I used to make sure all my IM software logged all my chats by default - I saw it as a form of "recording my life" (I used to chat online a LOT). Especially in the event that something happened to me (some kind of fatal accident etc.) there would be some history or leftover "data" for family/friends to keep, I guess. Honestly if people had read the chats they would think so differently of me considering the things I discussed, but regardless I felt like I would want people to know either way. I imagine other people do this as well, although maybe not neccesarily with the same reasons in mind (no, I'm not hinting at anything).
That's the absolute first phrase that came to mind: "Fuck him."
I'm absolutely fucking sick and tired of this "terrorist" bullshit propaganda. If having some semblance of freedom means the risk of being attacked by terrorists, bring them the fuck on! Because guess what? Living in a bloody dictatorship doesn't lessen the chances of some terrorist group launching an attack of any sort!
I received a report just like this article refers to, from my ISP. The thing is, the infringment report indicated that I was sharing a foreign-language version of a Hollywood movie, which I absolutely 100% had never done. They had the correct software I had been using (for downloading files OTHER THAN movies), correct IP and filesharing-network-user-ID, but I have NEVER downloaded the movie that I was being "reported" for, nor have I ever shared it or anything even resembling it (or any other movies, actually).
So, my question is, what would happen if my ISP disconnected me because of this? There are really only two main ISPs around here, and the other one is definitely not desireable. Because some automated bot made up a completely false "infringement" report, I could lose net connectivity? Am I no longer allowed to use p2p software even if what I'm downloading is legally OK to download?
"If you are not aware of our Acceptable Use Policy, which strictly prohibits use of our Service to infringe the copyrights of others, you may review at mytelus.com/internet. Please be aware that violation of this policy could result in disconnection of your Service"
What about alleged and unsubstantiated violation of this policy? What about when a bot sends mostly-correct infringement notices, but there was NO actual copyright infringement occuring? How can the ISP know whether anything illegal actually occured?
Just because they know my IP, username and user ID and then add the name of a hollywood movie with a.AVI at the end, doesn't mean there's ANY truth to the report. This really really bothers me, because I pay for high speed access and have been a customer of this company for years, but could magically have my services cut off permanently with them because of incorrect, falsified and effectively fabricated copyright infringement notices!
Take a look at Smashing Pumpkins. They released their final album for free online, for fans to distribute.
I still remember a friend of mine (who didn't have net access) calling me up and asking me to "burn the new Smashing Pumpkins album". I was pretty surprised when he told me to just go to the band's website, but, there it was, fully available in high quality mp3 format, for free.
Yeah dude, all those anti-DRM kids now are posers, I've been total anti-DRM since like three weeks ago... One time I even hung out with these totally cool DRM h8r boi's that actually srsly met some programmer guy from Apple one time, for real !!
Well, maybe not in the actual game art (altho Marathon's was pretty damn primitive), but the armor on Master Chief in Halo is actually of the same family as that of the protagonist's in Marathon - Mjolnir combat armor.
So while visually the armor may somehow compare to that in Half Life, the concept of that armor series was already there 6 or 7 years earlier...;)
BTW you can download the whole Marathon trilogy for free at http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/:) It is now playable on Mac, Win and Linux (possibly other platforms) due to the "Aleph One" 3d-accelerated source port of the Marathon engine.
Nooo I don't mean a group of *your* friends, I mean a group of opponent players who are all friends...;) AKA a team of buddies who go around and get legitimate players booted by muting them...:(
I can assure you if there was any ripping off, it was done by Half Life's developers. Go load up Marathon and you'll see what I'm talking about... Or, simply view the following pages:
Basically, the Halo "universe" is hugely an evolution of what Bungie began in the early 90s with the Marathon series. If you loosen the technicalities a little bit, Halo is basically a beefed up kickass version of what Marathon ought to have been..;)
Oh, so if you're a good player, up against a group of friends who don't want to lose, they just all Mute you on their end and you're suddenly ejected from the game? Hmmm.... might not work out too well...;)
Yes, there is already a player-feedback option in the game (called "Feedback", surprisingly enough) which is used to report people who yell, swear, or cheat (etc.) and Bungie have already told us it's very easy to notice when a certain user is constantly marking everyone as a cheater or someone who yells and swears a lot (and thus this user's feedback is accordingly "taken with a grain of salt", if not ignored completely).
