All someone has to do is write a script that systematically generates and submits email addresses, and no one would ever be able to create a new Myspace account ever again!
(Yes, I know, you'd probably need to make a full-scale DDOS out of it so that MySpace can't tell that all the submissions are coming from the same IP address, and it's entirely possible that you'd crash Myspace's servers before successfully submitting all of the possible email addresses at pingable domains. Perhaps a more attainable goal would be to wipe out all of the possible Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail addresses fewer than 10 characters long?)
Monte Cook's famous review of 3.5e revealed that Wizards was planning on making the new "revision" as soon as sales dropped off. And sure enough, the changes shook up just enough things to make it nigh impossible to use 3.0 books in a 3.5 campaign, but included just enough goodies to make people want to argue for making the switch (e.g. the complete overhaul of the Ranger class to make it actually interesting). These types of changes may be good for the publisher, but they're a pain in the tail for the people on the ground with a campaign already in progress. Especially with the plan to charge a recurring fee, I think it's very reasonable to expect Wizards to comment on how long this edition will actually be around (and very unlikely that they will actually do so, because the answer will most likely be incriminating).
I lasted about 6 weeks in FFXI. The iconic experience of my time there was when I entered an area for one of the low level quests and found a player around my level farming there. The player inspected me and informed me that I was high enough level to equip earrings. I asked what type of earrings I should get, and he told me. I went back to town to check the AH and discovered that the earrings in question cost 10K gil each. I had a few hundred.
FFXI's job system is a clever attempt to reconcile forced grouping with new players starting the game and not having people their level to group with. In fact, ALL players are required to level at least one job other than their preferred class to half of the level cap. While this does have the benefit of ensuring that there are more low level characters online at any given time, the issue is that almost all of them don't actually want to be there. As a result, there's a tremendous pressure to optimize your characters with the very best gear, food, subjobs (yes, sometimes you may need to level a job you don't care about because it's the optimal subjob for the optimal subjob for your actual job), items to prevent foes from aggroing as you travel to the area you want to go and farm (yes, even travel is a group activity) etc. If you've got all these things, and an ideal group, you might be able to shave a day or two off your time in low level purgatory, so players jump at the chance. And don't get me started on how access to airship travel is restricted until you get to a very high level (that will be very hard to reach without airship access).... unless you come up with 500,000 gil from somewhere.
In short, cash is a bad place to put your timesinks. If you create a gil sellers' paradise, you can't be too shocked when they show up.
1. Independent of any legal issues, SL players have no way of verifying that the operations of a "casino" are legitimate. I can't imagine why anyone would give in-game currency to a "slot machine" that has almost certainly been programmed to make sure that the house always wins. From this standpoint, banning such activities isn't necessarily a bad thing. (Indeed, games like World of Warcraft that have banned "casinos" have done so because players tend to spam to advertise games which are so stacked against their customers to count as scams, not because they felt that gambling for in-game currency violated federal law.)
2. Notably, the blog post also declares that there will be NO REIMBURSEMENT for second life "property" removed in order to enforce this policy, much less for devaluation of in-game "land" that used to host a high-traffic casino. I'm half curious whether we're going to see any lawsuits over this, and, in the longer term, whether this will affect peoples' willingness to purchase virtual assets from Linden Labs. I find it remarkable that anyone would willingly purchase "property" that can be rendered valueless at the discretion of the service providers under the terms of service. (Indeed, a court has already ruled against the TOS' arbitration clauses, arguing that they were too one-sided to be enforcible, so perhaps there is an open door to raise just such a challenge here.)
I don't see how you could make a smaller touchscreen phone without a stylus, and even if you could, what would be the point? You wouldn't be able to read email or surf the web on an iPhone Nano, even with intelligent zoom-in, so that kills nearly half of the perks of the regular iPhone right off.
