In the guild I play on in WoW (we're a rather casual guild) we're actually preparing to do our first raid test soon, and thinking about getting ventrilo... but right after it was mentioned, most of the people said they won't be doing any talking, and most of us have known each other for years on IRC before getting into WoW.
I do remember I had to put my credit card details when I signed up for the trial, but that's on the euro side. Maybe it's different on the US side.
Of course, nothing stop them from using fake/stolen credit card info, AFAIK credit card info is mostly used to prevent the same people from signing over and over to trial... but in any case if they did that, it might give Blizzard some more legal ammo, since IIRC using fake or stolen credit card information is actually illegal and could be used as a criminal case instead of just civil.
And when you report a spammer, it ignores all messages coming from the entire account until you log off. That prevents a spammer from creating an alt, spamwhisper everyone, delete it, create another alt, repeat.
I remember watching a discovery channel show about a kind of monkey that did too... and even engages in group and homosexual sex and prostitution (some females exchanged sex for food). It was a looong time ago, though, but I do remember one thing they said that some scientists believed that the way those monkeys behaved would be the closest of how a human society would behave without a set of morals being thaught at us since childhood
There are linux gamers, of course... but if I had to guess, there are probably very few linux only gamers. What I mean is people that will not dual boot and will rather go without a very good and popular game than buying it if it isn't linux native (I know several posters here are like that, but I doubt there are many people overall).
In my case at least I use two, a windows one for games and work (linux is not there yet for graphic design and video production) and a linux for internet and general use..:)
There's also economies of scale... if they sell 100 windows computers for every one linux computer (numbers pulled out of my behind), then you have to take into account that each of the windows computer end up being cheaper to produce (without counting OS price) than each of the linux ones.
There are several different levels of underdevelopment.
There are LOTS of places where I agree with you that technology won't help much if simpler problems aren't solved first... but there are also lots of places where access to food, clean water and medicine is at least good enough to live (I can think of quite a few here in Venezuela for example), and where access to technology and education would make a big difference.
I don't think I've ever said this... but I wish I had mod points... aaah.. the memories (that was my first videogame ever on an atari 5200 that came with vanguard, pac man and moon patrol)..:)
I'd say the Blu-ray backers have more influence, at least when it comes to movies. At least two of the blu-ray backers (Disney and Sony) are very big content producers, while the HD-DVD backers you mentioned there have a big influence in the world of hardware, software and electronics, none of them produce actual content, and IMHO the one that wins in the end will be the one that has most movies people want to watch.
Disney is a huge player there too... even if a parent isn't interested in it, the little kids will want to watch Meet the Robinsons, Ratarouille and re-re-re-re-re-remastered peter pan over and over again, and if those are only available on Blu Ray, guess which format daddy will buy?
Now insert replies from geek family guys about how they won't buy either and how will they use their mythTV or media center computers instead...:)
This is that sometimes first time a vulnerability becomes public knowledge is when the patch comes out and it's reverse engineered... so if you release patches first to home users and on patch tuesday to corporate ones, you put them more at risk.
To be fair, it is worse because before it was a month where (in the best case) only microsoft knew of the patches, while then it would be a month that crackers had to reverse engineer the patches, find out what the vulnerability was, and take advantage of yet unpatched computers.
Then again, since most home users don't update their computers as it is, that's what's happening already.
Agree there. The bulk of my clients, at least (video production) use hotmail, and also most of the people on my trillian list are MSN users, and most of them use hotmail as their main email. Most of what I receive on hotmail (that I check about one a week or less) are chain "cute powerpoint" emails, though.
Usually the more techy oriented people use gmail, but those aren't the bulk of the population. I've lost count of the times when I've been asked if I can send them a video I'm working on trough email (heavily compressed, of course)... and they give me a hotmail account.
If I had to guess, webmail popularity is heavily tied to IM popularity. Here in Venezuela, at least among the people I'm in contact with, MSN is the most used IM program and yahoo second, and don't really know anyone here that used google's IM... and in webmails it's the same, hotmail the most popular, followed (not too closely, though) by yahoo, and then by gmail.
