The only other occasion I can think of off the top of my head where something like this happened is when the World Wrestling Federation tried to lawyer the (much older) World Wildlife Fund out of its right to use "WWF". What is it they call the giant men who grope each other these days? I can't recall, but it certainly doesn't have an "F" at the end of it. You have the details of this pretty turned around.
The World Wildlife Fund sat around, saying nothing for years and years as the wrestling organization was prospering. Then, when the wrestling organization was running into it's first financial hurdles, they pounced and dragged them into court in Europe-- knowing such BS wouldn't work in US courts at the time.
Not wanting to bother with another legal battle, the wrestling organization simply changed their name and carried on.
It wasn't a good thing in my opinion. It was pretty bad. This leaves the door open for any corporation to sue the pants off another over three letter acronyms, even in completely unrelated types of businesses.
Also, I won't be contributing money anytime soon to a supposedly charitable organization who spends the money given to them on "protecting trademarks" when the differences in the businesses is completely obvious.
Yeah, wine still sucks. It makes me question why anyone is comfortable with a 1.0 being slapped next to the name when a serious minority of applications even begin to work and the ones that do tends to have lots of issues.
Get a new roommate! People who refuse to take consideration of others are an impossible situation to deal with all around.
I've heard this about a single machine running not being noticeable, but when you have roommates the power consumption tends to be different each month. Once I ditched mine, I was able to pay attention to the bills more and even a P3 700 with a single HDD would easily push my bill up $10/mo or so. Because of this, I just ditched it and use the WRT, which is much more sane on it's consumption.
I agree, tho, the WRT will go to hell if it has too much running on it. With all the bashing of the factory firmware going on, I can say I tried all of them and doing server refreshes in shooters was a lot better with the factory firmware than any of the other ones. If one person is sitting around playing WoW or browsing the web, I don't think it'd be noticeable, but any time it's getting hammered, it'll show.
You might as well get a subcompact notebook if you are going to carry that big pile of shit around it's tackle box. It would probably be lighter and all you need is a cell card.
I used vi all the time via my Sidekick. All the keys are there, you just have to chord it. It's the quickest keyboard of all the "smart" phones I've tried.
It's also the most closed, so if your ssh host requires funky settings, you aren't going to connect. Rather unfortunate, since it's a rather nice interface, but more focus is on the proprietary ring-tones and other kiddie functionality.
Even back in the early 1990's the computer shop I worked at was ripping every Symantec product, aside from AV, off customer computers due to the various problems they would cause.
Again, the Dreamcast had a shorter run of less than three years. A few games continued to come out, but it was dropped like a bomb and nothing but refurbs were available after that time.
It's amusing that after losing nearly $5 billion on the Xbox project, getting their asses handed to them by Sony in sales, and having a very large percentage of the ownership population pirating games that nobody at Microsoft would have figured out what you guys are saying here.
Wow, you really care a lot about the end of life for the Xbox. If you really want number, go look for them yourself. All I know is my Xbox originals play just fine on my 360. I was playing Street Fighter Anniversary online, with a pretty decent population of other players, just this last weekend.
I still say it was pretty normal. I got mine on release day in November 2001 and played it until November 2005 when my 360 showed up. That's four years of steady play and since everything worked on the new console, the old one just became a full time video player up until the 360's dashboard update made it completely irrelevant with the addition of more codecs a few months ago.
Perhaps there's more to your hatred of the Xbox line than you are saying. It's pretty simple business logic:)
Yeah, I was irritated because I was actually playing WoW when it happened. My issues were people running macros and gold farming chinamen. Those damage the game far more than the Linux bogey man ever would. Still, kudos to them for lifting it.
What are you smoking? The Xbox just had a normal lifespan for a console. It's like saying you won't buy another Sega game because they quit making DC before you were tired of the platform. The key, really, is to get the console at the beginning of it's span and you won't have this problem. The same goes with laptops, cell phones, etc.
Anyway, you can still get replacement controllers at Gamespot.