Nah, Halo 2 definitely isn't the best game ever. There are elements that annoy all of us. That said, it's a very fun game with unique aspects that I enjoy. Great atmospheres, music, storyline and concepts that I enjoy. That's all my personal preference stuff. But the big thing with the multiplayer is that there isn't any other game where you can just boot up the Xbox, throw on your headset and be playing some mega fun intense games with all your buddies within a couple minutes. That's the big thing. TeamSpeak & Ventrilo have issues such as cross-platform issues, router/NAT issues, someone having to run the server (altho we have a very high speed dedicated machine), all that crap. Halo 2 just works, and works immediately.
OK, plus there's the aspect that all of the friends in our group that play on Halo 2 are big fans of Bungie's previous games like Marathon, Myth and Oni.. A bunch of us are in the photos on that bungie.net article I linked;)
Um, troll much? It takes maybe 10 seconds. If you can't handle that, I'm surprised you even play the game considering the minute-or-two wait to get into a game. Anyway, obviously Bungie acknowledges that it ought to be easier to mute people in a more timely/convenient manner, hence this/. article...
I don't see the justification for restricting video games from minors whilst allowing them to view thoroughly disturbing scenes of violence, rape etc. on television day in and day out. Seriously, I can't believe the stuff I have seen whilst unintentionally observing TV shows that are on in the same room as I am. Like weird-ass flashbacks of some crime where some woman is strangled and raped or something, and then shot. All these CSI-type shows. It's fucking unbelievable! This is at 8pm at night when probably 99.9% of kids younger than 17-18 are awake and *probably watching TV*. Somehow I have a hard time believing video games would be more disturbing than these highly realistic live-action depictions of violent crimes complete with brutal sounds and audio to go along with them...
Also, honestly, "the kid that guns down his classmates" has a fuckload more reasons for doing so that simply playing video games. In fact, playing violent video games is more of a result of rather than a cause of "issues" or so on. You can take it from me, I moderate a community forum of people who discuss issues regarding high school shootings, one member of which was the recent high-school shooter in Germany, "resistantx"... We've talked about it. It's been discussed ad nauseam. The consensus is exactly what I just mentioned a moment ago - killers aren't made by playing video games, and the contribution to murderous tendencies by violent video games could be numerated as maybe 0.1% influence.
A compromise that really isn't that bad at all? Postal is still one of my all-time favorite games ever. If I *hadn't* been able to buy a copy that day, I probably wouldn't have played it until years later when I definitely wouldn't have appreciated it in the same way. Basically the suggestion that it's a good idea to restrict younger people from potentially great games is pretty rough, in my opinion. It's like... "Hi kids, there's a whole huge chunk of video game culture you are excluded from because of your age, regardless of how mentally mature/capable you might be. Here watch some quality violent TV shows instead." Seriously, there is not enough rationale behind this to make it even remotely valid.
I've played PC FPSes pretty much religiously since Doom came out (going so far as to installing Doom on the school computers and getting banned from the computer lab a couple times as a result). In high school years I used to come home from school every day and pretty much play Quake 1 for the rest of the day. The same trend continued for years with other games until recently where every fucking FPS is a rehash of stuff I've already played extensively. Halo 2 is something a little different, and a big part of multiplayer gaming for me is the enjoyment of playing a game with some friends - it really makes the difference between "pretty cool" and "totally fucking awesome", for me. While I don't expect that other people might have the same experience, that happens to be mine. I used to say "why the hell do people even buy consoles? PCs are so much better, you have better/more control, way more software (which you can pirate), you can do way more with them..." but, playing Halo 2 has changed my opinion on consoles...