It has been interesting to watch the other shoe drop on the iPhone. At first I figured the catch would be that the cost of service would be insane. Then it came out that the pricing was very competitive (catch: it's on the cheaper EDGE network). Thing is, I was looking for the way normal cell phone service providers screw people (namely by overcharging for services). ATT's bargaining position as the last place carrier was weak enough that we may be seeing the dawn of a whole new paradigm of affordable service and expensive hardware. The cost of the replacement service, plus the loaner iPhone that you'll need if your cell number is your only phone, is about 20% of the cost of the device. What I find surprising is that analysts were shocked by this. A regular service provider would rather sell a cheap replacement battery to avoid having to subsidize a replacement phone. A hardware provider would rather sell you a new $500 2nd generation iPhone than a $40 battery.
The big question now is who wins the battles over the missing features. For example, ATT wants to charge current insane rates for more ringtones, while Apple wants to include the best possible featureset to make the initial sale (which, I would imagine, is where most of their profit in this endeavor comes from) more attractive. If Apple can pull out some big wins (e.g. end the practice of charging $2 for the ability to use a 30 second clip of music you already own as a ringtone), and can continue to deliver a device that's worth the cost, this could be a good thing for customers. (One hopes that the 2nd generation iPhone comes with support for faster networks and integrated GPS amongst other things, which would make it worth the upgrade for current iPhone owners.) Or we could be looking at an excuse for other service providers to decrease their subsidies of phones (still cheaper out of pocket expenses than an iPhone!), which would be bad for all of us.
The Iowa caucuses are non-binding, and that didn't prevent them from deciding the 2004 Democratic nomination. The 24/7 news media is so desperate for media that they will over-play any event, no matter how insignificant it's intended to be. You didn't hear that John Kerry won a non-binding caucus that, due to its format (no secret ballots, and caucus-goers need to stay at the events for far longer than it takes to cast a ballot) might not even reflect the will of the Democrats of Iowa, much less the Nation. You heard that John Kerry was a winner, John Edwards was a cute number 2, and Howard Dean was bleeping nuts. You heard this for a solid week every time you turned on a TV, opened a newspaper, or listened to the radio. Once they'd finished carpet bombing America with the results to the point where everyone knew what had happened a few day later, they spent the rest of the week with talking head after talking head dissecting WHY John Kerry was a winner, John Edwards was a cute number 2, and Howard Dean was bleeping nuts. Even their coverage of what the candidates were doing in New Hampshire introduced Kerry as the Iowa winner, Edwards as the young attractive runner up, and Crazy Howard Dean. Wesley Clark chose to ignore Iowa, and it's unclear if anyone even knew he was in the race a week later. No grassroots campaign, no amount of phone calls, ad purchases, emails, or even door to door visits can equal the impact this had on undecided voters, and what do you know, a week later New Hampshire believed that John Kerry was a winner, John Edwards was a cute number 2, and Howard Dean was bleeping nuts.
The Florida Dems can make the contest non-binding, but the point is moot if coverage of their primary decides the outcome in all the binding contests that happen after the Florida Primary. Unless, of course, Iowa 2008 has already decided the race by then.
Doesn't the DMCA take-down procedure require you to swear upon pain of perjury that you actually own the copyright for the item in question (or are acting as their authorized agent)? It would seem to me that, even if the fake ID IS copyright-able, the copyright would belong to the forger. (Remember, the CC license exists because authors have copyright whether they want it or not.) I DOUBT any forger would be stupid enough to draw up a contract transferring the copyright of the illegal fake ID to the customer, since that would be an admission of guilt to a crime. So, it would seem to me that either A) the girl forged the ID herself (a far greater offense than mere possession and attempted use) or B) she misrepresented the copyright status of her DMCA takedown notice. Pretty darned stupid.
Unfortunately, the well-defined "end" to LOTR has resulted in the first licensed game I can think of where you can't actually go to most of the cool locations from the book (and movies, though Turbine doesn't have that particular license) because the plot hasn't advanced that far yet. They CAN'T expand into Mordor because once they do, that's Game Over. They can't expand to the White City or Rohan because that would make the game half over. They're not even adding the Mines of Moria during the game's first year of release (according to a recent dev chat), cause that would make the game 1/4 over.
The challenge for Turbine is that, with the "ending" (and so much about locations in the middle) already known, players want to actually get there sometime. That's a problem when your business model is, essentially, stalling the players for time as you continue to collect your monthly fees.