You also have to blame developers that have nothing to do with Microsoft for not developing games for the platform anymore. It's not just one company at work, it is many. Keep crying foul and making "I'm not buying this because of that" protests and you'll find yourself in a wilderness cabin making your own butter soon enough.
All that aside, I do believe the 360 will be around much longer, if for no other reason the amount of money to be made off Live and MMO games, such as Conan, for some time to come.
This often happens to me when I bring up how nice of a platform the 360 is because OH GOD ITS MICROSOFT. It's a narrow little club on here who likes to mod down folks over less popular opinions and not over whether you are actually trolling.
It's been sad though, it took a while for the Mac client to come out for WoW. Also, nobody seems to remember the ban-hammer being wielded over folks running it under Linux with wine.
Back when WoW was new, you really needed a top of the line PC with an expensive graphics card before the cartoon-like artwork looked right.
Not to mention, the PVP was terrible unless you had these things, too. Nothing like being in the middle of a fight and standing still for 3 seconds while your computer loads the graphical effects of the spell being cast on you.
Point is, when a game comes to market it tends to be in the higher end of the hardware market and then the hardware eventually climbs to it's level. This, I figure is beneficial for something like a MMo, since it limits the rate of growth to a level that can be managed resulting in a more tweaked gaming experience a couple of years down the road (see WoW).
"... start looking for a new challenge and a less happy candy colored world"
What about the real world?
(said with a bit of sarcasm and a tad seriousness)
If the only reason to leave WoW is to play another MMO game, then, maybe... Have you have played WoW for several years and still want more "challenges" why not "Get a life"? *sigh* Seriously! Well, it's just like any other hobby. Some people find recreation in tinkering with Linux with no professional interests, should these people "get a life" as well?
I know folks that range from art directors, a couple of doctors, to a professional angler in real life who all play WoW to whittle away some spare time. None of them have ground up multiple characters to max, none of them sit in raids, or live in basements. They just log in a few times a week and play. This is the average player, if the millions of people who have accounts did that, Blizzard would need many times the server capacity they have currently.
Anyway, back on topic. The non-article linked in the headline lacks to mention one of the more important things about this game: They are probably going to release a version for the xbox 360. This will give an advantage leaps and bounds ahead of what Blizzard has done, since it allows people who don't play games on their computer or have Windows (like me), but still crave a real MMO on the console. I won't play them on the PC because I don't want to have to install voice conferencing software to talk to 1% of the user base, but just use the headset that comes with every 360 with Live access. All the social typing involved with current and previous generation MMOs is the real life-drain IMO. There's also plenty of other benefits to a console driven MMO because the fun goes away, for me, once people start installing mods and scripts on their PC to make their characters more powerful or quicker than they should be. I like an even playing field, not one ruled by whoever dropped $3k on the latest gaming rig and knows all the database, mod, script sites to further advantage them.
North America? How about people in the east wanting to kill all infidels? There's probably more than 5b people considered infidels by those folks, and they are screaming for it to be done, not just uncaring.
It's sad that the AC is either not from the US just trying to bag on us, or is from the US and entirely ignorant about the current state of affairs across this planet. Just about everyone not part of the west wants to take it down.
In reality, folks should really be happy we aren't as bad as people say we are. I mean, we are called every name in the book, have the most powerful military, most bombs, and a lot of capital to drive a 'real' war; not the policing of two third world countries-- really, women spend more on makeup every year than we spend on holding together those puppets. It's just exciting news because our public won't commit because we know it's a shit mission.
Wait until some big shit comes down the pipe and the world will sing a different tune, either "OH COME SAVE US!" or "OMG WTF OUR CITIES ARE GONE!" depending on where you happen to be living.
The majority of users on here aren't admins and programmers they are just geeks./. has changed over the years, and yes, in the beginning, it was. Now it's a hodge-podge of various types of users, mostly still running Windows and considering themselves 'power users'. It only takes a short time reading posts here to come to this conclusion.
