Yeah. I interpret their "help but not hinder" comment to mean:
"Some of our license agreements prevent us from contributing 3D support to open source drivers, we like Nouveau but can't legally contribute to it."
One wonders what happens if Nouveau becomes the official xorg driver. Perhaps NV will be able to legally contribute to the 2D aspects of the driver. The binary drivers will likely continue to exist as long as they are encumbered by technologies licensed from other vendors which NV has no direct control over (such as S3TC support).
They already do. Fresh factory installs come with a bootable diagnostics partition, and Dell also offers an ISO image for those that have nuked the partition for whatever reason (such as installing Linux)
Dell Diagnostics resides in a standalone partition, and for machines that do not have it, Dell offers a bootable ISO CD image.
There is no need for Windows to run Dell Diagnostics.
That said, as of a year ago (March 2006), Dell was selling dual-core systems with diagnostics that did not properly test multicore/multiprocessor machines. The diag routines spent a total of 5-10 seconds running a single multiprocessor test, all the rest were uniprocessor. As a result my E1705 that would crash regularly under Windows and Linux with SMP enabled would pass Dell Diag with flying colors. (The machine was rock solid if the second core was disabled, and the machine's replacement is rock solid under all circumstances.)
To Dell's credit, they accepted that their diagnostics tools were deficient in this regard, getting my replacement order approved was EASY.
I have (like you) had a few rare occasions where NVidia had a driver version that had some stability problems requiring me to backlevel them (to be honest, those were both clearly marked as betas...)
I have not had any problems where some software requires newer drivers and other software requires older drivers, requiring either frequent driver switching or not using a certain software package, a story which seems all too common with ATI cards.
In addition to that, from conversations with friends who are stuck with ATI cards until they can afford to upgrade, they seem to constantly have issues where Game A requires driver version Y or below, but game B requires driver version X and above, with X > Y.
The end result - having to uninstall and reinstall drivers when changing between game A and game B, or simply not playing one of the games. (I don't remember exact driver versions, but one of the games in question was Civ IV about 6 months after it was released.)
Meanwhile, I have had to downgrade NVidia drivers a total of once, and that's because I was using the most bleeding-edge drivers I could find. Note that not a single piece of software actually NEEDED those bleeding edge drivers, so I didn't have to give up anything when I downgraded.
Long, long ago I had an ATI card with utterly horrific driver support, and haven't even considered ATI since then since I have yet to see any evidence that the situation has improved sufficiently. (They've improved a LOT, but the state of ATI drivers used to be so abysmal that they're still way behind NV in terms of driver quality.)
Yup, one good reason why Asterisk makes sense even in a single-user situation like my apartment (Assuming you already have the majority of the hardware in place, as I said it makes perfect sense if you already have a dedicated central server for files/media, not necessarily if you don't already have a dedicated server machine for other reasons.)
Also, the Asterisk wakup call script blows away any alarm clock if you can get it to work. (It seems to fail if your extensions are set up with significantly different contexts than the original author's. It took me a day and a half to get it running on my old Asterisk setup, and then when I went to a Trixbox-based config I could never get the snooze functionality to work.)
Probably not. I didn't buy a DVD-ROM drive (or any other DVD reading mechanism) until there was decent DVD playback support for Linux.
Guess when I bought my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive? When the first AACS crack came out, that's when. While so far it can only be used for copying (quite inefficient), it's a matter of time before this gets used for realtime playback on unlicensed systems like my Linux box.
I'm not sure how to submit something to be added as an "update" but here goes:
http://goonfleet.com/reply_to_CCP.html - SA/Goon's response to the latest CCP devblog. It is extremely well written, and I agree with it completely despite the fact that I think the SA crew (and GoonFleet) are assholes.
The only people this affects are those who use the file in an illicit manner (distributing it on P2P). It's not like DRM where it punishes legit users significantly, often forcing them to piracy just for the sake of compatibility.
Oh, and it's nothing new. The old DRMed files had it too. In fact, back in the days of PyMusique and whatever that program was that stripped Apple DRM after the fact (as opposed to PyMusique not applying it in the first place), neither program did anything about this identification data because unlike the DRM, there was no legit reason to remove it. It's always been there, albeit in many cases encrypted.