Between the cost, and being shackled to ATT Wireless cellular service, I don't think the music player market is in any danger today. Ask again in a few years if/when both of these things aren't true and you might see a very different picture.
This may or may not have an effect on PVP situations, but I think that's ultimately going to be relatively minor. What people AREN'T commenting on is that this change also exposes your character's full repuptation page to the world.
FYI for non-WOW players, Blizzard has implemented a system where killing enemies in a dungeon awards you "reputation" with someone somewhere that doesn't like the people in that dungeon. As a result, there's a significant amount of information to be had from a character's reputation scores - a veritable scorecard of how many times you've run all of the dungeons in the game. Now that could be a good thing (information being free helps everyone make more informed choices), or a bad thing when the information presented is misleading. A highly skilled player who recently made a new character might not have the reputation scores to "prove" it, while an incompetent player who somehow survived large numbers of dungeon runs (perhaps without contributing all that much to any of them) might have high reputation scores that don't reflect their ability.
Now this information is now definitely out there, whether you wanted it to be or not, and people are going to use it to evaluate applicants to guilds or even people looking for groups. (I wonder - and doubt - whether Blizzard fully thought through that part of things.)
It's amazing how much effort you can save when you don't take the time to do the job properly. As long as people still buy your product, there's no incentive to actually fix it before it launches.
Recording artists are seeing less and less of their revenue from CD sales, but we have the record labels to thank for that. Labels get a huge portion of CD sales (and there's surprizingly little money to go around for a best-seller to begin with once they're done selling wholesale to Walmart). Labels get no portion of ticket sales. Coincidence? Of course it is, blame piracy! I don't know what these people would offer their shareholders as an excuse if they one day suceeded in stomping out file sharing.
That the "hot 18 y/o girl" they were talking to online may not be exactly what they're expecting....:)
Re:Editors/Reviews are at fault as well
on
Merck's Deleted Data
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· Score: 3, Insightful
All but one of the authors of the study were either employed by or consultants for Merck. The company decided that the article would technically be telling the truth (X patients died DURING THIS TRIAL) without mentioning the deaths that occured between the scheduled end of the trial and the publication of the paper. Short of the peer reviewers conducting their own clinical trial, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, there was no way for them to know that information had been withheld.
Market saturation is a myth to placate the shareholders. What's actually going on here is that companies have yet to grasp that online games are a different business model from offline games. A crappy licensed game is a sucess if there are a million copies sitting on shelves in players' closets somewhere. That reknowned low level of quality just doesn't cut it anymore if you're expecting your customers to keep paying a monthly fee.
But that's very scary for developers. That would mean that they have to convince whomever is funding them that they're going to have to make a GOOD game. Market saturation, on the other hand? Now there's a good excuse. That's a problem you can throw money at. Our game doesn't suck, it was just released at the wrong time, with a bad ad campaign, or the latest movies were critically panned. It's anyone's fault but the people who made a mediocre game, so clearly future investments in that game studio remain a good idea.
Why does the Slashdot post point to a one paragraph article with links to people who actually have the information instead of just posting those links directly?
White Wolf: Alright, we need some quick cash, so let's charge people for using the books we've already sold them. We should at least make some effort to pretend we have justification for this. Let's say that all the volunteers spending their time and effort to write and run the games that make our product worth owning should either eat the costs out of pocket or join our "fan club" along with all their players to get a "license". Storyteller: You're going to need to make a diplomacy check to get the players to agree to that. WW: Why? We own this stuff. Storyteller: Roll the dice. WW: Oh, alright. *rolls die* Uh... what does "critical fumble" mean?
Haven't looked at their stuff recently, but I remember that WW games used to focus somewhat on a coming apocalypse. Something tells me there are going to be a lot of cataclymic world-destroying final sessions of ongoing campaigns the night before this goes into effect. They *may* be within their rights to do this (debateable) but I can't imagine it's going to help sales any.
I don't pirate any music because it isn't worth the albeit slim possibility of a lawsuit for way the heck more money than that music is possibly worth to me. As a result, I don't try out new music the way I used to when my *ahem* "friend" in college who pirated lots of music was around, and thus I don't find out about any music to go and buy. Thus, any non-zero video game spending > my music expenses.