Regardless, this DBA is:
a) calling the people that pay his bills stupid in a public forum. Just because he is in charge of the DB, doesn't mean he's smarter or a better person than the people paying for his company's services.
b) Evidence given to 'a' since this DBA barely qualifies as a junior administrator if he doesn't understand the control measures in his DB to keep things from getting wonky if a user happens to type a bad query.
Well, the submitter is obviously not worth his salt if he can't make simple job decisions without "asking slashdot" and calling his paying clients stupid in a public forum. It probably wouldn't be terribly hard to put two and two together if a client happens to read this site and say to himself "I don't know, but I think this is the company we are dealing with" and looking for a provider of services that has their shit together a bit better.
U.S. Army soldier, as an optional replacement for the Common Access Card - they get filled with vaccinations and all kinds of other stuff today, and are essentially treated as paid property of Uncle Sam. Putting them on military personnel? Not a chance, it would put your guys at an enormous tactical disadvantage when $50 worth of common electronic components could "light them up" from 100m.
There's probably a few more reasons the government would not be interested in implanting such things in citizens. Cost of operations having to figure out how to install, maintain and monitor everyone. Considering no totalitarian group is doing this now, I think people in current democracies are pretty safe from this.
As mentioned many times in the thread, there's already many other methods of tracking that's already usable by the government when they are interested in you. Hell, we can't even get a few miles of "electronic fence" to work at the border, I really don't see people handing over money for a project of this scale in my lifetime.
For the guy who mentions "all but 7 RFID cards are accounted for" in a burning building and firemen go dying, I highly doubt firemen would go running into a burning building because someone might be in there over employee swipe badges. They tend to go on "Hey, Suzie was on the 2nd floor! I think she's still inside! We can't find her!" instead of waiting for the NT admin to run into said burning building, log into a Win2k machine that's off the network and audit who has come and gone from the building since the fire started.
I don't care how many people run Media Center or Windows $CURRENT_VERSION. I just don't want you to snap up copies, then run to the government and make them waste more of my tax dollars controlling how businesses operate.
For real, save this stuff for getting rid of funding for ethanol, which has a bigger effect on the globe than "OH MY POOR CHILD IS A SOCIAL RETARD BECAUSE HE CANT WATCH SHARK WEEK!!".
Also, the broadcasters only want to control the media and seem to be content with what they can do with some DRM in a digital medium and will probably fine-tune it over time, they don't want to completely block you from accessing it in a way that still drives up their revenue. If you think it's alright to get every bit of media at your whim, with your own rules, then you are just a drain on their perceived revenue and should go back to 2000 and argue about how Napster should be legal while keeping a straight face. The government, nor anyone in any position of power is going to care. Again, waste your time protesting something that REALLY affects your kid's future and not this garbage.
I see a lot of hoopla going on here. People yapping about their 'rights' and apparently not even reading the article to see this only affected Windows Media Center and not other digital recorders like DirecTV, Dish, or cable. First off, who cares if Media Center can't record a program for whatever reason? You shouldn't be running Windows to begin with. Even if you are running MythTV, it's not time to piss your knickers just yet, as other DVRs recorded these programs just fine and in high definition digital. You can stick that low-def s-video cable so far up where the sun doesn't shine that it reappears back in the 1990s where that video/audio quality was acceptable.
It seems highly unlikely that content providers will absolutely block digital time shifting of THEIR property, it's more likely the control measures will more commonly be not allowing you to skip ads or limiting how long you can keep a recording.
If it matters so much, you can just be smart and quit watching. This is capitalist America!
Really, NBC doesn't have a single program worth a damn. Heros is bad. Face it. The concept was cool, but the product is shit. Don't just sit there and make excuses about it. People did that enough with Buffy. Stop the addiction now and read a book, draw a picture, or yell at people for being stupid on the Internet.
Oh, I see now. "most mammals". Perhaps just the tastey ones that are socially accepted in his locale don't have enough self awareness to be part of this God-fabric that protects the lucky ones from getting chopped up for dinner?
I like the 'fish vegetarians'. They try to convince themselves that fish are so dumb that it doesn't count as cruel. I like to fish and cook what I catch, and can say without a doubt that fish go absolutely ballistic about being bled out while alive and live longer in that situation than any mammal or bird I've ever seen.