Yes, I realize I'm nitpicking my own post here, but if I don't I know you will.
Interestingly enough, such nitpicking is one of the ways CCP is trying to delete itself, in terms of the Sharkbait/DarkStar 1 incident. CCP claims that DS1's petition asking what was going on was never deleted and petitions can't be deleted, but the honest truth is that from the player's viewpoint, "closed without a response" = "deleted". While it may still be in CCP's system somewhere, as far as the player is concerned it is gone. CCP never addressed why the petition was closed without a response.
The problem here is that in EVE, direct dev involvement can do far more damage to game balance (while not being blatantly obvious) due to the game design. In other MMOs, a dev would have to do something blatantly obvious to the entire playerbase to have a lasting effect on game balance.
Prior to the t20 scandal, many would have said the same thing.
After the t20 scandal and the way it was botched/non-handled (covered up, then finally admitted with no corrective action taken - t20 is still with the company), people actually are more likely to trust the Goons than CCP.
It doesn't help that two of the Goon's accusations in this round were true (albeit whitewashed so as not to look quite as bad as they seemed) with the most serious one as of yet unaddressed.
Um, t20? Those accusations turned out not to be baseless by any means.
If CCP had handled the t20 incident properly, no one would be believing Goons due to their heritage, but CCP pretty much said "bad t20, you shouldn't have done that but we're not going to punish you."
If these allegations had come out of nowhere from GoonSwarm, no one would have believed them.
Unfortunately for CCP, they have already been caught trying to cover up allegations that turned out in the end to be true, and a large portion of the playerbase does not believe that CCP handled the initial incident properly at all.
Most of us were willing to give them a second chance, but so far, they're blowing it.
An insightful poster in the EVE Online forums said, "You know you're in trouble when the majority of your playerbase is more inclined to believe an organization that was responsible for the term Photoshop Friday than they are inclined to believe you." Honestly, while the Something Awful/GoonSwarm crew may be assholes, they make NO effort to hide that fact. They're blatant about it, and a lot of people will prefer an open blatant asshole (you know what to expect from them) to a backstabbing sleazebag (They're acting nice, but what are they REALLY up to?)
After the t20 incident, CCP destroyed any trust the playerbase had in them. They tried to cover up the t20 scandal for as long as they could (including banning anyone who discussed or linked to the allegations), and in the end it turned out that the allegations were true. At that point, t20 got a small slap on the wrist and the BPOs were removed from the game, but not the ingame money they generated (and hence the damage they caused). By the time CCP addressed the issue, the ingame balance of power had already been permanently altered. t20 is still with the company, and no effort was made to repair the damage he did. In any other MMO, the damage a rogue developer could have done is far less, and despite that, it's known that other MMO companies (Blizzard, Mythic) are FAR stricter about dev/GM misconduct - at any other company, t20 would be LONG gone, but the fact is that as long as he is still with the company and the playerbase continues to fail to see heads roll, they will never trust CCP again.
The funniest thing is the fact that they say "trust us, we'll do what's right" when so far they have an established track record of not doing so.
Yes, I am now actively looking for another game to play. I was passively waiting for something better to be released, but now I think I can find something better from the list of what is already out there.
Unfortunately never, if anything the trend seems to be in the opposite direction as spying and monitoring get easier.
Hence the relatively recent term "helicopter mom".
Nowadays, parents go to websites of organizations their children might even have the slightest possibility of associating with and yell at them if there's anything even slightly objectionable.
I can sort of see this for high schoolers, but recently the webmaster account of the website of one of my former organizations (Cornell University Marching Band trombone section) got a nastygram from a "helicopter mom" worried about what little Timmy would encounter when he got to COLLEGE. Time to let go, lady! Most of us laughed, because we're tame as hell compared to many organizations on campus... The funniest part of her letter was when she claimed not to be a "helicopter mom". (As to why we all saw this message - the current site admin thought it was of enough interest/importance to forward it to the trombone student/alumni mailing list for comments/informational purposes.)
Oh, and yes, for most of us, this was the first time we had actually heard the term "helicopter mom".