Not to say most "site visit" articles on my MMORPG of choice (WoW) don't wind up similarily slanted, but this "news" basically accepted Sony's party line whole cloth and reprinted it. I don't think that any such articles can actually be trusted since, at the end of the day, the "journalist" in question probably wants to be invited back someday.
Of course things aren't going to go to heck tomorrow. As the Six Apart owners points out, they just bought the place and don't want to destroy their new toy just yet. And heck, they probably get themselves a PR boost by being able to claim a massive increase in the numbers of people using services they own. Perhaps even some more business from LJ users pleased with the promised upgrades. But in the long term, what are they going to do?
A) Keep Live Journal at its existing level of performance, providing a totally free competitor to their own paid services that's more than sufficient for 99.9% of the Net or,
B) Implement changes that make being a free LJ user a lot less desireable.
As a business, let me think about that one for a minute. With choice B, even if we drive off 99% of LJ's current 5.5 million users and only get 1% to switch over to paid service, we're getting 50K new customers while dramatically lowering overhead/bandwidth for upkeeping the exponentially expanding LJ community. We don't even need to be the "bad" guys by implementing any cruel and unusual license agreements. All we need to do is put hardware upgrades for unpaid users at the bottom of the priority list until people leave on their own. I forget, was there a choice of some sort in there?
I'm somewhat less than happily walking around with a GPS transmitter in my backpack because of new regulations that cell phones need to have a GPS transmitter in order to relay my location to emergency dispatchers should I use it to dial 911. Now they're telling me that in an event where that information might actually be critical to more people than just myself, e.g. my calling 911 in response to a terrorist attack, they won't be able to GET that location data because the system will have been shut down. How is this a good idea?
If you just want an extra bar, I recommend Telo's bottom bar (linked in one of the first comments to the original article). It seems to be the best at moving other things you need to see off of itself.
Also note that many, though not all, Cosmos functions can stand alone. To check, look at the.toc file in each sub-directory. If it doesn't say "required dependencies: Cosmos", you can usually extract just the one subdirectory into your/interface/addons folder, though depending on how well documented the add on is you might have a hard time figuring out how to configure it. If you really want a stand-alone for something that is Cosmos dependent (EasyMail, TackleBox), you can usually find either someone who's done it or DIY instructions via Google. I wouldn't redistribute any such liberated mods without the original author's permission though (they probably could have made it stand-alone themselves if they wanted).
In previous Blizzard games, various hacks to give you access to information your client had to have but you weren't supposed to see were in fact cheating and bannable offenses. This notice on the main WOW page aside, Blizzard hasn't done much to inform users that this time they're ENCOURAGING people to mod their UI's, in part because they have failed to include highly important features in the one that ships with the game (every single class needs a second hotbar in their early teens). And, in all fairness, non-users do have a point - players with the mod installed can tell if they're just inside or just outside of spell range, faster access to a wider range of skills, better macro options, and numerous other things that DO give mod users advantages over non-mod users. Whether one should have to choose between installing a third party script on your machine or being at a disadvantage relative to other users is a separate debate from whether it's technically allowed by Blizzard.
Also note that the language in the policy permitting UI's is very nebulous in terms of what those mods are allowed to do - basically Blizzard is trying to cover their tails in case they want to ban a specific thing later (see their occasional "requests" that Cosmos remove things from their UI, which would probably become a lot less polite if refused). That may cause serious problems down the line if people have installed mods that were legal at the time and don't get the message that they've since been banned.
Personally, I won't use Cosmos because of the massive bloat, labyrthine menus to even find out what it's doing, the possibility of taking a performance hit from all the extra things Cosmos attempts to do, and because there were some very shady incidents involving the programmers during the beta. But I certainly don't have a problem with other people using it, as I go on to use other mods.:)
You should hit the Wayback machine for their thoughts on the sixth season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, which was number one on their bad list for a long time over a number of issues (including a prominent lesbian character). FYI, none of that year's episodes were actually found to be indecent.
