Freezer trick only works on 'clicks of death', i.e. to get the head to stop recalibrating so much so you can get the data off the drive before permadeath.
Whenever you hear of 'hard drive tricks' you always have to qualify the statement.
"And why is that amusing? A content-filled and freely-accessible Internet is a resource that the whole community benefits from, and yet Adblock drives up the real cost of having that content and accessibility."
You're missing the point, there was a point where ads were tastefully done (google text) but they became obnoxious. Most people didn't mind ads when they were reasonable. But add in flash autplaying videos with obnoxiously loud volume or epileptic seizure inducing flashing "to grab your attention" and you end up with adblock.
"So, yes, he is a jerk. He thinks that his right to make money following a particular business model overrides my right to own a device where I retain full control. I sincerely wish him to go out of business."
That is most of the game industry today, Valve with Steam and TF2 F2P (fucking hats!), diablo 3, and all the other MMO's and F2P games. The whole industry is a fucking crime syndicate these days.
"I worked at Walmart for a summer. To what poor treatment was I supposedly subjected?"
Unlivable wages, and if you deny they pay garbage and they most CERTAINLY can afford more then you're delusional. I live right near a walmart and no one working their makes enough to save for a rainy day.
... are so misinformed as to make their political views and opinions invalid. Just looking at american slashdotters talk about 'the left' or 'the liberals' is informative at how effective american media has been at propaganda. If you don't think you are a victim of propaganda I would point you to this talk here:
As someone who lives in canada, we know that THERE IS NO LEFT IN NORTH AMERICA anymore. Canada for a long time was a little left of center then america but that stopped 30 some years ago (around 1970's) and we've been on the same hard right path as america ever since. Our "liberals" are really conservatives in terms of ideology (pro corporate, anti public welfare). They've been making the same policy choices along american lines and now with harper and co, harper is stealth privatizing healthcare by making uninformed ideologically driven cuts to evidence based government policies and downloading federal deficit onto the provinces.
You can't talk politics in north america anymore with any kind of sanity at all. The human mind does not work like a rational machine and I think the more you understand about the limitations of your own mind, the less emotional investment you have in your own political views - because you know your response is based on flawed brain structures you inherited that force you to interpret the world in a particular way without your consent.
... that the advent of Television (watching movies together, cartoons, simpsons, etc) was much more damaging. How many people are glued to TV or a screen in case of the net these days?
The truth is our minds find it easier to find positively stimulating things on screens then being active.
Re:Summary of comments on DRM
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"I'm not sure why slashdot hates the DRM here so much."
Because it's people like you who allow corporations to strip us of our rights to own the products we buy by blinding buying their bullshit. Most older slashdotters remember when you owned the games you bought and could play them without the hassle of the nanny corporation to look over your shouldre 'authenticating' your copy every time you want to play a game YOU PAID FOR. If you're paying you deserve to own it, this idea that when you pay for a product it is 'never yours' and you should just bow down for a bunch of greedy corporations who don't give a fuck about you is just fucking DISTURBING.
Most intelligent people on slashdot don't like the way gaming is going. We all grew up during era's where we owned the games we bought (effectively) both console and PC. Even console games have been getting worse with 'already on disc dlc' and 'online passes' and other nonsense. The game industry is corrupt and out of control and it's people like you that tick us off.
As time as gone on DRM has gotten more intrusive and restrictive. Do you think it's just going to stop?
But you are a moron. All old games had multiplayer and singleplayer AND all the code and assets were OWNED by the player, you never had to worry about being disconnected or monitored 24/7. You could always play your game when and where you wanted to. With online you cannot, your rights are being stripped away from you. "Online DRM" is the same as BREAKING the game, using legal conartistry and consumer apathy to force a broken product on everyone.
You're PAYING you deserve to get a copy you own and control, period. The "online business model" is bullshit corporate speak to take stupid chumps to the cleaners.
"I think if you value a society based on the rule of law where every person/industry... is treated equally by law, the existence of patents in other industries should carry over to the software industry."
There is a huge problem with this statement, copyrights, patents - are monopolies. They were invented in theory for projects that require serious long term investment, but we've seen the actual the results of more then a century of their existence. I'd say for all the benefits that you proclaim exist are lost by legal costs and a bloated legal system. Not only that but copyright has been extended many times already. If you are rich you can just keep purchasing congress critters to make laws on behalf of special interests and fuck screw 'the public good'. The clusterfuck that is the modern patent system proves that human beings are too incompetent to decide what is patentable and what isn't. You should go look at all the frivolous lawsuits over physical products then come back and tell us how wonderful it is with a straight face.
