"Hacking" is most certainly not limited to software hacking! One definition of "Hacking" is to understand a system and to patch together a creative solution that circumvents but doesn't hinder normal operation. Your creative solution most certainly qualifies you as a hacker! To this end, many hams are hackers as well.
I hardly saw hide nor hair of my Gameboy (not that it has those things) for 2 years thanks to my parents' infatuation with Tetris. I later bought them Dr Mario for their wedding anniversary and it was the most used gift they'd ever recieved. Now they love Popcap and Yahoo games and the like.
Short of kids games and CDRom versions of board games and gameshows, games are not generally marketed for the whole family. But don't let that stop you parents! If you want to be responsible role models for your children, make EVERY game a family game! If your kid is reluctant or embarassed to have you join in on a gaming session, there's a missing link in your relationship! The family that MUDs together, hugs together!
Consider yourself lucky if you can download the 2.5 GB file from Fileplanet. Earlier beta testers were forced to use a proprietary BitTorrent client which totally maxed out your connection, both up and down. My disappointment with the game itself aside, this delivery method was totally unacceptable. There are many ISP's who impose 5GB combined transfer limits per month, and after uploading at 45KB\s for 3 hours these people were lucky to get the whole game at all, never mind play.
The quality of this game and of the installer are not up to par with Blizzard's usually high standards. If you've played other MMORPG's in the past, don't go nuts trying to jump on this beta-wagon. It's very ho hum. I deleted it in less time than it took to download the beast.
Australia has banned the release of Microsoft's Project Gotham Racing 2 - not because it encourages reckless driving, but because one of the courses is set in Sydney. Gotta love a government that decides for you what is moral.
I don't know first hand, but I've read in a few places that game testers love their job and do very well at it. They bring forth many more problems than are fixed due to budget constraints and marketing pressure to release a game as early as possible. Also, companies don't like supporting or expanding upon finished products because it costs them money.
You really don't think it's appropriate to explicitly ban bootable linux storage devices from a corporate acceptable IT use policy? I agree that disabling USB altogether is a real step backward, but there's a line in the middle. Many companies have banned iPods, not because they are storage devices, but because they are MASS storage devices. There is use, and ACCEPTABLE use. I'm as much in favour of worker rights as anyone, but I must concede that some devices are a combination of potintially dangerous and frivolous - workers could bring a discman or radio or bring an MP3 CD instead of an Ipod or linux-booting MP3 player.
I bet one of the included tools can mount NTFS. Just walk over to a server, discreetly boot up Linux, copy the SAM file, brute force it at home, and you've got superuser access. Any smart net admin would ban this player from their workplace.
Well, it took me all of 2s to enable the "auto reconnect" plugin that came with my installation of Gaim. Then it's just a case of checking all the options in the preferences of that plugin.
Plugin? So let me get this straight... you're berating me because I can't find an option that doesn't come with the program? Keep on braying, you edonkey.
Okay, looks like someone here has a career in manually pleasuring penguins.
"It drops [MSN] connections all the time"
This was a problem a few versions ago. 1.0.0 (and indeed the few releases prior to it) have worked excellently for moi.
Well la dee da for you. If you had the cranial capacity to look at the changelog you'd be well aware that they have not addressed this issue at all. This means, senor narcicist, that if it worked for you before it'll work now. But thanks for coming out.
"[Gaim] displays a big, mandatory connect window whenever it tries to reconnect."
Only for people that are too fucking stupid to explore the preferences.
Yuh huh. And that preference would be where? I configured it up the ying yang and even (gasp!) installed a plugin or two. My complaints are about features that are unaddressed by the programmers for whatever reason. Wow buddy, never get a job in QA.
"I had to terminate the client while watching a movie during an internet outage because it kept superimposing messages over BSplayer every 5 minutes."
Another case of the previous issue. This can all be disabled if you have a little bit of IT nouse and a few grey cells. It's just a checkbox or two, nothing too difficult, y'know.
Indeed, if this were programmed in, I would do it. Alas, nay. Instead you've hurt the GAIM staff's feelings by making their omission appear easy to implement.... You realize we're talking about GAIM here right? Maybe you've just misspelled Trillian. G-A-I-M. I'll spell it again for you if exceedingly that long acronym caused too many CRC errors in your brain's buffer. ...... did he say "nouse"?