Slashdot Mirror
All someone has to do is write a script that systematically generates and submits email addresses, and no one would ever be able to create a new Myspace account ever again!
(Yes, I know, you'd probably need to make a full-scale DDOS out of it so that MySpace can't tell that all the submissions are coming from the same IP address, and it's entirely possible that you'd crash Myspace's servers before successfully submitting all of the possible email addresses at pingable domains. Perhaps a more attainable goal would be to wipe out all of the possible Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail addresses fewer than 10 characters long?)
Monte Cook's famous review of 3.5e revealed that Wizards was planning on making the new "revision" as soon as sales dropped off. And sure enough, the changes shook up just enough things to make it nigh impossible to use 3.0 books in a 3.5 campaign, but included just enough goodies to make people want to argue for making the switch (e.g. the complete overhaul of the Ranger class to make it actually interesting). These types of changes may be good for the publisher, but they're a pain in the tail for the people on the ground with a campaign already in progress. Especially with the plan to charge a recurring fee, I think it's very reasonable to expect Wizards to comment on how long this edition will actually be around (and very unlikely that they will actually do so, because the answer will most likely be incriminating).
I lasted about 6 weeks in FFXI. The iconic experience of my time there was when I entered an area for one of the low level quests and found a player around my level farming there. The player inspected me and informed me that I was high enough level to equip earrings. I asked what type of earrings I should get, and he told me. I went back to town to check the AH and discovered that the earrings in question cost 10K gil each. I had a few hundred.
FFXI's job system is a clever attempt to reconcile forced grouping with new players starting the game and not having people their level to group with. In fact, ALL players are required to level at least one job other than their preferred class to half of the level cap. While this does have the benefit of ensuring that there are more low level characters online at any given time, the issue is that almost all of them don't actually want to be there. As a result, there's a tremendous pressure to optimize your characters with the very best gear, food, subjobs (yes, sometimes you may need to level a job you don't care about because it's the optimal subjob for the optimal subjob for your actual job), items to prevent foes from aggroing as you travel to the area you want to go and farm (yes, even travel is a group activity) etc. If you've got all these things, and an ideal group, you might be able to shave a day or two off your time in low level purgatory, so players jump at the chance. And don't get me started on how access to airship travel is restricted until you get to a very high level (that will be very hard to reach without airship access).... unless you come up with 500,000 gil from somewhere.
In short, cash is a bad place to put your timesinks. If you create a gil sellers' paradise, you can't be too shocked when they show up.
Two comments:
1. Independent of any legal issues, SL players have no way of verifying that the operations of a "casino" are legitimate. I can't imagine why anyone would give in-game currency to a "slot machine" that has almost certainly been programmed to make sure that the house always wins. From this standpoint, banning such activities isn't necessarily a bad thing. (Indeed, games like World of Warcraft that have banned "casinos" have done so because players tend to spam to advertise games which are so stacked against their customers to count as scams, not because they felt that gambling for in-game currency violated federal law.)
2. Notably, the blog post also declares that there will be NO REIMBURSEMENT for second life "property" removed in order to enforce this policy, much less for devaluation of in-game "land" that used to host a high-traffic casino. I'm half curious whether we're going to see any lawsuits over this, and, in the longer term, whether this will affect peoples' willingness to purchase virtual assets from Linden Labs. I find it remarkable that anyone would willingly purchase "property" that can be rendered valueless at the discretion of the service providers under the terms of service. (Indeed, a court has already ruled against the TOS' arbitration clauses, arguing that they were too one-sided to be enforcible, so perhaps there is an open door to raise just such a challenge here.)
I don't see how you could make a smaller touchscreen phone without a stylus, and even if you could, what would be the point? You wouldn't be able to read email or surf the web on an iPhone Nano, even with intelligent zoom-in, so that kills nearly half of the perks of the regular iPhone right off.
