they had to do for comupters like the amiga back in the 80's. The interiors were nicely 50's retro-styled, but the graphics themselves were very average and repetetive. Its like they had a library of about 50 objects that they just kept re-using. They certainly did that with the characters. The worst thing is that given the large amount of graphics re-use you could at least expect there to be a lot of levels/playing time, but it was all over after only a few hours of playing.
I guess I must seriously missing something but IMHO this is a really budget-quality game that has nothing at all going for it gameplay-wise, massively too much hype and no repeat playability.
I was amazed at the sheer number of supposedly unbiased games reviewers that gave it top scores. I didn't realise how open to bribery from games producers those guys must be.
>> With a growing number of internet service providers imposing hard bandwidth caps,
Uhh, isn't it just comcast (at least in the USA)? why do you say "growing number"? Actually I've been waiting for a slashdot article that says how comcast is gonna stop bandwidth caps in order to stem the tide of customers leaving, but I guess either most people don't know or care, or maybe just don't have any alternative broadband providers. Perhaps what needs to happen is for a comcast customer to initiate a class action suit because they reached their limit and got cut off, even though there's no such clause explicitly in their contract.
1) The storing of credit card details after a successful transaction has completed should be made illegal unless the customer explicitly agrees to each instance. There's no reason why Best Western or most other sellers should need to retain credit card details once theyve got their money.
2) It should be illegal to store or hold personal data on others without their express consent for each instance of addign to their record.
3) It should be illegal to persistently store personal data of others in anything other than a military-grade level of encryption.
4) If the only way to get comapnies to tighten up security is to have them face a risk of going under, then so be it. Companies should be subject to autmoatic damages for loss of personal data. Anyone whos data is lost or otherwise compromised should be automatically given a significant payment for stress, inconveneince and risk. I'm thinking of a minimum of $5000 to each person is appropriate.
What a dumb idea. Do we really want to send the incorrect message to the future that everyone really beleived stupid stuff like the world was created in 7 days?
so... as well as the inmplanted chip the abductee also has to carry a separate GPS transmitter? In which case I'm not seeing the point of the implant...
Comcast have already been proved to be blatant liars that deserve no trustworthiness to be left alone to do the right thing. Consequently I'm guessing that the FCC now are looking to oversee exactly what Comcast plan to do next, in order to ensure that their service really can't throttle traffic in any way in future.
>> Because it definitely isn't fighting for net neutrality. I totally disagree. This seems to be an excellent indicator that they are doing all they can to protect it.
Given his sensibilities about not doing any more Seinfeld episodes, I would have guessed that he of all people would have better sense than to associate himself with such a crappy product and company, especially as a comeback. I guess the money finally ran out from the endless re-runs and DVD box sets eh Jerry?
>> "Vista will be as fast on the future technology as XP is on current technology in a couple years."
I expect you're right but its hardly something Microsoft should feel proud about.
Microsoft press release: We just made sonething that does the same job (or actually worse job in several important cases) as XP but needs 10 times as much HD space, 4x as much ram, and will only feel as fast as XP today on hardware that should be out in a couple of years.
>> Vista was developed for future hardware. Vista will be just as fast as XP in a couple years
Logically invalid. As the hardware gets faster, then so does both Vista and XP running on it by roughly equal proportions. Consequently at no point will Vista ever be as fast as XP given a level playing field.
It is the relative levels of useful functionality before and after a change that determines whether that change was actually an upgrade or downgrade. Contrary to Microsoft's devisive mis-usage of the word 'upgrade' the actual classification of whether something is an upgrade or downgrade does not in fact have any dependency on the difference in age of the pre- and post-change environment. Consequently, as Vista is widely accepted to be functionally more limited and less practical than XP in most areas that matter, (e.g. vista's extra interference in the user's workflow causing a reduction in efficiency, its massive extra usage of more memory and cpu to perform essentially similar role to XP except with less backward software compatability and significantly less ability to play users own media, etc etc ), moving from XP to Vista is clearly both definitavely and technically a downgrade, and so should be referred to as such.