Except that at every other MMO company, coverups don't occur. Dev misconduct also rarely occurs, because at every other company there are HARSH penalties in place. Developers get the boot for infractions far less severe than t20's.
Yet t20 is still with the company, having only received an unspecified slap on the wrist... THAT is the number one reason no one trusts CCP anymore. So far all of CCP's actions have said that while they may not explicitly condone such behavior from their devs, they do tolerate it and anyone busted acting inappropriately will just get a small slap on the wrist.
That's one of the definite critical differences between EVE and other MMOs. In other MMOs, the damage a rogue dev can do is minor at worst, and likely not very permanent.
As a result, no one cares that WoW devs or DAoC devs play the game. They can't do much damage, and there's plenty of evidence that even if a dev were caught doing ANY damage, the consequences for them would be severe.
(As an example of how a dev can't do much permanent damage in DAoC - There was an incidence a few years ago where there was a security breach on the European DAoC servers that allowed someone to elevate their privileges to the maximum possible on that server. The worst damage they could do was temporarily spawn some high-level monsters in places they shouldn't be. For the most part, the playerbase's reaction was: "WTF?" "OK... LMAO! We have an alb dragon outside and 75 albs in a portal keep guarded by invincible guards. Let's kill that thing!"
In EVE, where the economy is player driven and players can exert significant amounts of control over a particular piece of territory in the game, dev involvement can do MASSIVE amounts of damage to the game. Between the clear evidence (including a past confession/admission by t20 in the first scandal) of misconduct, the amount of damage a rogue dev can do (the blueprints t20 gave out were licenses to print money), and the way CCP mishandled the whole situation, I think everyone has been waiting for the next scandal to see if CCP learned from their mistakes and if this new IA department was anything more than hot air.
By the way, a quick summary of the first scandal: A dev (t20) was caught giving items of great value to players. These "blueprint originals" had lots of intrinsic value on the market themselves and would have been worth quite a lot of ingame money if sold, but more important was the fact that these items were critical to the manufacture of other items. As a result, they were basically a license to print money. Once the scandal came out, this was CCP's response: Initially, try to cover it up. Then, finally when it was impossible to continue denying the allegations, the dev involved finally publically confessed. CCP's subsequent response: Remove the blueprints from the game Nothing else. t20 was given a slap on the wrist but allowed to stay with CCP, nothing was done to remove all of the wealth that those blueprints generated from the game and the enormous advantage that wealth gave to one alliance within the game.
There was a second mini-scandal that raised suspicions but had no evidence of misconduct. Basically, a former alliance bigwig retired his characters and went to work as a GM. People were a bit paranoid, but the fact that The Enslaver had clearly stopped playing his characters first made most people forget the issue quickly. If it hadn't been for the previous t20 incident this second issue would have been complete non-news.
In the current scandal, this has been CCP's reaction: For the allegation of a dev improperly joining a corporation and making themselves a director temporarily, they have addressed it but insufficiently. They claim the dev was trying to fix a bug, but according to the CEOs of that corporation, none of their POSes were bugged in any way and they had no standing petitions regarding such bugs. Their petitions asking why a dev had joined them had been ignored. If the dev's actions were legitimate, why was their petition deleted? Why were they not informed by the dev of his intentions prior to his actions? CCP had a chance to address that accusation privately, but instead tried to cover it up. For the other allegations - CCP has completely ignored them and failed to address them at all. Initially they tried to cover it up with forum post deletion and numerous permabans of people's accounts. Pretty much anyone that linked to Goonfleet's open letter either in an ingame channel or on the forums was banned permanently. This says to the playerbase that CCP has something to hide.
I'm giving CCP 1-2 weeks to address the situation. If I don't see clear evidence of heads rolling or a DAMNED good explanation of why the staff involved have been allowed to stay, I'm going to be leaving.