Anyway, in the end, if you like it, you like it.. if you don't, you don't... Some people just don't "get" Halo and don't see the big deal. Doesn't matter to me, I think it owns and I'll keep playing it. Meanwhile UT2029 and Battlefield 3042 (and further derivatives) can go to hell.
Yes, the feature to mute a player in Halo 2 *does* exist, and it *is* easily available in-game. Press start while in a game. Press Y to get the player list. Choose one of the players. Press A , scroll to "mute" and... mute the player! Hey, I do it all the time...;)
The thing is, when you get on there with a group of friends you really enjoy playing the game with, trust me, it's the most fun multiplayer experience you could have online. It's about as close as you can get to actually having a bigass split-screen LAN with all your buddies, without actually being in the same room with them. Considering the group of people I play Halo 2 online with live all over North America (and UK), we've only been able to get together once a year or so (usually for E3), but playing online on Xbox Live is the next-closest alternative.
Honestly the yearly fee for an Xbox Live "Gold" account is 100% worth it simply for the purpose of being able to play Halo 2 and other XBL games online with these friends of mine.
When you're on a team with the most kickass teammates, it doesn't matter how rude/disrespectful/immature the opponent players are - not only can they be muted easily, it just doesn't matter because we can all just laugh and keep having a lot of fun knowing we had a great time (usually winning, too) while the other guys are just wasting their time screwing around.
You know, I don't support restricting availability of software to "younger" gamers.
If you've played the game Postal (the first one, not the recent FPS "Postal 2"), you'll know it's excessively violent and pretty extreme what with people crawling along in agony, leaving a trail of blood on the ground behind them...
Anyway, I picked up a copy at the age of 13, despite various warnings right on the box (made by the game developer themselves not some parental-advisory group).
Playing Postal at the age of 13 didn't do a damned single negative thing. In fact it gave me a great way to release my pent up anger and frustration about the world around me during those times. If anything it was more *therapeutic* to me, than influential in a harmful way. This is of course merely my own experience and I'm a pretty "dark" kind of person to begin with, so violent stuff doesn't phase me, for instance loving movies like Natural Born Killers, Se7en, American History X etc. all throughout my teenage years...
Anyway, I was going to say I'll boycott GameStop, but I don't buy software anymore unless I *really* like it...;)
The new Adobe Creative Suite runs slow on recent Macs because it was all compiled & written for PowerPC architecture, not x86! Big graphics shops are using absolute latest G5s running absolute latest OS X with no problems at all, because they are still PowerPC CPUs.
CS2 can't feasibly be made "Universal" (AKA run native speeds on both PPC and x86) because there are large amounts of PPC-specific code in CS2.
"Backward compatibility through the Apple line is less than stellar, and explains some of their past troubles with regard to market share. MS on the other hand have had some rational people in their midst who have always seen to it that backwards compatability rules. They almost never break backward compatability for any reason, and when they do it is because it is nearly technically impossible to keep. I can still run my DOS apps in XP."
Take a look at this long list of applications people are running that are many (~20) years old:
Notice these people are still succesfully running programs from 1986 and 1988.
I also, some time ago, found the website of a programmer who wrote a game on his Lisa machine (or may have been SE/30, I forget) which still runs properly on his OS X machine today with absolutely no modifications, same executable file and everything. I just spent 15 minutes looking for the guy's site but I had no luck. If anyone can find this please offer a link! It may actually have been posted as a/. article at some point in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be new here.
I used to make sure all my IM software logged all my chats by default - I saw it as a form of "recording my life" (I used to chat online a LOT). Especially in the event that something happened to me (some kind of fatal accident etc.) there would be some history or leftover "data" for family/friends to keep, I guess. Honestly if people had read the chats they would think so differently of me considering the things I discussed, but regardless I felt like I would want people to know either way. I imagine other people do this as well, although maybe not neccesarily with the same reasons in mind (no, I'm not hinting at anything).