Slashdot Mirror
I was referring to the tackle box. Never saw a phone with such a big case.
Yeah, that controller was a tendon destroyer. I used mine up until the day I lost the power supply during a move.
My roommate used to call it my E-cock due to the shape of it and how it goes erect (centers) when it senses a hand wrapped around it.
The World Wildlife Fund sat around, saying nothing for years and years as the wrestling organization was prospering. Then, when the wrestling organization was running into it's first financial hurdles, they pounced and dragged them into court in Europe-- knowing such BS wouldn't work in US courts at the time.
Not wanting to bother with another legal battle, the wrestling organization simply changed their name and carried on.
It wasn't a good thing in my opinion. It was pretty bad. This leaves the door open for any corporation to sue the pants off another over three letter acronyms, even in completely unrelated types of businesses.
Also, I won't be contributing money anytime soon to a supposedly charitable organization who spends the money given to them on "protecting trademarks" when the differences in the businesses is completely obvious.
Yeah, wine still sucks. It makes me question why anyone is comfortable with a 1.0 being slapped next to the name when a serious minority of applications even begin to work and the ones that do tends to have lots of issues.
Get a new roommate! People who refuse to take consideration of others are an impossible situation to deal with all around.
I've heard this about a single machine running not being noticeable, but when you have roommates the power consumption tends to be different each month. Once I ditched mine, I was able to pay attention to the bills more and even a P3 700 with a single HDD would easily push my bill up $10/mo or so. Because of this, I just ditched it and use the WRT, which is much more sane on it's consumption.
I agree, tho, the WRT will go to hell if it has too much running on it. With all the bashing of the factory firmware going on, I can say I tried all of them and doing server refreshes in shooters was a lot better with the factory firmware than any of the other ones. If one person is sitting around playing WoW or browsing the web, I don't think it'd be noticeable, but any time it's getting hammered, it'll show.
Now go kick out the roomie.
You might as well get a subcompact notebook if you are going to carry that big pile of shit around it's tackle box. It would probably be lighter and all you need is a cell card.
I doubt the person asking needs this *now* if they managed to ask like two years after initially asking.
I used vi all the time via my Sidekick. All the keys are there, you just have to chord it. It's the quickest keyboard of all the "smart" phones I've tried.
It's also the most closed, so if your ssh host requires funky settings, you aren't going to connect. Rather unfortunate, since it's a rather nice interface, but more focus is on the proprietary ring-tones and other kiddie functionality.
Or save the ten bucks a month in electricity and show him how to set his bandwidth limits in his client.
The lengths people will go to avoid social interaction these days.
Even back in the early 1990's the computer shop I worked at was ripping every Symantec product, aside from AV, off customer computers due to the various problems they would cause.
Again, the Dreamcast had a shorter run of less than three years. A few games continued to come out, but it was dropped like a bomb and nothing but refurbs were available after that time.
It's amusing that after losing nearly $5 billion on the Xbox project, getting their asses handed to them by Sony in sales, and having a very large percentage of the ownership population pirating games that nobody at Microsoft would have figured out what you guys are saying here.
Wow, you really care a lot about the end of life for the Xbox. If you really want number, go look for them yourself. All I know is my Xbox originals play just fine on my 360. I was playing Street Fighter Anniversary online, with a pretty decent population of other players, just this last weekend.
:)
I still say it was pretty normal. I got mine on release day in November 2001 and played it until November 2005 when my 360 showed up. That's four years of steady play and since everything worked on the new console, the old one just became a full time video player up until the 360's dashboard update made it completely irrelevant with the addition of more codecs a few months ago.
Perhaps there's more to your hatred of the Xbox line than you are saying. It's pretty simple business logic
Yeah, I was irritated because I was actually playing WoW when it happened. My issues were people running macros and gold farming chinamen. Those damage the game far more than the Linux bogey man ever would. Still, kudos to them for lifting it.