Not if they do like previous DirectX generations, where the games ran in both new and older version of DirectX, but looked prettier or had more effects in the newer one.
One detail about that... WoW mostly already does it.
The box comes with both windows and OSX version on it, and while there's no official linux support, from what I've heard runs quite nicely on wine. Actually, I remember reading sometime ago about the anti-botting part of WoW accidentally identifying some linux users as bots and banning them, and Blizzard worked with the wine (or was it cedega?) team to find out what happened, fix it, and unban the banned accounts (haven't followed it much after it happened, though, so no idea what came out of it).
IIRC the trial also lets you pick between windows and OSX when downloading.
Maybe they'll create a starcraft MMO that links into WoW so that Azeroth and Outland are two planets in the starcraft universe... then again that wouldn't go too well with warcraft fans that were whining that the adition of the draenei and their "netherships" felt too sci-fiey..:)
I remember reading somewhere that Toy Story generated about one terabyte of data when rendered, and it was rendered at half the full film resolution (something like 2k instead of 4k), so I would guess about 2 to 4 terabytes of uncompressed frames for a regular 90 minutes movie.
I shudder to think how much it would be needed to store all the LoTR extended trilogy...:)
Well, the main reason that drove me to KDE from gnome was that could never get the AltGR key working properly (it worked as a regular alt). That key is used in spanish keyboards to get some symbols like @ and #.
I does bring an interesting point, though... how do you define spyware?
If it's on a law, it must be defined, but make the definition too strict and spyware makers will just find loopholes... make it too broad, and you end up affecting legitimate apps like windows update or the ubuntu popularity contest. Also, how do you define willingly update/activate it?. A spyware maker can claim the user willingly installed it by leaving the "install XXX" checkbox on when installing a program, or by clicking "yes" or "I accept" on an internet website.
It sounds easy to say, but when it comes to laws it must be said on a way that it can't possibly be misunderstood or misinterpreted even by a lawyer that has never touched a computer before... that's where it gets complicated.
Same here, except that without Adblock. I really don't mind regular ads, even some animated ones.. I kinda just filter them out in my mind, most of the times don't even notice them. Even the blinker ones don't really bother me too much...
If it's one of those floater ads that obscure what I'm reading and I have to find a hidden X to close, or a talking one, however, I don't even bother to block them... I just close the site and don't go back.
It is getting insane already... anyone remember Blade "Wait, I can't hunt vampires before first updating my apple itunes's playlist and putting on my apple Ipod in slow motion" Trinity?...:)
Then again I shouldn't be complaining.. part of my work is making commercials (video editing)..:)
There's a program that does something like that (IIRC it's norton internet security or something like that). If it detects a botnet command coming trough IRC, it disconnects all IRC connections on the computer. Unfortunately it has an annoying side effect (which an IRC friend kinda hated me for for a while) that if you were talking on IRC, and someone wrote one of those commands, it would disconnect you..:)
That's only starting with the complexity that would come from tax on online drops. Talking on WoW terms (that's the only one I've played) what's the base price?. Auction House price?. Vendor price?. A blue (rare) item can go for a few hundred golds on AH yet sells for 5 or 6 gold to vendors. What about BoP items (bind on pickup, become soulbound when you pick them up. Most of the better stuff work this way)? Can't sell them on ebay unless I sell the entire character, and they're not worth much in gold to vendors. And what happend when a new expansion comes out?. When TBC came out you could get green (uncommon) items out of simple quests or drops from regular monsters that were better than epic items you got from endgame bosses beforehand. Or what if Blizzard decides to release a patch tomorrow that changes the value of gold at all, or just decide to shut down WoW at all?. That's without going into international servers or people from other countries (I'm from Venezuela, for example, and play on european servers).