That's the absolute first phrase that came to mind: "Fuck him."
I'm absolutely fucking sick and tired of this "terrorist" bullshit propaganda. If having some semblance of freedom means the risk of being attacked by terrorists, bring them the fuck on! Because guess what? Living in a bloody dictatorship doesn't lessen the chances of some terrorist group launching an attack of any sort!
Fuck him. That's all I can say.
"Wow. That has got to me one of the most ignorant and biggoted things I have ever seen on Slashdot."
/. comment!
Hey that's crazy, your spell-checking software actually emboldened your spelling mistake for you, even in a
I received a report just like this article refers to, from my ISP. The thing is, the infringment report indicated that I was sharing a foreign-language version of a Hollywood movie, which I absolutely 100% had never done. They had the correct software I had been using (for downloading files OTHER THAN movies), correct IP and filesharing-network-user-ID, but I have NEVER downloaded the movie that I was being "reported" for, nor have I ever shared it or anything even resembling it (or any other movies, actually).
.AVI at the end, doesn't mean there's ANY truth to the report. This really really bothers me, because I pay for high speed access and have been a customer of this company for years, but could magically have my services cut off permanently with them because of incorrect, falsified and effectively fabricated copyright infringement notices!
So, my question is, what would happen if my ISP disconnected me because of this? There are really only two main ISPs around here, and the other one is definitely not desireable. Because some automated bot made up a completely false "infringement" report, I could lose net connectivity? Am I no longer allowed to use p2p software even if what I'm downloading is legally OK to download?
"If you are not aware of our Acceptable Use Policy, which strictly prohibits use of our Service to infringe the copyrights of others, you may review at mytelus.com/internet. Please be aware that violation of this policy could result in disconnection of your Service"
What about alleged and unsubstantiated violation of this policy? What about when a bot sends mostly-correct infringement notices, but there was NO actual copyright infringement occuring? How can the ISP know whether anything illegal actually occured?
Just because they know my IP, username and user ID and then add the name of a hollywood movie with a
Take a look at Smashing Pumpkins. They released their final album for free online, for fans to distribute.
:)
I still remember a friend of mine (who didn't have net access) calling me up and asking me to "burn the new Smashing Pumpkins album". I was pretty surprised when he told me to just go to the band's website, but, there it was, fully available in high quality mp3 format, for free.
That was 7 years ago.
hahaha
Yeah dude, all those anti-DRM kids now are posers, I've been total anti-DRM since like three weeks ago... One time I even hung out with these totally cool DRM h8r boi's that actually srsly met some programmer guy from Apple one time, for real !!
Well, maybe not in the actual game art (altho Marathon's was pretty damn primitive), but the armor on Master Chief in Halo is actually of the same family as that of the protagonist's in Marathon - Mjolnir combat armor.
;)
:) It is now playable on Mac, Win and Linux (possibly other platforms) due to the "Aleph One" 3d-accelerated source port of the Marathon engine.
Check it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MJOLNIR_battle_armor
So while visually the armor may somehow compare to that in Half Life, the concept of that armor series was already there 6 or 7 years earlier...
BTW you can download the whole Marathon trilogy for free at http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/
Nooo I don't mean a group of *your* friends, I mean a group of opponent players who are all friends... ;) AKA a team of buddies who go around and get legitimate players booted by muting them... :(
I can assure you if there was any ripping off, it was done by Half Life's developers. Go load up Marathon and you'll see what I'm talking about... Or, simply view the following pages:
;)
Halo: Original Game, or Sequel?
Halo Resources - Marathon Similarities
Halo Story Page - Marathon Connections
Basically, the Halo "universe" is hugely an evolution of what Bungie began in the early 90s with the Marathon series. If you loosen the technicalities a little bit, Halo is basically a beefed up kickass version of what Marathon ought to have been..