First time: Evidence of serious misconduct (the "t20 Incident") came out, horribly mishandled by CCP, with some whitewashing too. They did at least claim to have set up an IA department, so many gave them the benefit of the doubt and decided to see what would happen. They did not fire t20, which made a lot of people less likely to trust them in the future. Second time: For the most part, an "outing" of certain GMs' normal players. Not too bad, as (theoretically) even before the "outing", the normal character (The Enslaver) had been retired to avoid conflicts of interest. There was slight suspicion that some conflict of interest remained, but the fact that there was clear evidence of the "normal" character having been retired already made most people forgive this, with the exception of becoming more suspicious. Third time: For a lot of people, including myself, this is the "acid test" that determines whether or not we stick around. It's not looking good so far, as all we have seen is coverups and whitewashing. It took a concerted forum spam effort (which was a last resort after CCP insta-deleted a petition regarding the "dev joining corp" issue and then insta-deleted the single thread that initially publically disclosed the issue after CCP had already had an opportunity to handle it privately.) So far, CCP has addressed one of the three allegations (the least severe one), and their response to that issue was insufficient. I'm still willing to give them a week or two to dig themselves out of this hole, but I have a feeling I'm going to be moving from passively waiting for a better game to come out to actively searching for something else to play, or just take a break from games in general for a while. I'm about due for one of those.
Same here. I just rip, download, or for a while went to AllOfMP3. Now that iTunes is starting to go non-DRM I may consider them again.
The record industry focused too much on beating AllOfMP3 via lawsuits, rather than realizing that AllOfMP3 is clear proof that you can base a business model on selling non-DRMed music. While the money going to AllOfMP3 was not getting where it should, the fact that money WAS going to them was proof that consumers will pay if you give them something they want. (No DRM, stop charging MORE for an electronic download with less quality and add-ons than the physical CD.)
Except that in the second half of the season, the truth about Hawkins began coming out and he was no longer a cryptic "Locke" by any means, including WHY the hell he's in Jericho.
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In short, you're saying that FOSS should not be used as it prevents the use of security through obscurity (as opposed to proper security).
A truly secure system will be secure whether you have the source code or not.
If you think VxWorks is more secure than Linux simply because it's closed source, you need a bullet in the head.
Yeah. I interpret their "help but not hinder" comment to mean:
"Some of our license agreements prevent us from contributing 3D support to open source drivers, we like Nouveau but can't legally contribute to it."
One wonders what happens if Nouveau becomes the official xorg driver. Perhaps NV will be able to legally contribute to the 2D aspects of the driver. The binary drivers will likely continue to exist as long as they are encumbered by technologies licensed from other vendors which NV has no direct control over (such as S3TC support).
They already do. Fresh factory installs come with a bootable diagnostics partition, and Dell also offers an ISO image for those that have nuked the partition for whatever reason (such as installing Linux)
Simple. You use the bootable diagnostics CD that Dell already provides on their website.
Dell Diagnostics resides in a standalone partition, and for machines that do not have it, Dell offers a bootable ISO CD image.
There is no need for Windows to run Dell Diagnostics.
That said, as of a year ago (March 2006), Dell was selling dual-core systems with diagnostics that did not properly test multicore/multiprocessor machines. The diag routines spent a total of 5-10 seconds running a single multiprocessor test, all the rest were uniprocessor. As a result my E1705 that would crash regularly under Windows and Linux with SMP enabled would pass Dell Diag with flying colors. (The machine was rock solid if the second core was disabled, and the machine's replacement is rock solid under all circumstances.)
To Dell's credit, they accepted that their diagnostics tools were deficient in this regard, getting my replacement order approved was EASY.
I have (like you) had a few rare occasions where NVidia had a driver version that had some stability problems requiring me to backlevel them (to be honest, those were both clearly marked as betas...)
I have not had any problems where some software requires newer drivers and other software requires older drivers, requiring either frequent driver switching or not using a certain software package, a story which seems all too common with ATI cards.
In addition to that, from conversations with friends who are stuck with ATI cards until they can afford to upgrade, they seem to constantly have issues where Game A requires driver version Y or below, but game B requires driver version X and above, with X > Y.
The end result - having to uninstall and reinstall drivers when changing between game A and game B, or simply not playing one of the games. (I don't remember exact driver versions, but one of the games in question was Civ IV about 6 months after it was released.)