What are you smoking? The Xbox just had a normal lifespan for a console. It's like saying you won't buy another Sega game because they quit making DC before you were tired of the platform. The key, really, is to get the console at the beginning of it's span and you won't have this problem. The same goes with laptops, cell phones, etc.
Anyway, you can still get replacement controllers at Gamespot.
You also have to blame developers that have nothing to do with Microsoft for not developing games for the platform anymore. It's not just one company at work, it is many. Keep crying foul and making "I'm not buying this because of that" protests and you'll find yourself in a wilderness cabin making your own butter soon enough.
All that aside, I do believe the 360 will be around much longer, if for no other reason the amount of money to be made off Live and MMO games, such as Conan, for some time to come.
This often happens to me when I bring up how nice of a platform the 360 is because OH GOD ITS MICROSOFT. It's a narrow little club on here who likes to mod down folks over less popular opinions and not over whether you are actually trolling.
It's been sad though, it took a while for the Mac client to come out for WoW. Also, nobody seems to remember the ban-hammer being wielded over folks running it under Linux with wine.
Back when WoW was new, you really needed a top of the line PC with an expensive graphics card before the cartoon-like artwork looked right.
Not to mention, the PVP was terrible unless you had these things, too. Nothing like being in the middle of a fight and standing still for 3 seconds while your computer loads the graphical effects of the spell being cast on you.
Point is, when a game comes to market it tends to be in the higher end of the hardware market and then the hardware eventually climbs to it's level. This, I figure is beneficial for something like a MMo, since it limits the rate of growth to a level that can be managed resulting in a more tweaked gaming experience a couple of years down the road (see WoW).
What about the real world?
(said with a bit of sarcasm and a tad seriousness)
If the only reason to leave WoW is to play another MMO game, then, maybe... Have you have played WoW for several years and still want more "challenges" why not "Get a life"? *sigh*
Seriously! Well, it's just like any other hobby. Some people find recreation in tinkering with Linux with no professional interests, should these people "get a life" as well?
I know folks that range from art directors, a couple of doctors, to a professional angler in real life who all play WoW to whittle away some spare time. None of them have ground up multiple characters to max, none of them sit in raids, or live in basements. They just log in a few times a week and play. This is the average player, if the millions of people who have accounts did that, Blizzard would need many times the server capacity they have currently.
Anyway, back on topic. The non-article linked in the headline lacks to mention one of the more important things about this game: They are probably going to release a version for the xbox 360. This will give an advantage leaps and bounds ahead of what Blizzard has done, since it allows people who don't play games on their computer or have Windows (like me), but still crave a real MMO on the console. I won't play them on the PC because I don't want to have to install voice conferencing software to talk to 1% of the user base, but just use the headset that comes with every 360 with Live access. All the social typing involved with current and previous generation MMOs is the real life-drain IMO. There's also plenty of other benefits to a console driven MMO because the fun goes away, for me, once people start installing mods and scripts on their PC to make their characters more powerful or quicker than they should be. I like an even playing field, not one ruled by whoever dropped $3k on the latest gaming rig and knows all the database, mod, script sites to further advantage them.
North America? How about people in the east wanting to kill all infidels? There's probably more than 5b people considered infidels by those folks, and they are screaming for it to be done, not just uncaring.
It's sad that the AC is either not from the US just trying to bag on us, or is from the US and entirely ignorant about the current state of affairs across this planet. Just about everyone not part of the west wants to take it down.
In reality, folks should really be happy we aren't as bad as people say we are. I mean, we are called every name in the book, have the most powerful military, most bombs, and a lot of capital to drive a 'real' war; not the policing of two third world countries-- really, women spend more on makeup every year than we spend on holding together those puppets. It's just exciting news because our public won't commit because we know it's a shit mission.
Wait until some big shit comes down the pipe and the world will sing a different tune, either "OH COME SAVE US!" or "OMG WTF OUR CITIES ARE GONE!" depending on where you happen to be living.
The majority of users on here aren't admins and programmers they are just geeks. /. has changed over the years, and yes, in the beginning, it was. Now it's a hodge-podge of various types of users, mostly still running Windows and considering themselves 'power users'. It only takes a short time reading posts here to come to this conclusion.