"The file manager is absolute garbage"
I have to say I never tried using Gaim as a file manager. I always mistook it for a multi-protocol IM/chat client. *shrugs*
Then you may be interested to learn that, in this astounding day of rocket ships and test tube babies, some IM protocols allow file transfer. Yeah, it's amazing, so take a minute to catch your breath. True, someone added the feature to drag a file onto the chat window to send it, but recieving files is a nightmare. Upon recieving a file, the programmers could have left the file manager tasks to the OS instead of writing their own crappy one. Instead, they implemented a very substandard one which is incapable of remembering where you want to save incoming files. My point is that just because a bundled feature is not a program's main feature, it doesn't mean there is any excuse for it to be poor.
(Of course, if you refer to the open/save dialogs, they're Gtk2.4 related and you can't really blame the Gaim guys for that.)
Read my original post again and you will quite plainly see that I do. A poor worker blames his tools.
"the directory shortcut buttons point to ridiculous places"
Erm, change them. ?
How? There is no feature in the GUI. "Then why don't you edit the source, you twit" you shall retort. Well, my fatheaded friend, you must understand that no good program relies on user source editing in order to make it function the way you want it. It's called ergonomics, intuitiveness, useability... sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. "E-Z". Got it? You sure?
"GAIM is nowhere near ready for 1.0."
People have said the same about, oh, I dunno, Windows. But that reached version 2-frickin-thousand a few years back.
You can spot a simpleton a mile away when their only argument is badmouthing Microsoft without actually saying why. It's the Linux snob's way of crawling into the fetal position. Even if this was true, you're saying that it's okay for GAIM to prematurely declare version 1.0 because another programmer has done it in the past? Sure, if you're a corner cutter scrounging for
I think software companies should bundle REAL things in the box, like manuals, action figures, cloth maps, anything to reward people for purchasing the package. A bunch of tossware would be pointless.
Since I use the MSN network more than any other IM network, I cannot recommend GAIM to anyone. It drops connections all the time and displays a big, mandatory connect window whenever it tries to reconnect. It's always reporting inconsequential errors in a system window that cannot be disabled. I had to terminate the client while watching a movie during an internet outage because it kept superimposing messages over BSplayer every 5 minutes. The file manager is absolute garbage, and the directory shortcut buttons point to ridiculous places. The only unique feature I like is sorting contacts by log size.
GAIM is nowhere near ready for 1.0. Maybe it is tolerable if you use Linux and have no other option, if you have low standards, or you must support freeware at any (no) cost. If you use Windows, Trillian is superior in every way.
Downgrade your favourite game from 32BPP to 16BPP and enjoy a 20% framerate increase. 16BPP is exponentially less work for your GPU to crunch and put onscreen. Just like 1024x768 is exponentially fewer pixels to render than 1280x1024.
So these results are based on Half Life? This game is ancient, and 10% of people (more than 25000) play the game at resolutions LOWER than 640x480? This is the least credible survey I've ever seen, and it's more ridiculous if it's true that this data is collected automatically.
You gotta feel sorry for those 11 people with 10GB HDD's... And that one guy speaking an unknown language! I bet he's pretty lonely!
True Crime: Streets of L.A. for PC did the exact same thing. Wouldn't load until I removed Daemon Tools and CloneCD. It wouldn't even tell me what the offending software was! Like one poster above, I just cracked the software.
P.S., if you use a No-CD crack in The Sims 2, you can't change flooring! Double whammy!
You know it's a sad day when you start missing those Monkey Island code wheels!
Similarly, Maxis' Streets of Simcity lets you race around in your imported Simcity 2000 megalopolis!
As mentioned in the above article, Wright has a very good sense of gamers' needs. He knows people get tired of their games and ultimately try to hack them up and modify the experience. Interoperability between products is a brilliant way to make gamers happy and sell more of his products.
This "game" has been beyond buggy for over a year, and there have hardly been any upgrades or visible bug fixes since I started playing last March. For the first 2 months I loved this game obsessively. I saw incredible potential in the premise and I really enjoyed exploring the landscape and meeting new people. Being able to move your very human avatar around the same environment with others was extremely fulfilling. However, after the initial awe, the whole thing got old really quick. Too many bugs and not enough features.
I've been pessimistic about There for some time now. They've spent millions of dollars in the 3-year beta and they are not ready to go gold. I think they made a mistake by going pay so early. The MMOG side of There is doomed to disappear in the near future. Good thing they signed that fat deal with the American military for tactical group simulations. There Inc has made an amazing product with many many viable uses.