The opposite is true here - you are standing on dangerous ground. I've watched entire industries become snake oil salesmen and basically criminals using patents to exploit others for profit, not for any kind of long term investment the betterment of society. Patents, monopolies. Were to further 'the common good' when that is no longer the case it can no longer be justified.
... projects were successful to begin with. There is a lot of negative gamer sentiment that many beloved older games and genre's stopped being produced by big publishers because the publishers deemed they were 'dead' or they just wouldn't yield the kinds of profits they want to keep shareholders happy.
It doesn't help that many modern games have been butchered (in terms of functionality, LAN, etc) or chained to DRM and always online connections.
"I'm pretty sure that P2P has cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years."
Or it could be that you were never that interested in music to begin with. (i.e. it's not a priority). People who VALUE music will end up paying for it (if they want more of it). Kind of like how in the game industry even though games are pirated en masse many pirates pay for games they love because they know if they don't those games stop being made.
I think the issue with music is that music was always a 'dime a dozen' and kind of like how machines displaced manual labor in the industrial revolution (devalued manual labor), music has been devalued by technology.
... while this study is interesting doesn't just living give us all subtle injuries? I mean doesn't sitting our our butts for a good portion of school, work and leisure give us issues with circulation and blood clotting over long period of time? or how about poor diet?
I'd like to see these studies balanced against 'everyday' risks we all take for granted, if they are significantly divergent then I'd agree we should do something about sports. Otherwise it's life is about risks, just living means we're dying and there's not much yet we can do about it until science/tech can repair damage of just living a 'regular' life.
" Heck, even NES games retailed at $50, and that's before you take inflation into account. I'm not sure where this "gaming is too expensive these days!" myth came from."
God I hate when stupid slashdotters say this, you have to account for purchasing power. Wages have not kept up with inflation for the last 30 years inequality is at an all time high. To say gaming is 'less expensive' today is naive because the MARKET for games has expanded, not to mention the price of things like housing, electricity, education, food, etc, have gone up much more then inflation and wages have staid the same or gone down some. Purchasing power not price is the benchmark.
"but without developers we don't have games. I'd rather not see all my favorite developers out of work."
I could care less about modern game industry and developers, between online drm, free 2 play and fucking HATS in TF2. Valve, steam and the rest need to be thrown in a fire.
I remember a time when you could actually OWN YOUR GAME. Now you're paying to never own anything and they can shut-down servers (as with console games) demon souls servers were shut down just recently. I want the whole industry to die, I want the industry to be wiped clean and the good developers who will make proper PC and console games with things like peer to peer multiplayer (for console) and dedicated servers for PC so we can play our fucking games WE PAID FOR whenever we want even 60 years after a dev or publisher has gone belly up.
The dumbness of the modern teenage gamer, F2P, MMO and steam lover is killing gaming.
There has been a revival the last few years in indie games, games like legend of grimrock, magicka, torchlight, dungeon defenders, orcs must die, hard reset.
... game developers. Game developers never learn that if you have a game based on player vs player you're naturally going to get people angry. People don't like to lose. All competitive games had this problem going back to the beginning. If you want a game where people don't get angry then you have to change the goals for winning and make game modes that don't penalize you heavily for having bad players. i.e. where only 1 or 2 people can carry a whole team of newbies, or a fundamental change in goals where newbies dying has little effect on the overall game.
Games like DOTA naturally heavily penalize you for having bad players, in games like first person shooters you usually have these people just change to the winning team.
Also many newbies while I can understand not wanting to be harassed by assholes often just can't play competitively even with a lot of practice and learning. Competitive games are natural breeding grounds for hostility because no one likes sucking and no one likes losing but most people who play competitive games aren't very good.
"So lets just not do it. Lets continue keeping all our stuff in one place. Screw space! Planning ahead is for suckers."
It's more like the fact that the vast majority of the population isn't intelligent enough to want it and most of them are struggling (financially) so exactly why would they want to spend something that smarter future generations could do much quicker and efficiently then old human being v1.0?
I think people who rail against events in our time forget how inefficient and slow human beings are. IMHO we should focus in making better human beings and/or robots/AI tools that augment human intelligence. Our main problem isn't that we're not curious, it's that we don't have enough intelligent, responsible and secure human beings on planet earth.
... it was just easier from economies of scale perspective to make the same size LCD's for PC's and TV's. It sucks, CRT's were big bulky and put out a lot of heat but whoever originally spec'd "HDTV" resolution helped kill 4:3 on PC.
You can still get 16:10 monitors at a premium but they have slowly been coming down to more reasonable price points (below $350 dollars). But for the masses cost is everything.