It still seems to be there sometimes... at least I switched from konversation to xchat (on kubuntu) because konversation seemed to use its own clipboard, couldn't paste things from other sources in there, or paste things I copied on it on other sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Specially when the though warrior dwarf ends up sounding like this:
http://karacry.ytmnd.com/
In the guild I play on in WoW (we're a rather casual guild) we're actually preparing to do our first raid test soon, and thinking about getting ventrilo... but right after it was mentioned, most of the people said they won't be doing any talking, and most of us have known each other for years on IRC before getting into WoW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannara_(game)
:)
Haven't played it myself, though (I'm a big shannara fan)... I would really like a newish shannara game/movie/series/whatever..
I do remember I had to put my credit card details when I signed up for the trial, but that's on the euro side. Maybe it's different on the US side.
Of course, nothing stop them from using fake/stolen credit card info, AFAIK credit card info is mostly used to prevent the same people from signing over and over to trial... but in any case if they did that, it might give Blizzard some more legal ammo, since IIRC using fake or stolen credit card information is actually illegal and could be used as a criminal case instead of just civil.
And when you report a spammer, it ignores all messages coming from the entire account until you log off. That prevents a spammer from creating an alt, spamwhisper everyone, delete it, create another alt, repeat.
I remember watching a discovery channel show about a kind of monkey that did too... and even engages in group and homosexual sex and prostitution (some females exchanged sex for food). It was a looong time ago, though, but I do remember one thing they said that some scientists believed that the way those monkeys behaved would be the closest of how a human society would behave without a set of morals being thaught at us since childhood
Wow... I though I was the only one... I loved those games...
There are linux gamers, of course... but if I had to guess, there are probably very few linux only gamers. What I mean is people that will not dual boot and will rather go without a very good and popular game than buying it if it isn't linux native (I know several posters here are like that, but I doubt there are many people overall).
:)
In my case at least I use two, a windows one for games and work (linux is not there yet for graphic design and video production) and a linux for internet and general use..
There's also economies of scale... if they sell 100 windows computers for every one linux computer (numbers pulled out of my behind), then you have to take into account that each of the windows computer end up being cheaper to produce (without counting OS price) than each of the linux ones.
There are several different levels of underdevelopment.
There are LOTS of places where I agree with you that technology won't help much if simpler problems aren't solved first... but there are also lots of places where access to food, clean water and medicine is at least good enough to live (I can think of quite a few here in Venezuela for example), and where access to technology and education would make a big difference.
I don't think I've ever said this... but I wish I had mod points... aaah.. the memories (that was my first videogame ever on an atari 5200 that came with vanguard, pac man and moon patrol).. :)
I'd say the Blu-ray backers have more influence, at least when it comes to movies. At least two of the blu-ray backers (Disney and Sony) are very big content producers, while the HD-DVD backers you mentioned there have a big influence in the world of hardware, software and electronics, none of them produce actual content, and IMHO the one that wins in the end will be the one that has most movies people want to watch. Disney is a huge player there too... even if a parent isn't interested in it, the little kids will want to watch Meet the Robinsons, Ratarouille and re-re-re-re-re-remastered peter pan over and over again, and if those are only available on Blu Ray, guess which format daddy will buy? Now insert replies from geek family guys about how they won't buy either and how will they use their mythTV or media center computers instead... :)
This is that sometimes first time a vulnerability becomes public knowledge is when the patch comes out and it's reverse engineered... so if you release patches first to home users and on patch tuesday to corporate ones, you put them more at risk.
To be fair, it is worse because before it was a month where (in the best case) only microsoft knew of the patches, while then it would be a month that crackers had to reverse engineer the patches, find out what the vulnerability was, and take advantage of yet unpatched computers.
Then again, since most home users don't update their computers as it is, that's what's happening already.
Agree there. The bulk of my clients, at least (video production) use hotmail, and also most of the people on my trillian list are MSN users, and most of them use hotmail as their main email. Most of what I receive on hotmail (that I check about one a week or less) are chain "cute powerpoint" emails, though.
Usually the more techy oriented people use gmail, but those aren't the bulk of the population. I've lost count of the times when I've been asked if I can send them a video I'm working on trough email (heavily compressed, of course)... and they give me a hotmail account.
If I had to guess, webmail popularity is heavily tied to IM popularity. Here in Venezuela, at least among the people I'm in contact with, MSN is the most used IM program and yahoo second, and don't really know anyone here that used google's IM... and in webmails it's the same, hotmail the most popular, followed (not too closely, though) by yahoo, and then by gmail.