It has been interesting to watch the other shoe drop on the iPhone. At first I figured the catch would be that the cost of service would be insane. Then it came out that the pricing was very competitive (catch: it's on the cheaper EDGE network). Thing is, I was looking for the way normal cell phone service providers screw people (namely by overcharging for services). ATT's bargaining position as the last place carrier was weak enough that we may be seeing the dawn of a whole new paradigm of affordable service and expensive hardware. The cost of the replacement service, plus the loaner iPhone that you'll need if your cell number is your only phone, is about 20% of the cost of the device. What I find surprising is that analysts were shocked by this. A regular service provider would rather sell a cheap replacement battery to avoid having to subsidize a replacement phone. A hardware provider would rather sell you a new $500 2nd generation iPhone than a $40 battery.
The big question now is who wins the battles over the missing features. For example, ATT wants to charge current insane rates for more ringtones, while Apple wants to include the best possible featureset to make the initial sale (which, I would imagine, is where most of their profit in this endeavor comes from) more attractive. If Apple can pull out some big wins (e.g. end the practice of charging $2 for the ability to use a 30 second clip of music you already own as a ringtone), and can continue to deliver a device that's worth the cost, this could be a good thing for customers. (One hopes that the 2nd generation iPhone comes with support for faster networks and integrated GPS amongst other things, which would make it worth the upgrade for current iPhone owners.) Or we could be looking at an excuse for other service providers to decrease their subsidies of phones (still cheaper out of pocket expenses than an iPhone!), which would be bad for all of us.
The Iowa caucuses are non-binding, and that didn't prevent them from deciding the 2004 Democratic nomination. The 24/7 news media is so desperate for media that they will over-play any event, no matter how insignificant it's intended to be. You didn't hear that John Kerry won a non-binding caucus that, due to its format (no secret ballots, and caucus-goers need to stay at the events for far longer than it takes to cast a ballot) might not even reflect the will of the Democrats of Iowa, much less the Nation. You heard that John Kerry was a winner, John Edwards was a cute number 2, and Howard Dean was bleeping nuts. You heard this for a solid week every time you turned on a TV, opened a newspaper, or listened to the radio. Once they'd finished carpet bombing America with the results to the point where everyone knew what had happened a few day later, they spent the rest of the week with talking head after talking head dissecting WHY John Kerry was a winner, John Edwards was a cute number 2, and Howard Dean was bleeping nuts. Even their coverage of what the candidates were doing in New Hampshire introduced Kerry as the Iowa winner, Edwards as the young attractive runner up, and Crazy Howard Dean. Wesley Clark chose to ignore Iowa, and it's unclear if anyone even knew he was in the race a week later. No grassroots campaign, no amount of phone calls, ad purchases, emails, or even door to door visits can equal the impact this had on undecided voters, and what do you know, a week later New Hampshire believed that John Kerry was a winner, John Edwards was a cute number 2, and Howard Dean was bleeping nuts.
The Florida Dems can make the contest non-binding, but the point is moot if coverage of their primary decides the outcome in all the binding contests that happen after the Florida Primary. Unless, of course, Iowa 2008 has already decided the race by then.
Doesn't the DMCA take-down procedure require you to swear upon pain of perjury that you actually own the copyright for the item in question (or are acting as their authorized agent)? It would seem to me that, even if the fake ID IS copyright-able, the copyright would belong to the forger. (Remember, the CC license exists because authors have copyright whether they want it or not.) I DOUBT any forger would be stupid enough to draw up a contract transferring the copyright of the illegal fake ID to the customer, since that would be an admission of guilt to a crime. So, it would seem to me that either A) the girl forged the ID herself (a far greater offense than mere possession and attempted use) or B) she misrepresented the copyright status of her DMCA takedown notice. Pretty darned stupid.
Unfortunately, the well-defined "end" to LOTR has resulted in the first licensed game I can think of where you can't actually go to most of the cool locations from the book (and movies, though Turbine doesn't have that particular license) because the plot hasn't advanced that far yet. They CAN'T expand into Mordor because once they do, that's Game Over. They can't expand to the White City or Rohan because that would make the game half over. They're not even adding the Mines of Moria during the game's first year of release (according to a recent dev chat), cause that would make the game 1/4 over.