It seems to me that all they are doing is hurting the big labels with this charge. I mean, the internet radio stations can still broadcast original music from unsigned bands and not pay a penny of this extortionate music tax because if unsigned, the bands themselves exclusively own and control the rights to their own music. So only the big labels lose out, meaning everyone else wins. No doubt the bands would give free rights to the internet radio stations as they would be only too grateful for the airplay, the internet stations get tax-free content to air, and even the audience win as we finally get some original music instead of the usual formulaic commercial crap the labels are currently forcing on us.
Slashdot Mirror
I REALLY wish they did this here in the USA.
I have a 3 yr old son and live opposite a kids play park.
The park has been totally ruined by f***ing retards who walk their dogs there and dont bother to pick up their sh1t when they think no-one is watching.
It makes me mad thinking about those dog owners who just don't care about passing some potentially really nasty diseases onto kids.
Wow the RIAA could really be hoist by their own petard.
Ray I hope you countersue those bastards with everything you can think of. In fact how about beating them at their own game and tying them up with masses of labour-intensive legal red tape for years?
I'm a software developer who has been involved in interviewing other prospective software developers for our company for a while now.
I've been highly surprised by the high proportion of applicants we get with excellent resumes claiming years of good development experience, yet even gentle questioning soon uncovers their general technical knowledge and actual ability is massively below what their resumes would have you believe.
Clearly there are a large proportion of people out there who are just blatantly lying on their resumes and hoping their bluff won't get found out until they get a job offer.
One guy who claimed on his resume that he had decades of working as a software developer in C and C++ didn't even realise that the source code needs to be compiled before it can be executed. No joke.
If someone chooses to writes on their resume that C++ programming is their primary skill set then a few simple questions about classes, exception handling etc, is fair game in my opinion. You'd be surprised how many interviewees resent being asked technical questions though. Its no coincidence that the most resentful ones are nearly always the most clueless.
Amazing how Microsoft always get found out with this 'hidden phone home' stuff, they always make some really lame excuse, and nobody ever actually does anything about it.
Its dissapointing that even though laptops have largely taken over from desktops for general personal computing use, still no laptop even comes close to the price/performance and especially upgradability of an atx case system.
If your primary motivation is high-GPU games like crysis, you're still way better served by a conventional PC box rather than a laptop.
>>What is needed is a DRM classification system similar to the ratings system,
Thats a really good idea. Unfortunately I don't see the labels willingly implementing this as it uncovers info they don't want customers to realise before they get their money. The labels don't care about the customers realising after they get it home as they have their money and most stores have a no-refund policy on software anyway so customers are stuck with it.
On that basis though, I'm surprised there hasn't been a class-action lawsuit against some of the worst offenders (bioshock, spore) for failing to sufficiently describe on the outside of the box all the nasty shit they do install on your PC.
This is a tiny compromise, and doesn't do anything to address the legitimate concerns voiced by everyone over Spore and other DRM-infested games.
Apart from the fact that I have to reinstall windows every few months because I frequrently upgrade my hardware, and that windows is so badly architected that it gets slower and fills up more and more diskspace on its own over time, I have a moral issue too: Why should I ever have to seek someone elses permission to use a product I already paid for?
Consequently I refuse to buy any software that has any installation counters/limits at all because of the fear that at sometime in the future its down the continued existence of EA and some arbitrary corporate decisions that allow me to reinstall my own game.
You may think that EA won't ever stop you reinstalling Spore or other DRM'd games if you make a ligitimate case, but thats probaby exactly what all those customres who bought DRM'd music from Microsofts MSN music store thought too. Then Microsoft arbitrarily changed their DRM scheme and left millions of customres unable to play music files they had paid for. My point is we've already seen one giant corp do it.
Pirate Bay was not really an option for me before, but this kind of DRM is really making it one.
> 'The Guru role is to help sell Windows-based PCs. It is not to be an alternative tech support channel for Microsoft as this has no financial return beyond improved customer satisfaction,' Baker said. One reason: Windows Gurus could end up 'lightning rods for customers' frustrations with Vista.'"