I hereby award you +1 from my phantom mod points! You may be interested in the WSP Module Player Plugin for Winamp 5 which improves the accuracy of music module playback.
BTW, ModPlug Player is quite compact and can operate in "windowshade" mode just like Winamp. Plus, it can run most Winamp 2.x plugins.
Since version 2, Winamp has been notorious for playing MOD, XM, S3M, and related files inaccurately. It fudges up a lot of the effects, particularly portamento (note slide) and key-off commands. You all should be using ModPlug Player to play these formats! It ain't perfect but it's the best Windows player there is.
Why get this player? So that you can drink deeply from the cup of BBS\Internet history! Check out someMODsites and dig some chippy goodness!
SHAMELESS PLUG -- Be sure to scope out my MODs as well!
I wonder how much it costs Yahoo for one person to play the game. Do people really look at this display if it's one of about 20 at that intersection? The concept is extremely cool but is it really an affective form of advertising?
Other applications for this concept may work better:
Change the design or colour of the ad
Vote for which of the company's products will go on sale next week
Vote for the billboard's mascot of the day
etc., etc., etc.
It's a great idea! I'm curious to see how far it will go.
Respect to MS for fixing the problem only 2 days later.
It's not the first and won't be the last IE exploit! Be prepared! Don't buy into the monoculture - use "second tier" software whenever possible. Mozilla Firefox is a fantastic free web browser with many security features and simple toggles. Eprompter is an excellent, simple, and free POP3\Hotmail\webmail client that lets you delete messages server-side before you open\view them.
Most important of all, keep up-to-date with Slashdot and other news services to stay aware of new vulnerabilities!
I disagree with this completely. Every single player game is designed so that one person, i.e. YOU, plow through it steadily to keep your interest. When you lose you have to start over again, but YOU are the star of the show. For this reason, multiplayer games are very frustrating for players of primarily single player games. I don't think these people know or care that they are hurting others. They just want to win the game. (the ones who brag about it are excepted)
Slashdot Mirror
"Hacking" is most certainly not limited to software hacking! One definition of "Hacking" is to understand a system and to patch together a creative solution that circumvents but doesn't hinder normal operation. Your creative solution most certainly qualifies you as a hacker! To this end, many hams are hackers as well.
Ham is to pirate radio stations as hacker is to hacktivism (e.g. defaced web sites)
I hardly saw hide nor hair of my Gameboy (not that it has those things) for 2 years thanks to my parents' infatuation with Tetris. I later bought them Dr Mario for their wedding anniversary and it was the most used gift they'd ever recieved. Now they love Popcap and Yahoo games and the like.
Short of kids games and CDRom versions of board games and gameshows, games are not generally marketed for the whole family. But don't let that stop you parents! If you want to be responsible role models for your children, make EVERY game a family game! If your kid is reluctant or embarassed to have you join in on a gaming session, there's a missing link in your relationship! The family that MUDs together, hugs together!
Consider yourself lucky if you can download the 2.5 GB file from Fileplanet. Earlier beta testers were forced to use a proprietary BitTorrent client which totally maxed out your connection, both up and down. My disappointment with the game itself aside, this delivery method was totally unacceptable. There are many ISP's who impose 5GB combined transfer limits per month, and after uploading at 45KB\s for 3 hours these people were lucky to get the whole game at all, never mind play.
The quality of this game and of the installer are not up to par with Blizzard's usually high standards. If you've played other MMORPG's in the past, don't go nuts trying to jump on this beta-wagon. It's very ho hum. I deleted it in less time than it took to download the beast.
Australia has banned the release of Microsoft's Project Gotham Racing 2 - not because it encourages reckless driving, but because one of the courses is set in Sydney. Gotta love a government that decides for you what is moral.
I don't know first hand, but I've read in a few places that game testers love their job and do very well at it. They bring forth many more problems than are fixed due to budget constraints and marketing pressure to release a game as early as possible. Also, companies don't like supporting or expanding upon finished products because it costs them money.
You really don't think it's appropriate to explicitly ban bootable linux storage devices from a corporate acceptable IT use policy? I agree that disabling USB altogether is a real step backward, but there's a line in the middle. Many companies have banned iPods, not because they are storage devices, but because they are MASS storage devices. There is use, and ACCEPTABLE use. I'm as much in favour of worker rights as anyone, but I must concede that some devices are a combination of potintially dangerous and frivolous - workers could bring a discman or radio or bring an MP3 CD instead of an Ipod or linux-booting MP3 player.