The challenge for Turbine is that, with the "ending" (and so much about locations in the middle) already known, players want to actually get there sometime. That's a problem when your business model is, essentially, stalling the players for time as you continue to collect your monthly fees.
Between the cost, and being shackled to ATT Wireless cellular service, I don't think the music player market is in any danger today. Ask again in a few years if/when both of these things aren't true and you might see a very different picture.
This may or may not have an effect on PVP situations, but I think that's ultimately going to be relatively minor. What people AREN'T commenting on is that this change also exposes your character's full repuptation page to the world.
FYI for non-WOW players, Blizzard has implemented a system where killing enemies in a dungeon awards you "reputation" with someone somewhere that doesn't like the people in that dungeon. As a result, there's a significant amount of information to be had from a character's reputation scores - a veritable scorecard of how many times you've run all of the dungeons in the game. Now that could be a good thing (information being free helps everyone make more informed choices), or a bad thing when the information presented is misleading. A highly skilled player who recently made a new character might not have the reputation scores to "prove" it, while an incompetent player who somehow survived large numbers of dungeon runs (perhaps without contributing all that much to any of them) might have high reputation scores that don't reflect their ability.
Now this information is now definitely out there, whether you wanted it to be or not, and people are going to use it to evaluate applicants to guilds or even people looking for groups. (I wonder - and doubt - whether Blizzard fully thought through that part of things.)
It's amazing how much effort you can save when you don't take the time to do the job properly. As long as people still buy your product, there's no incentive to actually fix it before it launches.
Recording artists are seeing less and less of their revenue from CD sales, but we have the record labels to thank for that. Labels get a huge portion of CD sales (and there's surprizingly little money to go around for a best-seller to begin with once they're done selling wholesale to Walmart). Labels get no portion of ticket sales. Coincidence? Of course it is, blame piracy! I don't know what these people would offer their shareholders as an excuse if they one day suceeded in stomping out file sharing.
That the "hot 18 y/o girl" they were talking to online may not be exactly what they're expecting.... :)
All but one of the authors of the study were either employed by or consultants for Merck. The company decided that the article would technically be telling the truth (X patients died DURING THIS TRIAL) without mentioning the deaths that occured between the scheduled end of the trial and the publication of the paper. Short of the peer reviewers conducting their own clinical trial, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, there was no way for them to know that information had been withheld.
Market saturation is a myth to placate the shareholders. What's actually going on here is that companies have yet to grasp that online games are a different business model from offline games. A crappy licensed game is a sucess if there are a million copies sitting on shelves in players' closets somewhere. That reknowned low level of quality just doesn't cut it anymore if you're expecting your customers to keep paying a monthly fee.
But that's very scary for developers. That would mean that they have to convince whomever is funding them that they're going to have to make a GOOD game. Market saturation, on the other hand? Now there's a good excuse. That's a problem you can throw money at. Our game doesn't suck, it was just released at the wrong time, with a bad ad campaign, or the latest movies were critically panned. It's anyone's fault but the people who made a mediocre game, so clearly future investments in that game studio remain a good idea.
Why does the Slashdot post point to a one paragraph article with links to people who actually have the information instead of just posting those links directly?
White Wolf: Alright, we need some quick cash, so let's charge people for using the books we've already sold them. We should at least make some effort to pretend we have justification for this. Let's say that all the volunteers spending their time and effort to write and run the games that make our product worth owning should either eat the costs out of pocket or join our "fan club" along with all their players to get a "license".
Storyteller: You're going to need to make a diplomacy check to get the players to agree to that.
WW: Why? We own this stuff.
Storyteller: Roll the dice.
WW: Oh, alright. *rolls die* Uh... what does "critical fumble" mean?
Haven't looked at their stuff recently, but I remember that WW games used to focus somewhat on a coming apocalypse. Something tells me there are going to be a lot of cataclymic world-destroying final sessions of ongoing campaigns the night before this goes into effect. They *may* be within their rights to do this (debateable) but I can't imagine it's going to help sales any.
I don't pirate any music because it isn't worth the albeit slim possibility of a lawsuit for way the heck more money than that music is possibly worth to me. As a result, I don't try out new music the way I used to when my *ahem* "friend" in college who pirated lots of music was around, and thus I don't find out about any music to go and buy. Thus, any non-zero video game spending > my music expenses.