His statement is so transparently ridiculous it makes me wonder how he thinks its even possible for someone to read that then go ahead and buy Vista. Unlike Apple geniusses, These MS gurus cannot be considered beneficial to customers in any way.
If Microsoft were actually concerned about customer satisfaction as he says, these gurus would also answer existing customers technical questions. He's clearly admitting these people are not actually technical gurus, they are sales droids that are there to wallpaper over vistas cracks with pre-programmed marketspeak, thats all. The fact he acknowledges they could become lighting rods underlines the implication that Vista really is a load of overhyped crap.
His statment clearly shows that Microsoft's strategy still has not changed. They only work hard on promoting some wallpaper-thin image of their products, rather than spend any time actually providing real help or support that people need. Once someone falls for the pitch and buys vista, MS are clearly leaving them out in the cold to struggle and eventually discover what thay have actually wasted their money on.
>>> "vendors are trying hard to make it affordable and "outspeed" each other"
Yeah...by introducing limits on customers usage of bandwidth and the most popular protocols. This is NOT a net win (pun intended) for end-users. I'd rather have slower link with unrestricted access than have a theoretically faster link that I can't use to do what I want.
>> DRM SecuROM type tactics are killing pc gaming more than piracy.
Yeah I get the feeling that this is actually what EA are trying to make happen.
They like console games bacuse:
a) they can charge $60 instead of $45
b) they seem to (mistakenly) think its harder to crack/copy console games.
c) they probably don't have to work as hard to develop a console game than a good PC game as they're not usually as deep. I'm guessing they can also probably re-use more code from their other old console games than you can get away with for PC games.
d) they can get the same customer buying the same game more than once because console games more frequently require the media to be in the drive to play... hence more damaged media.
Its a no-brainer for them really.
Honestly, DRM affects and concerns me much more in my day-to-day life than those other things. We have already have charities for things like world hunger. Where is the mechanism for cohesive public action against DRM?
>> When you consider the intrinsic benefits of anything built on solid-state technology versus anything mechanical
As far as I can see there really aren't any, at least for conventional desktop PC use. The most obvious one would be performance, except suprisingly when comapred with the fastest of todays mechanical drives there's not much if any performance advantage. In some cases SSDs are actually worse.
There's still a lot of other disadvanteges to SSDs, like a more limited number of write operations, only small storage sizes available, and much higher cost per Gb.
Someone wake me up when there's a 1TB SSD for $250 that can do unlimited rewrite ops.
I'm just amazed that Comcast still have enough customers left that they feel they can still push them around some more with this monthly limit thing.
If you (still) have Comcast as your internet provider, please can you post a reply here explaining why you haven't moved already?
(note to moderators: this is an honest question, I'm interested)
My qualification to have an opinion: I paid good money for this and played it to the end.
My opinion: from all the hype I was expecting something much much more and was very dissapointed.
I found Bioshock to be a fairly dull semi-on-rails shooter with an unimaginative, awkward and badly scripted plot. There were so many great possibilities plot-wise that they completely missed out on. There were parts of the plot that just made no sense and many annoying and stupidly unrealistic holes in the gameplay like when you kill a big daddy (Which was ludicrously tedious as it took so long and all your ammo but otherwise was easy) then you could walk away and turn around and the same one would be right back. Very cheap and cheesy.
The majority of reviews were ranting about the fantastic graphics but I was suprised at how obviously low-res and fake the views out of the windows were (I mean REALLY blocky scaled up 2D bitmaps instead of 3D rendered objects even though I was playing on highest poss. graphics settings). The developers have no excuse for adopting the same cpu-cheap approach to doing background scenery that they had to do for comupters like the amiga back in the 80's. The interiors were nicely 50's retro-styled, but the graphics themselves were very average and repetetive. Its like they had a library of about 50 objects that they just kept re-using. They certainly did that with the characters. The worst thing is that given the large amount of graphics re-use you could at least expect there to be a lot of levels/playing time, but it was all over after only a few hours of playing.
I guess I must seriously missing something but IMHO this is a really budget-quality game that has nothing at all going for it gameplay-wise, massively too much hype and no repeat playability.