... C++ primer plus by Stephen prata is a good starting point when just beginning, at some point pretty much all programmers come into contact with C and Prata's pedagogy is sound. Teach each concept, have student master that concept, then move onto the next concept, building up as you go.
"is that as more technology becomes available, the true believers seem MORE certain of their faith"
Most people who are deeply religious are also deeply uninformed of what the source text of their religion teaches. Most religious people are religious in name only and their believes/traditions and behaviours deviate so far from the text as to be pointless.
Religious people are sloppy thinkers in that area of their life, religion comes from non-thinking. Anyone who put the effort into thinking would never be a believer of the traditional abrahamic religions.
"Are you serious? You're drunk on nostalgia my friend."
Not drunk at all. I'm not saying there are not some good games being made today, but game quality (i.e. DRM, removing lan, chaining games to online, no map editors/modding, etc) are definitely objective REDUCTIONS in game quality and if you don't think so you're not very bright.
You can also compare the features in UT99, UT2004 to Unreal 3 to see the removal and reduction of things any serious pc game should have because of sloppy ports on behalf of game developers. There are a few decent games that were actually ported correctly/developed as proper PC games as multiplatform releases but they are few and far between. Too many games are straight ports with no thought put into things like controls, dedicated servers/multiplayer.
... of the modern videogame industry while I'm also pessimistic about kickstarter I'd rather throw money at people who love and care about games then just watch every game become an MMO and chained to online DRM (Starcraft 2, diablo 3).
Kickstarter is really tapping into a lot of negative gamer sentiment, especially if you grew up in the 80's and 90's and watched PC game quality dive off cliff after the early 2000's. The last decade has been probably one of the worst decades for gamers and gamers rights on the whole. Map editors, tools to mod games? Sorry we'd rather sell you bonus weapons and extra maps as DLC at inflated prices.
Most newer generation gamers didn't grow up playing Doom, Duke3D, Quake and many other early PC games so they have no f'n clue how bad games have become.
Slashdot Mirror
Freezer trick only works on 'clicks of death', i.e. to get the head to stop recalibrating so much so you can get the data off the drive before permadeath.
Whenever you hear of 'hard drive tricks' you always have to qualify the statement.
"And why is that amusing? A content-filled and freely-accessible Internet is a resource that the whole community benefits from, and yet Adblock drives up the real cost of having that content and accessibility."
You're missing the point, there was a point where ads were tastefully done (google text) but they became obnoxious. Most people didn't mind ads when they were reasonable. But add in flash autplaying videos with obnoxiously loud volume or epileptic seizure inducing flashing "to grab your attention" and you end up with adblock.
"So, yes, he is a jerk. He thinks that his right to make money following a particular business model overrides my right to own a device where I retain full control. I sincerely wish him to go out of business."
That is most of the game industry today, Valve with Steam and TF2 F2P (fucking hats!), diablo 3, and all the other MMO's and F2P games. The whole industry is a fucking crime syndicate these days.
"I worked at Walmart for a summer. To what poor treatment was I supposedly subjected?"
Unlivable wages, and if you deny they pay garbage and they most CERTAINLY can afford more then you're delusional. I live right near a walmart and no one working their makes enough to save for a rainy day.
... are so misinformed as to make their political views and opinions invalid. Just looking at american slashdotters talk about 'the left' or 'the liberals' is informative at how effective american media has been at propaganda. If you don't think you are a victim of propaganda I would point you to this talk here:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
As someone who lives in canada, we know that THERE IS NO LEFT IN NORTH AMERICA anymore. Canada for a long time was a little left of center then america but that stopped 30 some years ago (around 1970's) and we've been on the same hard right path as america ever since. Our "liberals" are really conservatives in terms of ideology (pro corporate, anti public welfare). They've been making the same policy choices along american lines and now with harper and co, harper is stealth privatizing healthcare by making uninformed ideologically driven cuts to evidence based government policies and downloading federal deficit onto the provinces.
You can't talk politics in north america anymore with any kind of sanity at all. The human mind does not work like a rational machine and I think the more you understand about the limitations of your own mind, the less emotional investment you have in your own political views - because you know your response is based on flawed brain structures you inherited that force you to interpret the world in a particular way without your consent.
"In my mind this and the proliferation of, at best, highly questionable patents is the real problem."
I think the whole idea you can get rid of 'fallacious patents' is questionable given the long history of governments cocksucking of special interests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
... that the advent of Television (watching movies together, cartoons, simpsons, etc) was much more damaging. How many people are glued to TV or a screen in case of the net these days?
The truth is our minds find it easier to find positively stimulating things on screens then being active.