Meanwhile, I have had to downgrade NVidia drivers a total of once, and that's because I was using the most bleeding-edge drivers I could find. Note that not a single piece of software actually NEEDED those bleeding edge drivers, so I didn't have to give up anything when I downgraded.
Long, long ago I had an ATI card with utterly horrific driver support, and haven't even considered ATI since then since I have yet to see any evidence that the situation has improved sufficiently. (They've improved a LOT, but the state of ATI drivers used to be so abysmal that they're still way behind NV in terms of driver quality.)
Yup, one good reason why Asterisk makes sense even in a single-user situation like my apartment (Assuming you already have the majority of the hardware in place, as I said it makes perfect sense if you already have a dedicated central server for files/media, not necessarily if you don't already have a dedicated server machine for other reasons.)
Also, the Asterisk wakup call script blows away any alarm clock if you can get it to work. (It seems to fail if your extensions are set up with significantly different contexts than the original author's. It took me a day and a half to get it running on my old Asterisk setup, and then when I went to a Trixbox-based config I could never get the snooze functionality to work.)
Regarding "PBX is overkill"
Once you've got a central media server, you may as well go VoIP-PBX (Asterisk, specifically)
Probably not. I didn't buy a DVD-ROM drive (or any other DVD reading mechanism) until there was decent DVD playback support for Linux.
Guess when I bought my Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive? When the first AACS crack came out, that's when. While so far it can only be used for copying (quite inefficient), it's a matter of time before this gets used for realtime playback on unlicensed systems like my Linux box.
80 cores means there are probably quite a lot of on-chip interconnects between the cores.
I'm not sure how to submit something to be added as an "update" but here goes:
http://goonfleet.com/reply_to_CCP.html - SA/Goon's response to the latest CCP devblog. It is extremely well written, and I agree with it completely despite the fact that I think the SA crew (and GoonFleet) are assholes.
I agree. Who cares?
The only people this affects are those who use the file in an illicit manner (distributing it on P2P). It's not like DRM where it punishes legit users significantly, often forcing them to piracy just for the sake of compatibility.
Oh, and it's nothing new. The old DRMed files had it too. In fact, back in the days of PyMusique and whatever that program was that stripped Apple DRM after the fact (as opposed to PyMusique not applying it in the first place), neither program did anything about this identification data because unlike the DRM, there was no legit reason to remove it. It's always been there, albeit in many cases encrypted.
the wrong wording... stupid typos... :)
Yes, I realize I'm nitpicking my own post here, but if I don't I know you will.
Interestingly enough, such nitpicking is one of the ways CCP is trying to delete itself, in terms of the Sharkbait/DarkStar 1 incident. CCP claims that DS1's petition asking what was going on was never deleted and petitions can't be deleted, but the honest truth is that from the player's viewpoint, "closed without a response" = "deleted". While it may still be in CCP's system somewhere, as far as the player is concerned it is gone. CCP never addressed why the petition was closed without a response.
Maybe I used the wording. Perhaps "without precedent" might have been a better choice of words. Thanks for nitpicking. :)
The problem here is that in EVE, direct dev involvement can do far more damage to game balance (while not being blatantly obvious) due to the game design. In other MMOs, a dev would have to do something blatantly obvious to the entire playerbase to have a lasting effect on game balance.
As others have commented:
Prior to the t20 scandal, many would have said the same thing.
After the t20 scandal and the way it was botched/non-handled (covered up, then finally admitted with no corrective action taken - t20 is still with the company), people actually are more likely to trust the Goons than CCP.
It doesn't help that two of the Goon's accusations in this round were true (albeit whitewashed so as not to look quite as bad as they seemed) with the most serious one as of yet unaddressed.
"More baseless accusations"?
Um, t20? Those accusations turned out not to be baseless by any means.
If CCP had handled the t20 incident properly, no one would be believing Goons due to their heritage, but CCP pretty much said "bad t20, you shouldn't have done that but we're not going to punish you."
If these allegations had come out of nowhere from GoonSwarm, no one would have believed them.
Unfortunately for CCP, they have already been caught trying to cover up allegations that turned out in the end to be true, and a large portion of the playerbase does not believe that CCP handled the initial incident properly at all.
Most of us were willing to give them a second chance, but so far, they're blowing it.