Not if they do like previous DirectX generations, where the games ran in both new and older version of DirectX, but looked prettier or had more effects in the newer one.
One detail about that... WoW mostly already does it. The box comes with both windows and OSX version on it, and while there's no official linux support, from what I've heard runs quite nicely on wine. Actually, I remember reading sometime ago about the anti-botting part of WoW accidentally identifying some linux users as bots and banning them, and Blizzard worked with the wine (or was it cedega?) team to find out what happened, fix it, and unban the banned accounts (haven't followed it much after it happened, though, so no idea what came out of it). IIRC the trial also lets you pick between windows and OSX when downloading.
Maybe they'll create a starcraft MMO that links into WoW so that Azeroth and Outland are two planets in the starcraft universe... then again that wouldn't go too well with warcraft fans that were whining that the adition of the draenei and their "netherships" felt too sci-fiey.. :)
I remember reading somewhere that Toy Story generated about one terabyte of data when rendered, and it was rendered at half the full film resolution (something like 2k instead of 4k), so I would guess about 2 to 4 terabytes of uncompressed frames for a regular 90 minutes movie.
:)
I shudder to think how much it would be needed to store all the LoTR extended trilogy...
Well, the main reason that drove me to KDE from gnome was that could never get the AltGR key working properly (it worked as a regular alt). That key is used in spanish keyboards to get some symbols like @ and #.
I does bring an interesting point, though... how do you define spyware?
If it's on a law, it must be defined, but make the definition too strict and spyware makers will just find loopholes... make it too broad, and you end up affecting legitimate apps like windows update or the ubuntu popularity contest. Also, how do you define willingly update/activate it?. A spyware maker can claim the user willingly installed it by leaving the "install XXX" checkbox on when installing a program, or by clicking "yes" or "I accept" on an internet website.
It sounds easy to say, but when it comes to laws it must be said on a way that it can't possibly be misunderstood or misinterpreted even by a lawyer that has never touched a computer before... that's where it gets complicated.
Same here, except that without Adblock. I really don't mind regular ads, even some animated ones.. I kinda just filter them out in my mind, most of the times don't even notice them. Even the blinker ones don't really bother me too much... If it's one of those floater ads that obscure what I'm reading and I have to find a hidden X to close, or a talking one, however, I don't even bother to block them... I just close the site and don't go back.
It is getting insane already... anyone remember Blade "Wait, I can't hunt vampires before first updating my apple itunes's playlist and putting on my apple Ipod in slow motion" Trinity?... :)
Then again I shouldn't be complaining.. part of my work is making commercials (video editing).. :)
There's a program that does something like that (IIRC it's norton internet security or something like that). If it detects a botnet command coming trough IRC, it disconnects all IRC connections on the computer. Unfortunately it has an annoying side effect (which an IRC friend kinda hated me for for a while) that if you were talking on IRC, and someone wrote one of those commands, it would disconnect you.. :)
That's only starting with the complexity that would come from tax on online drops. Talking on WoW terms (that's the only one I've played) what's the base price?. Auction House price?. Vendor price?. A blue (rare) item can go for a few hundred golds on AH yet sells for 5 or 6 gold to vendors. What about BoP items (bind on pickup, become soulbound when you pick them up. Most of the better stuff work this way)? Can't sell them on ebay unless I sell the entire character, and they're not worth much in gold to vendors. And what happend when a new expansion comes out?. When TBC came out you could get green (uncommon) items out of simple quests or drops from regular monsters that were better than epic items you got from endgame bosses beforehand. Or what if Blizzard decides to release a patch tomorrow that changes the value of gold at all, or just decide to shut down WoW at all?. That's without going into international servers or people from other countries (I'm from Venezuela, for example, and play on european servers).
It still seems to be there sometimes... at least I switched from konversation to xchat (on kubuntu) because konversation seemed to use its own clipboard, couldn't paste things from other sources in there, or paste things I copied on it on other sources.