... to know who harper and co are and their neo-conservative heritage.
How american newconservatives stole canada
http://canadianmanifesto.blogspot.ca/2011/08/canadian-manifesto-introduction.html
"I'm not sure why slashdot hates the DRM here so much."
Because it's people like you who allow corporations to strip us of our rights to own the products we buy by blinding buying their bullshit. Most older slashdotters remember when you owned the games you bought and could play them without the hassle of the nanny corporation to look over your shouldre 'authenticating' your copy every time you want to play a game YOU PAID FOR. If you're paying you deserve to own it, this idea that when you pay for a product it is 'never yours' and you should just bow down for a bunch of greedy corporations who don't give a fuck about you is just fucking DISTURBING.
Most intelligent people on slashdot don't like the way gaming is going. We all grew up during era's where we owned the games we bought (effectively) both console and PC. Even console games have been getting worse with 'already on disc dlc' and 'online passes' and other nonsense. The game industry is corrupt and out of control and it's people like you that tick us off.
As time as gone on DRM has gotten more intrusive and restrictive. Do you think it's just going to stop?
"But it's not a single-player game. "
But you are a moron. All old games had multiplayer and singleplayer AND all the code and assets were OWNED by the player, you never had to worry about being disconnected or monitored 24/7. You could always play your game when and where you wanted to. With online you cannot, your rights are being stripped away from you. "Online DRM" is the same as BREAKING the game, using legal conartistry and consumer apathy to force a broken product on everyone.
You're PAYING you deserve to get a copy you own and control, period. The "online business model" is bullshit corporate speak to take stupid chumps to the cleaners.
"I think if you value a society based on the rule of law where every person/industry... is treated equally by law, the existence of patents in other industries should carry over to the software industry."
There is a huge problem with this statement, copyrights, patents - are monopolies. They were invented in theory for projects that require serious long term investment, but we've seen the actual the results of more then a century of their existence. I'd say for all the benefits that you proclaim exist are lost by legal costs and a bloated legal system. Not only that but copyright has been extended many times already. If you are rich you can just keep purchasing congress critters to make laws on behalf of special interests and fuck screw 'the public good'. The clusterfuck that is the modern patent system proves that human beings are too incompetent to decide what is patentable and what isn't. You should go look at all the frivolous lawsuits over physical products then come back and tell us how wonderful it is with a straight face.
The opposite is true here - you are standing on dangerous ground. I've watched entire industries become snake oil salesmen and basically criminals using patents to exploit others for profit, not for any kind of long term investment the betterment of society. Patents, monopolies. Were to further 'the common good' when that is no longer the case it can no longer be justified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
... projects were successful to begin with. There is a lot of negative gamer sentiment that many beloved older games and genre's stopped being produced by big publishers because the publishers deemed they were 'dead' or they just wouldn't yield the kinds of profits they want to keep shareholders happy.
It doesn't help that many modern games have been butchered (in terms of functionality, LAN, etc) or chained to DRM and always online connections.
"I'm pretty sure that P2P has cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years."
Or it could be that you were never that interested in music to begin with. (i.e. it's not a priority). People who VALUE music will end up paying for it (if they want more of it). Kind of like how in the game industry even though games are pirated en masse many pirates pay for games they love because they know if they don't those games stop being made.
I think the issue with music is that music was always a 'dime a dozen' and kind of like how machines displaced manual labor in the industrial revolution (devalued manual labor), music has been devalued by technology.
... while this study is interesting doesn't just living give us all subtle injuries? I mean doesn't sitting our our butts for a good portion of school, work and leisure give us issues with circulation and blood clotting over long period of time? or how about poor diet?
I'd like to see these studies balanced against 'everyday' risks we all take for granted, if they are significantly divergent then I'd agree we should do something about sports. Otherwise it's life is about risks, just living means we're dying and there's not much yet we can do about it until science/tech can repair damage of just living a 'regular' life.
" Heck, even NES games retailed at $50, and that's before you take inflation into account. I'm not sure where this "gaming is too expensive these days!" myth came from."
God I hate when stupid slashdotters say this, you have to account for purchasing power. Wages have not kept up with inflation for the last 30 years inequality is at an all time high. To say gaming is 'less expensive' today is naive because the MARKET for games has expanded, not to mention the price of things like housing, electricity, education, food, etc, have gone up much more then inflation and wages have staid the same or gone down some. Purchasing power not price is the benchmark.
"but without developers we don't have games. I'd rather not see all my favorite developers out of work."
I could care less about modern game industry and developers, between online drm, free 2 play and fucking HATS in TF2. Valve, steam and the rest need to be thrown in a fire.