Oh, so if you're a good player, up against a group of friends who don't want to lose, they just all Mute you on their end and you're suddenly ejected from the game? Hmmm.... might not work out too well... ;)
Yes, there is already a player-feedback option in the game (called "Feedback", surprisingly enough) which is used to report people who yell, swear, or cheat (etc.) and Bungie have already told us it's very easy to notice when a certain user is constantly marking everyone as a cheater or someone who yells and swears a lot (and thus this user's feedback is accordingly "taken with a grain of salt", if not ignored completely).
Nah, Halo 2 definitely isn't the best game ever. There are elements that annoy all of us. That said, it's a very fun game with unique aspects that I enjoy. Great atmospheres, music, storyline and concepts that I enjoy. That's all my personal preference stuff. But the big thing with the multiplayer is that there isn't any other game where you can just boot up the Xbox, throw on your headset and be playing some mega fun intense games with all your buddies within a couple minutes. That's the big thing. TeamSpeak & Ventrilo have issues such as cross-platform issues, router/NAT issues, someone having to run the server (altho we have a very high speed dedicated machine), all that crap. Halo 2 just works, and works immediately.
;)
OK, plus there's the aspect that all of the friends in our group that play on Halo 2 are big fans of Bungie's previous games like Marathon, Myth and Oni.. A bunch of us are in the photos on that bungie.net article I linked
Um, troll much? It takes maybe 10 seconds. If you can't handle that, I'm surprised you even play the game considering the minute-or-two wait to get into a game. Anyway, obviously Bungie acknowledges that it ought to be easier to mute people in a more timely/convenient manner, hence this /. article...
I don't see the justification for restricting video games from minors whilst allowing them to view thoroughly disturbing scenes of violence, rape etc. on television day in and day out. Seriously, I can't believe the stuff I have seen whilst unintentionally observing TV shows that are on in the same room as I am. Like weird-ass flashbacks of some crime where some woman is strangled and raped or something, and then shot. All these CSI-type shows. It's fucking unbelievable! This is at 8pm at night when probably 99.9% of kids younger than 17-18 are awake and *probably watching TV*. Somehow I have a hard time believing video games would be more disturbing than these highly realistic live-action depictions of violent crimes complete with brutal sounds and audio to go along with them...
Also, honestly, "the kid that guns down his classmates" has a fuckload more reasons for doing so that simply playing video games. In fact, playing violent video games is more of a result of rather than a cause of "issues" or so on. You can take it from me, I moderate a community forum of people who discuss issues regarding high school shootings, one member of which was the recent high-school shooter in Germany, "resistantx"... We've talked about it. It's been discussed ad nauseam. The consensus is exactly what I just mentioned a moment ago - killers aren't made by playing video games, and the contribution to murderous tendencies by violent video games could be numerated as maybe 0.1% influence.
A compromise that really isn't that bad at all? Postal is still one of my all-time favorite games ever. If I *hadn't* been able to buy a copy that day, I probably wouldn't have played it until years later when I definitely wouldn't have appreciated it in the same way. Basically the suggestion that it's a good idea to restrict younger people from potentially great games is pretty rough, in my opinion. It's like... "Hi kids, there's a whole huge chunk of video game culture you are excluded from because of your age, regardless of how mentally mature/capable you might be. Here watch some quality violent TV shows instead." Seriously, there is not enough rationale behind this to make it even remotely valid.
I've played PC FPSes pretty much religiously since Doom came out (going so far as to installing Doom on the school computers and getting banned from the computer lab a couple times as a result). In high school years I used to come home from school every day and pretty much play Quake 1 for the rest of the day. The same trend continued for years with other games until recently where every fucking FPS is a rehash of stuff I've already played extensively. Halo 2 is something a little different, and a big part of multiplayer gaming for me is the enjoyment of playing a game with some friends - it really makes the difference between "pretty cool" and "totally fucking awesome", for me. While I don't expect that other people might have the same experience, that happens to be mine. I used to say "why the hell do people even buy consoles? PCs are so much better, you have better/more control, way more software (which you can pirate), you can do way more with them..." but, playing Halo 2 has changed my opinion on consoles...