How many USB memory sticks boot your PC into linux?
I bet one of the included tools can mount NTFS. Just walk over to a server, discreetly boot up Linux, copy the SAM file, brute force it at home, and you've got superuser access. Any smart net admin would ban this player from their workplace.
Don't you love how the only appropriate reply to a Slashdot question is the only one not modded?
+1 insightful from me! If I had +1 to give
Well, it took me all of 2s to enable the "auto reconnect" plugin that came with my installation of Gaim. Then it's just a case of checking all the options in the preferences of that plugin.
Plugin? So let me get this straight... you're berating me because I can't find an option that doesn't come with the program? Keep on braying, you edonkey.
Okay, looks like someone here has a career in manually pleasuring penguins.
... You realize we're talking about GAIM here right? Maybe you've just misspelled Trillian. G-A-I-M. I'll spell it again for you if exceedingly that long acronym caused too many CRC errors in your brain's buffer.
...... did he say "nouse"?
"It drops [MSN] connections all the time"
This was a problem a few versions ago. 1.0.0 (and indeed the few releases prior to it) have worked excellently for moi.
Well la dee da for you. If you had the cranial capacity to look at the changelog you'd be well aware that they have not addressed this issue at all. This means, senor narcicist, that if it worked for you before it'll work now. But thanks for coming out.
"[Gaim] displays a big, mandatory connect window whenever it tries to reconnect."
Only for people that are too fucking stupid to explore the preferences.
Yuh huh. And that preference would be where? I configured it up the ying yang and even (gasp!) installed a plugin or two. My complaints are about features that are unaddressed by the programmers for whatever reason. Wow buddy, never get a job in QA.
"I had to terminate the client while watching a movie during an internet outage because it kept superimposing messages over BSplayer every 5 minutes."
Another case of the previous issue. This can all be disabled if you have a little bit of IT nouse and a few grey cells. It's just a checkbox or two, nothing too difficult, y'know.
Indeed, if this were programmed in, I would do it. Alas, nay. Instead you've hurt the GAIM staff's feelings by making their omission appear easy to implement.
"The file manager is absolute garbage"
I have to say I never tried using Gaim as a file manager. I always mistook it for a multi-protocol IM/chat client. *shrugs*
Then you may be interested to learn that, in this astounding day of rocket ships and test tube babies, some IM protocols allow file transfer. Yeah, it's amazing, so take a minute to catch your breath. True, someone added the feature to drag a file onto the chat window to send it, but recieving files is a nightmare. Upon recieving a file, the programmers could have left the file manager tasks to the OS instead of writing their own crappy one. Instead, they implemented a very substandard one which is incapable of remembering where you want to save incoming files. My point is that just because a bundled feature is not a program's main feature, it doesn't mean there is any excuse for it to be poor.
(Of course, if you refer to the open/save dialogs, they're Gtk2.4 related and you can't really blame the Gaim guys for that.)
Read my original post again and you will quite plainly see that I do. A poor worker blames his tools.
"the directory shortcut buttons point to ridiculous places"
Erm, change them. ?
How? There is no feature in the GUI. "Then why don't you edit the source, you twit" you shall retort. Well, my fatheaded friend, you must understand that no good program relies on user source editing in order to make it function the way you want it. It's called ergonomics, intuitiveness, useability... sorry, I forgot who I was talking to. "E-Z". Got it? You sure?
"GAIM is nowhere near ready for 1.0."
People have said the same about, oh, I dunno, Windows. But that reached version 2-frickin-thousand a few years back.
You can spot a simpleton a mile away when their only argument is badmouthing Microsoft without actually saying why. It's the Linux snob's way of crawling into the fetal position. Even if this was true, you're saying that it's okay for GAIM to prematurely declare version 1.0 because another programmer has done it in the past? Sure, if you're a corner cutter scrounging for
I think software companies should bundle REAL things in the box, like manuals, action figures, cloth maps, anything to reward people for purchasing the package. A bunch of tossware would be pointless.
Since I use the MSN network more than any other IM network, I cannot recommend GAIM to anyone. It drops connections all the time and displays a big, mandatory connect window whenever it tries to reconnect. It's always reporting inconsequential errors in a system window that cannot be disabled. I had to terminate the client while watching a movie during an internet outage because it kept superimposing messages over BSplayer every 5 minutes. The file manager is absolute garbage, and the directory shortcut buttons point to ridiculous places. The only unique feature I like is sorting contacts by log size.