I remember a time when you could actually OWN YOUR GAME. Now you're paying to never own anything and they can shut-down servers (as with console games) demon souls servers were shut down just recently. I want the whole industry to die, I want the industry to be wiped clean and the good developers who will make proper PC and console games with things like peer to peer multiplayer (for console) and dedicated servers for PC so we can play our fucking games WE PAID FOR whenever we want even 60 years after a dev or publisher has gone belly up.
The dumbness of the modern teenage gamer, F2P, MMO and steam lover is killing gaming.
"They still make PC-only titles?"
There has been a revival the last few years in indie games, games like legend of grimrock, magicka, torchlight, dungeon defenders, orcs must die, hard reset.
You just haven't been paying attention.
... commercial drm infested steam masquerading as a 'platform'.
... game developers. Game developers never learn that if you have a game based on player vs player you're naturally going to get people angry. People don't like to lose. All competitive games had this problem going back to the beginning. If you want a game where people don't get angry then you have to change the goals for winning and make game modes that don't penalize you heavily for having bad players. i.e. where only 1 or 2 people can carry a whole team of newbies, or a fundamental change in goals where newbies dying has little effect on the overall game.
Games like DOTA naturally heavily penalize you for having bad players, in games like first person shooters you usually have these people just change to the winning team.
Also many newbies while I can understand not wanting to be harassed by assholes often just can't play competitively even with a lot of practice and learning. Competitive games are natural breeding grounds for hostility because no one likes sucking and no one likes losing but most people who play competitive games aren't very good.
"So lets just not do it. Lets continue keeping all our stuff in one place. Screw space! Planning ahead is for suckers."
It's more like the fact that the vast majority of the population isn't intelligent enough to want it and most of them are struggling (financially) so exactly why would they want to spend something that smarter future generations could do much quicker and efficiently then old human being v1.0?
I think people who rail against events in our time forget how inefficient and slow human beings are. IMHO we should focus in making better human beings and/or robots/AI tools that augment human intelligence. Our main problem isn't that we're not curious, it's that we don't have enough intelligent, responsible and secure human beings on planet earth.
... it was just easier from economies of scale perspective to make the same size LCD's for PC's and TV's. It sucks, CRT's were big bulky and put out a lot of heat but whoever originally spec'd "HDTV" resolution helped kill 4:3 on PC.
You can still get 16:10 monitors at a premium but they have slowly been coming down to more reasonable price points (below $350 dollars). But for the masses cost is everything.
... C++ primer plus by Stephen prata is a good starting point when just beginning, at some point pretty much all programmers come into contact with C and Prata's pedagogy is sound. Teach each concept, have student master that concept, then move onto the next concept, building up as you go.
http://www.amazon.com/C-Primer-Plus-5th-Edition/dp/0672326973/
"is that as more technology becomes available, the true believers seem MORE certain of their faith"
Most people who are deeply religious are also deeply uninformed of what the source text of their religion teaches. Most religious people are religious in name only and their believes/traditions and behaviours deviate so far from the text as to be pointless.
Religious people are sloppy thinkers in that area of their life, religion comes from non-thinking. Anyone who put the effort into thinking would never be a believer of the traditional abrahamic religions.
"Are you serious? You're drunk on nostalgia my friend."
Not drunk at all. I'm not saying there are not some good games being made today, but game quality (i.e. DRM, removing lan, chaining games to online, no map editors/modding, etc) are definitely objective REDUCTIONS in game quality and if you don't think so you're not very bright.
You can also compare the features in UT99, UT2004 to Unreal 3 to see the removal and reduction of things any serious pc game should have because of sloppy ports on behalf of game developers. There are a few decent games that were actually ported correctly/developed as proper PC games as multiplatform releases but they are few and far between. Too many games are straight ports with no thought put into things like controls, dedicated servers/multiplayer.
I'm sorry but you are just factually incorrect.
... of the modern videogame industry while I'm also pessimistic about kickstarter I'd rather throw money at people who love and care about games then just watch every game become an MMO and chained to online DRM (Starcraft 2, diablo 3).
Kickstarter is really tapping into a lot of negative gamer sentiment, especially if you grew up in the 80's and 90's and watched PC game quality dive off cliff after the early 2000's. The last decade has been probably one of the worst decades for gamers and gamers rights on the whole. Map editors, tools to mod games? Sorry we'd rather sell you bonus weapons and extra maps as DLC at inflated prices.
Most newer generation gamers didn't grow up playing Doom, Duke3D, Quake and many other early PC games so they have no f'n clue how bad games have become.