Anyway, in the end, if you like it, you like it.. if you don't, you don't... Some people just don't "get" Halo and don't see the big deal. Doesn't matter to me, I think it owns and I'll keep playing it. Meanwhile UT2029 and Battlefield 3042 (and further derivatives) can go to hell.
Yes, the feature to mute a player in Halo 2 *does* exist, and it *is* easily available in-game. Press start while in a game. Press Y to get the player list. Choose one of the players. Press A , scroll to "mute" and... mute the player! Hey, I do it all the time... ;)
The thing is, when you get on there with a group of friends you really enjoy playing the game with, trust me, it's the most fun multiplayer experience you could have online. It's about as close as you can get to actually having a bigass split-screen LAN with all your buddies, without actually being in the same room with them. Considering the group of people I play Halo 2 online with live all over North America (and UK), we've only been able to get together once a year or so (usually for E3), but playing online on Xbox Live is the next-closest alternative.
Honestly the yearly fee for an Xbox Live "Gold" account is 100% worth it simply for the purpose of being able to play Halo 2 and other XBL games online with these friends of mine.
When you're on a team with the most kickass teammates, it doesn't matter how rude/disrespectful/immature the opponent players are - not only can they be muted easily, it just doesn't matter because we can all just laugh and keep having a lot of fun knowing we had a great time (usually winning, too) while the other guys are just wasting their time screwing around.
You know, I don't support restricting availability of software to "younger" gamers.
;)
If you've played the game Postal (the first one, not the recent FPS "Postal 2"), you'll know it's excessively violent and pretty extreme what with people crawling along in agony, leaving a trail of blood on the ground behind them...
Anyway, I picked up a copy at the age of 13, despite various warnings right on the box (made by the game developer themselves not some parental-advisory group).
Playing Postal at the age of 13 didn't do a damned single negative thing. In fact it gave me a great way to release my pent up anger and frustration about the world around me during those times. If anything it was more *therapeutic* to me, than influential in a harmful way. This is of course merely my own experience and I'm a pretty "dark" kind of person to begin with, so violent stuff doesn't phase me, for instance loving movies like Natural Born Killers, Se7en, American History X etc. all throughout my teenage years...
Anyway, I was going to say I'll boycott GameStop, but I don't buy software anymore unless I *really* like it...
All of this really makes me think of The Laughing Man from Ghost In The Shell...
The new Adobe Creative Suite runs slow on recent Macs because it was all compiled & written for PowerPC architecture, not x86! Big graphics shops are using absolute latest G5s running absolute latest OS X with no problems at all, because they are still PowerPC CPUs.
CS2 can't feasibly be made "Universal" (AKA run native speeds on both PPC and x86) because there are large amounts of PPC-specific code in CS2.
Also some screenshots and more information here:
l :)
http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/missile20.htm
YES, thank you for posting this! I've been looking for that link for so long!! :)
"All you fanboys need to stop stroking your egos and let people use whatever the fuck they want."
That's funny - that's exactly what I've said for the past 15 some-odd years to all the Windows fanatics that have insulted me for using Mac OS.
"Backward compatibility through the Apple line is less than stellar, and explains some of their past troubles with regard to market share. MS on the other hand have had some rational people in their midst who have always seen to it that backwards compatability rules. They almost never break backward compatability for any reason, and when they do it is because it is nearly technically impossible to keep. I can still run my DOS apps in XP."
9 1
/. article at some point in the past.
Take a look at this long list of applications people are running that are many (~20) years old:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=2508
Notice these people are still succesfully running programs from 1986 and 1988.
I also, some time ago, found the website of a programmer who wrote a game on his Lisa machine (or may have been SE/30, I forget) which still runs properly on his OS X machine today with absolutely no modifications, same executable file and everything. I just spent 15 minutes looking for the guy's site but I had no luck. If anyone can find this please offer a link! It may actually have been posted as a