An insightful poster in the EVE Online forums said, "You know you're in trouble when the majority of your playerbase is more inclined to believe an organization that was responsible for the term Photoshop Friday than they are inclined to believe you." Honestly, while the Something Awful/GoonSwarm crew may be assholes, they make NO effort to hide that fact. They're blatant about it, and a lot of people will prefer an open blatant asshole (you know what to expect from them) to a backstabbing sleazebag (They're acting nice, but what are they REALLY up to?)
After the t20 incident, CCP destroyed any trust the playerbase had in them. They tried to cover up the t20 scandal for as long as they could (including banning anyone who discussed or linked to the allegations), and in the end it turned out that the allegations were true. At that point, t20 got a small slap on the wrist and the BPOs were removed from the game, but not the ingame money they generated (and hence the damage they caused). By the time CCP addressed the issue, the ingame balance of power had already been permanently altered. t20 is still with the company, and no effort was made to repair the damage he did. In any other MMO, the damage a rogue developer could have done is far less, and despite that, it's known that other MMO companies (Blizzard, Mythic) are FAR stricter about dev/GM misconduct - at any other company, t20 would be LONG gone, but the fact is that as long as he is still with the company and the playerbase continues to fail to see heads roll, they will never trust CCP again.
The funniest thing is the fact that they say "trust us, we'll do what's right" when so far they have an established track record of not doing so.
Yes, I am now actively looking for another game to play. I was passively waiting for something better to be released, but now I think I can find something better from the list of what is already out there.
Unfortunately never, if anything the trend seems to be in the opposite direction as spying and monitoring get easier.
Hence the relatively recent term "helicopter mom".
Nowadays, parents go to websites of organizations their children might even have the slightest possibility of associating with and yell at them if there's anything even slightly objectionable.
I can sort of see this for high schoolers, but recently the webmaster account of the website of one of my former organizations (Cornell University Marching Band trombone section) got a nastygram from a "helicopter mom" worried about what little Timmy would encounter when he got to COLLEGE. Time to let go, lady! Most of us laughed, because we're tame as hell compared to many organizations on campus... The funniest part of her letter was when she claimed not to be a "helicopter mom". (As to why we all saw this message - the current site admin thought it was of enough interest/importance to forward it to the trombone student/alumni mailing list for comments/informational purposes.)
Oh, and yes, for most of us, this was the first time we had actually heard the term "helicopter mom".
Except that at every other MMO company, coverups don't occur. Dev misconduct also rarely occurs, because at every other company there are HARSH penalties in place. Developers get the boot for infractions far less severe than t20's.
Yet t20 is still with the company, having only received an unspecified slap on the wrist... THAT is the number one reason no one trusts CCP anymore. So far all of CCP's actions have said that while they may not explicitly condone such behavior from their devs, they do tolerate it and anyone busted acting inappropriately will just get a small slap on the wrist.
That's one of the definite critical differences between EVE and other MMOs. In other MMOs, the damage a rogue dev can do is minor at worst, and likely not very permanent.
As a result, no one cares that WoW devs or DAoC devs play the game. They can't do much damage, and there's plenty of evidence that even if a dev were caught doing ANY damage, the consequences for them would be severe.
(As an example of how a dev can't do much permanent damage in DAoC - There was an incidence a few years ago where there was a security breach on the European DAoC servers that allowed someone to elevate their privileges to the maximum possible on that server. The worst damage they could do was temporarily spawn some high-level monsters in places they shouldn't be. For the most part, the playerbase's reaction was:
"WTF?"
"OK... LMAO! We have an alb dragon outside and 75 albs in a portal keep guarded by invincible guards. Let's kill that thing!"
In EVE, where the economy is player driven and players can exert significant amounts of control over a particular piece of territory in the game, dev involvement can do MASSIVE amounts of damage to the game. Between the clear evidence (including a past confession/admission by t20 in the first scandal) of misconduct, the amount of damage a rogue dev can do (the blueprints t20 gave out were licenses to print money), and the way CCP mishandled the whole situation, I think everyone has been waiting for the next scandal to see if CCP learned from their mistakes and if this new IA department was anything more than hot air.