GAIM is nowhere near ready for 1.0. Maybe it is tolerable if you use Linux and have no other option, if you have low standards, or you must support freeware at any (no) cost. If you use Windows, Trillian is superior in every way.
This person fooled thousands of people into thinking he had really stumbled on to something! (S)he is a true roleplayer!
Downgrade your favourite game from 32BPP to 16BPP and enjoy a 20% framerate increase. 16BPP is exponentially less work for your GPU to crunch and put onscreen. Just like 1024x768 is exponentially fewer pixels to render than 1280x1024.
So these results are based on Half Life? This game is ancient, and 10% of people (more than 25000) play the game at resolutions LOWER than 640x480? This is the least credible survey I've ever seen, and it's more ridiculous if it's true that this data is collected automatically.
You gotta feel sorry for those 11 people with 10GB HDD's... And that one guy speaking an unknown language! I bet he's pretty lonely!
True Crime: Streets of L.A. for PC did the exact same thing. Wouldn't load until I removed Daemon Tools and CloneCD. It wouldn't even tell me what the offending software was! Like one poster above, I just cracked the software.
P.S., if you use a No-CD crack in The Sims 2, you can't change flooring! Double whammy!
You know it's a sad day when you start missing those Monkey Island code wheels!
Mr. Wright actually incorporated the very feature you seek in the latest iteration of Simcity. You can and base your success as a city planner based on their reflective thought bubbles.
Similarly, Maxis' Streets of Simcity lets you race around in your imported Simcity 2000 megalopolis!
As mentioned in the above article, Wright has a very good sense of gamers' needs. He knows people get tired of their games and ultimately try to hack them up and modify the experience. Interoperability between products is a brilliant way to make gamers happy and sell more of his products.
This "game" has been beyond buggy for over a year, and there have hardly been any upgrades or visible bug fixes since I started playing last March. For the first 2 months I loved this game obsessively. I saw incredible potential in the premise and I really enjoyed exploring the landscape and meeting new people. Being able to move your very human avatar around the same environment with others was extremely fulfilling. However, after the initial awe, the whole thing got old really quick. Too many bugs and not enough features.
I've been pessimistic about There for some time now. They've spent millions of dollars in the 3-year beta and they are not ready to go gold. I think they made a mistake by going pay so early. The MMOG side of There is doomed to disappear in the near future. Good thing they signed that fat deal with the American military for tactical group simulations. There Inc has made an amazing product with many many viable uses.
I hereby award you +1 from my phantom mod points! You may be interested in the WSP Module Player Plugin for Winamp 5 which improves the accuracy of music module playback.
BTW, ModPlug Player is quite compact and can operate in "windowshade" mode just like Winamp. Plus, it can run most Winamp 2.x plugins.
Since version 2, Winamp has been notorious for playing MOD, XM, S3M, and related files inaccurately. It fudges up a lot of the effects, particularly portamento (note slide) and key-off commands. You all should be using ModPlug Player to play these formats! It ain't perfect but it's the best Windows player there is.
Why get this player? So that you can drink deeply from the cup of BBS\Internet history! Check out some MOD sites and dig some chippy goodness!
SHAMELESS PLUG -- Be sure to scope out my MODs as well!
Other applications for this concept may work better:
- Change the design or colour of the ad
- Vote for which of the company's products will go on sale next week
- Vote for the billboard's mascot of the day
- etc., etc., etc.
It's a great idea! I'm curious to see how far it will go.Respect to MS for fixing the problem only 2 days later.
It's not the first and won't be the last IE exploit! Be prepared! Don't buy into the monoculture - use "second tier" software whenever possible. Mozilla Firefox is a fantastic free web browser with many security features and simple toggles. Eprompter is an excellent, simple, and free POP3\Hotmail\webmail client that lets you delete messages server-side before you open\view them.
Most important of all, keep up-to-date with Slashdot and other news services to stay aware of new vulnerabilities!
I disagree with this completely. Every single player game is designed so that one person, i.e. YOU, plow through it steadily to keep your interest. When you lose you have to start over again, but YOU are the star of the show. For this reason, multiplayer games are very frustrating for players of primarily single player games. I don't think these people know or care that they are hurting others. They just want to win the game. (the ones who brag about it are excepted)