Regardless, this DBA is:
a) calling the people that pay his bills stupid in a public forum. Just because he is in charge of the DB, doesn't mean he's smarter or a better person than the people paying for his company's services.
b) Evidence given to 'a' since this DBA barely qualifies as a junior administrator if he doesn't understand the control measures in his DB to keep things from getting wonky if a user happens to type a bad query.
Well, the submitter is obviously not worth his salt if he can't make simple job decisions without "asking slashdot" and calling his paying clients stupid in a public forum. It probably wouldn't be terribly hard to put two and two together if a client happens to read this site and say to himself "I don't know, but I think this is the company we are dealing with" and looking for a provider of services that has their shit together a bit better.
There's probably a few more reasons the government would not be interested in implanting such things in citizens. Cost of operations having to figure out how to install, maintain and monitor everyone. Considering no totalitarian group is doing this now, I think people in current democracies are pretty safe from this.
As mentioned many times in the thread, there's already many other methods of tracking that's already usable by the government when they are interested in you. Hell, we can't even get a few miles of "electronic fence" to work at the border, I really don't see people handing over money for a project of this scale in my lifetime.
For the guy who mentions "all but 7 RFID cards are accounted for" in a burning building and firemen go dying, I highly doubt firemen would go running into a burning building because someone might be in there over employee swipe badges. They tend to go on "Hey, Suzie was on the 2nd floor! I think she's still inside! We can't find her!" instead of waiting for the NT admin to run into said burning building, log into a Win2k machine that's off the network and audit who has come and gone from the building since the fire started.
I don't care how many people run Media Center or Windows $CURRENT_VERSION. I just don't want you to snap up copies, then run to the government and make them waste more of my tax dollars controlling how businesses operate.
For real, save this stuff for getting rid of funding for ethanol, which has a bigger effect on the globe than "OH MY POOR CHILD IS A SOCIAL RETARD BECAUSE HE CANT WATCH SHARK WEEK!!".
Also, the broadcasters only want to control the media and seem to be content with what they can do with some DRM in a digital medium and will probably fine-tune it over time, they don't want to completely block you from accessing it in a way that still drives up their revenue. If you think it's alright to get every bit of media at your whim, with your own rules, then you are just a drain on their perceived revenue and should go back to 2000 and argue about how Napster should be legal while keeping a straight face. The government, nor anyone in any position of power is going to care. Again, waste your time protesting something that REALLY affects your kid's future and not this garbage.
I see a lot of hoopla going on here. People yapping about their 'rights' and apparently not even reading the article to see this only affected Windows Media Center and not other digital recorders like DirecTV, Dish, or cable. First off, who cares if Media Center can't record a program for whatever reason? You shouldn't be running Windows to begin with. Even if you are running MythTV, it's not time to piss your knickers just yet, as other DVRs recorded these programs just fine and in high definition digital. You can stick that low-def s-video cable so far up where the sun doesn't shine that it reappears back in the 1990s where that video/audio quality was acceptable.
It seems highly unlikely that content providers will absolutely block digital time shifting of THEIR property, it's more likely the control measures will more commonly be not allowing you to skip ads or limiting how long you can keep a recording.
If it matters so much, you can just be smart and quit watching. This is capitalist America!
Really, NBC doesn't have a single program worth a damn. Heros is bad. Face it. The concept was cool, but the product is shit. Don't just sit there and make excuses about it. People did that enough with Buffy. Stop the addiction now and read a book, draw a picture, or yell at people for being stupid on the Internet.
Oh, I see now. "most mammals". Perhaps just the tastey ones that are socially accepted in his locale don't have enough self awareness to be part of this God-fabric that protects the lucky ones from getting chopped up for dinner?
I like the 'fish vegetarians'. They try to convince themselves that fish are so dumb that it doesn't count as cruel. I like to fish and cook what I catch, and can say without a doubt that fish go absolutely ballistic about being bled out while alive and live longer in that situation than any mammal or bird I've ever seen.