Not to say most "site visit" articles on my MMORPG of choice (WoW) don't wind up similarily slanted, but this "news" basically accepted Sony's party line whole cloth and reprinted it. I don't think that any such articles can actually be trusted since, at the end of the day, the "journalist" in question probably wants to be invited back someday.
Of course things aren't going to go to heck tomorrow. As the Six Apart owners points out, they just bought the place and don't want to destroy their new toy just yet. And heck, they probably get themselves a PR boost by being able to claim a massive increase in the numbers of people using services they own. Perhaps even some more business from LJ users pleased with the promised upgrades. But in the long term, what are they going to do?
A) Keep Live Journal at its existing level of performance, providing a totally free competitor to their own paid services that's more than sufficient for 99.9% of the Net or,
B) Implement changes that make being a free LJ user a lot less desireable.
As a business, let me think about that one for a minute. With choice B, even if we drive off 99% of LJ's current 5.5 million users and only get 1% to switch over to paid service, we're getting 50K new customers while dramatically lowering overhead/bandwidth for upkeeping the exponentially expanding LJ community. We don't even need to be the "bad" guys by implementing any cruel and unusual license agreements. All we need to do is put hardware upgrades for unpaid users at the bottom of the priority list until people leave on their own. I forget, was there a choice of some sort in there?
I'm somewhat less than happily walking around with a GPS transmitter in my backpack because of new regulations that cell phones need to have a GPS transmitter in order to relay my location to emergency dispatchers should I use it to dial 911. Now they're telling me that in an event where that information might actually be critical to more people than just myself, e.g. my calling 911 in response to a terrorist attack, they won't be able to GET that location data because the system will have been shut down. How is this a good idea?
If you just want an extra bar, I recommend Telo's bottom bar (linked in one of the first comments to the original article). It seems to be the best at moving other things you need to see off of itself.
.toc file in each sub-directory. If it doesn't say "required dependencies: Cosmos", you can usually extract just the one subdirectory into your /interface/addons folder, though depending on how well documented the add on is you might have a hard time figuring out how to configure it. If you really want a stand-alone for something that is Cosmos dependent (EasyMail, TackleBox), you can usually find either someone who's done it or DIY instructions via Google. I wouldn't redistribute any such liberated mods without the original author's permission though (they probably could have made it stand-alone themselves if they wanted).
Also note that many, though not all, Cosmos functions can stand alone. To check, look at the
In previous Blizzard games, various hacks to give you access to information your client had to have but you weren't supposed to see were in fact cheating and bannable offenses. This notice on the main WOW page aside, Blizzard hasn't done much to inform users that this time they're ENCOURAGING people to mod their UI's, in part because they have failed to include highly important features in the one that ships with the game (every single class needs a second hotbar in their early teens). And, in all fairness, non-users do have a point - players with the mod installed can tell if they're just inside or just outside of spell range, faster access to a wider range of skills, better macro options, and numerous other things that DO give mod users advantages over non-mod users. Whether one should have to choose between installing a third party script on your machine or being at a disadvantage relative to other users is a separate debate from whether it's technically allowed by Blizzard.
:)
Also note that the language in the policy permitting UI's is very nebulous in terms of what those mods are allowed to do - basically Blizzard is trying to cover their tails in case they want to ban a specific thing later (see their occasional "requests" that Cosmos remove things from their UI, which would probably become a lot less polite if refused). That may cause serious problems down the line if people have installed mods that were legal at the time and don't get the message that they've since been banned.
Personally, I won't use Cosmos because of the massive bloat, labyrthine menus to even find out what it's doing, the possibility of taking a performance hit from all the extra things Cosmos attempts to do, and because there were some very shady incidents involving the programmers during the beta. But I certainly don't have a problem with other people using it, as I go on to use other mods.
You should hit the Wayback machine for their thoughts on the sixth season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, which was number one on their bad list for a long time over a number of issues (including a prominent lesbian character). FYI, none of that year's episodes were actually found to be indecent.