I was amazed at the sheer number of supposedly unbiased games reviewers that gave it top scores. I didn't realise how open to bribery from games producers those guys must be.
>> With a growing number of internet service providers imposing hard bandwidth caps,
Uhh, isn't it just comcast (at least in the USA)? why do you say "growing number"?
Actually I've been waiting for a slashdot article that says how comcast is gonna stop bandwidth caps in order to stem the tide of customers leaving, but I guess either most people don't know or care, or maybe just don't have any alternative broadband providers.
Perhaps what needs to happen is for a comcast customer to initiate a class action suit because they reached their limit and got cut off, even though there's no such clause explicitly in their contract.
We need laws like:
1) The storing of credit card details after a successful transaction has completed should be made illegal unless the customer explicitly agrees to each instance. There's no reason why Best Western or most other sellers should need to retain credit card details once theyve got their money.
2) It should be illegal to store or hold personal data on others without their express consent for each instance of addign to their record.
3) It should be illegal to persistently store personal data of others in anything other than a military-grade level of encryption.
4) If the only way to get comapnies to tighten up security is to have them face a risk of going under, then so be it. Companies should be subject to autmoatic damages for loss of personal data. Anyone whos data is lost or otherwise compromised should be automatically given a significant payment for stress, inconveneince and risk. I'm thinking of a minimum of $5000 to each person is appropriate.
>> including versions of Genesis 1-3,
What a dumb idea. Do we really want to send the incorrect message to the future that everyone really beleived stupid stuff like the world was created in 7 days?
so... as well as the inmplanted chip the abductee also has to carry a separate GPS transmitter? In which case I'm not seeing the point of the implant...
Comcast have already been proved to be blatant liars that deserve no trustworthiness to be left alone to do the right thing. Consequently I'm guessing that the FCC now are looking to oversee exactly what Comcast plan to do next, in order to ensure that their service really can't throttle traffic in any way in future.
>> Because it definitely isn't fighting for net neutrality.
I totally disagree. This seems to be an excellent indicator that they are doing all they can to protect it.
Given his sensibilities about not doing any more Seinfeld episodes, I would have guessed that he of all people would have better sense than to associate himself with such a crappy product and company, especially as a comeback.
I guess the money finally ran out from the endless re-runs and DVD box sets eh Jerry?
>> "Vista will be as fast on the future technology as XP is on current technology in a couple years."
I expect you're right but its hardly something Microsoft should feel proud about.
Microsoft press release: We just made sonething that does the same job (or actually worse job in several important cases) as XP but needs 10 times as much HD space, 4x as much ram, and will only feel as fast as XP today on hardware that should be out in a couple of years.
>> Vista was developed for future hardware. Vista will be just as fast as XP in a couple years
Logically invalid. As the hardware gets faster, then so does both Vista and XP running on it by roughly equal proportions. Consequently at no point will Vista ever be as fast as XP given a level playing field.
It is the relative levels of useful functionality before and after a change that determines whether that change was actually an upgrade or downgrade. Contrary to Microsoft's devisive mis-usage of the word 'upgrade' the actual classification of whether something is an upgrade or downgrade does not in fact have any dependency on the difference in age of the pre- and post-change environment.
Consequently, as Vista is widely accepted to be functionally more limited and less practical than XP in most areas that matter, (e.g. vista's extra interference in the user's workflow causing a reduction in efficiency, its massive extra usage of more memory and cpu to perform essentially similar role to XP except with less backward software compatability and significantly less ability to play users own media, etc etc ), moving from XP to Vista is clearly both definitavely and technically a downgrade, and so should be referred to as such.
It seems to me that all they are doing is hurting the big labels with this charge.
I mean, the internet radio stations can still broadcast original music from unsigned bands and not pay a penny of this extortionate music tax because if unsigned, the bands themselves exclusively own and control the rights to their own music.
So only the big labels lose out, meaning everyone else wins. No doubt the bands would give free rights to the internet radio stations as they would be only too grateful for the airplay, the internet stations get tax-free content to air, and even the audience win as we finally get some original music instead of the usual formulaic commercial crap the labels are currently forcing on us.
He's lucky they didn't hang him as a witch.