By the way, a quick summary of the first scandal:
A dev (t20) was caught giving items of great value to players. These "blueprint originals" had lots of intrinsic value on the market themselves and would have been worth quite a lot of ingame money if sold, but more important was the fact that these items were critical to the manufacture of other items. As a result, they were basically a license to print money.
Once the scandal came out, this was CCP's response:
Initially, try to cover it up.
Then, finally when it was impossible to continue denying the allegations, the dev involved finally publically confessed. CCP's subsequent response:
Remove the blueprints from the game
Nothing else. t20 was given a slap on the wrist but allowed to stay with CCP, nothing was done to remove all of the wealth that those blueprints generated from the game and the enormous advantage that wealth gave to one alliance within the game.
There was a second mini-scandal that raised suspicions but had no evidence of misconduct. Basically, a former alliance bigwig retired his characters and went to work as a GM. People were a bit paranoid, but the fact that The Enslaver had clearly stopped playing his characters first made most people forget the issue quickly. If it hadn't been for the previous t20 incident this second issue would have been complete non-news.
In the current scandal, this has been CCP's reaction:
For the allegation of a dev improperly joining a corporation and making themselves a director temporarily, they have addressed it but insufficiently. They claim the dev was trying to fix a bug, but according to the CEOs of that corporation, none of their POSes were bugged in any way and they had no standing petitions regarding such bugs. Their petitions asking why a dev had joined them had been ignored. If the dev's actions were legitimate, why was their petition deleted? Why were they not informed by the dev of his intentions prior to his actions? CCP had a chance to address that accusation privately, but instead tried to cover it up.
For the other allegations - CCP has completely ignored them and failed to address them at all. Initially they tried to cover it up with forum post deletion and numerous permabans of people's accounts. Pretty much anyone that linked to Goonfleet's open letter either in an ingame channel or on the forums was banned permanently. This says to the playerbase that CCP has something to hide.
I'm giving CCP 1-2 weeks to address the situation. If I don't see clear evidence of heads rolling or a DAMNED good explanation of why the staff involved have been allowed to stay, I'm going to be leaving.
I'd say the 3rd time.
First time: Evidence of serious misconduct (the "t20 Incident") came out, horribly mishandled by CCP, with some whitewashing too. They did at least claim to have set up an IA department, so many gave them the benefit of the doubt and decided to see what would happen. They did not fire t20, which made a lot of people less likely to trust them in the future.
Second time: For the most part, an "outing" of certain GMs' normal players. Not too bad, as (theoretically) even before the "outing", the normal character (The Enslaver) had been retired to avoid conflicts of interest. There was slight suspicion that some conflict of interest remained, but the fact that there was clear evidence of the "normal" character having been retired already made most people forgive this, with the exception of becoming more suspicious.
Third time: For a lot of people, including myself, this is the "acid test" that determines whether or not we stick around. It's not looking good so far, as all we have seen is coverups and whitewashing. It took a concerted forum spam effort (which was a last resort after CCP insta-deleted a petition regarding the "dev joining corp" issue and then insta-deleted the single thread that initially publically disclosed the issue after CCP had already had an opportunity to handle it privately.) So far, CCP has addressed one of the three allegations (the least severe one), and their response to that issue was insufficient. I'm still willing to give them a week or two to dig themselves out of this hole, but I have a feeling I'm going to be moving from passively waiting for a better game to come out to actively searching for something else to play, or just take a break from games in general for a while. I'm about due for one of those.
Same here. I just rip, download, or for a while went to AllOfMP3. Now that iTunes is starting to go non-DRM I may consider them again.
The record industry focused too much on beating AllOfMP3 via lawsuits, rather than realizing that AllOfMP3 is clear proof that you can base a business model on selling non-DRMed music. While the money going to AllOfMP3 was not getting where it should, the fact that money WAS going to them was proof that consumers will pay if you give them something they want. (No DRM, stop charging MORE for an electronic download with less quality and add-ons than the physical CD.)
Except that in the second half of the season, the truth about Hawkins began coming out and he was no longer a cryptic "Locke" by any means, including WHY the hell he's in Jericho.