People that do such a thing must be histrionic and looking for some small thing to inflate their ego with.
Maybe they are simply looking to engage in conversation on that forum without having to decipher the messages of other posters. Computers have protocols that allow them to understand one another. We have common conventions and understandings that facilitate the process of communication. Why is it so different to expect that messages written in English be reasonably clear to someone who is proficient with the language?
I admit that I am no spelling/grammar nazi(see sig), but why does it become someone else's problem when they cannot understand the garbage that you stream of consciousnessed onto the page? That seems comparable to someone in person telling me to not pay attention to their body odor as I am not speaking to them in some kind of business or official sense.
He's just caught in the slashdot timewarp where any reference to the quality of windows must by default compare at least five year old windows products with current linux counterparts.
The only problem with that line of logic is that game development shops will never simply do away with their map makers and other content developers in that way.
The level content of most games is almost always made in groups. The days of one developer per map are long gone. Especially when your mappers are working on alpha/beta tools to begin with you need them right there at the office working as a group to be able to accomplish anything in an efficient timeframe.
That is, for the most part, possible with internet explorer. You can configure java/javascript for a security zone, then assign a site to that zone.
I know that there are loads of other problems with IE, but in this very narrow application of the software this is somewhere that I feel it beats firefox. This is for out of the box installs on both obviously, as there may be a plugin that I am not aware of which gives firefox similar functionality.
In general they seem to do a 1-2 free month subscription with game purchase. When I decided to give planetside more of a go than the seven days they hand out for free on occassion it was only ~10 dollars, so I got a month for less than the normal price. Generally that is the exception, but they always give something with the purchase.
....and here we witness the problem with access databases.
Really though, 1.5mb per person does seem excessive. I suppose there could always be duplicate entries of people from on-line vs in-store purchases. Then there are city/state/sales region data recordings. Not to mention attempting to describe the interests of cash-wielding consumers. Maybe some kind of cross reference of adds/items viewed and the associated ip adresses.....each matched up with any possible known people who have bought something with that ip address, not to mention all the statistical calculations it would take to produce a guess of whether or not your are the same person using this dynamic ip address that bought something on-line X amount of time ago. There is a lot of data to collect.
(The official word in the Steam formus I belive was, and I quote: "You dont have to worry about that". I belive while he was typing that, he did a Jedi Mind Trick hand wave. Unfortunately that only work on the week-minded.
So those of us who think in terms of days, months, or years are safe? Good to know that.
To be honest I am not really concerned about the whole deal. I ended up with a copy of hl2 "free" with an ATI video card purchase. I already have the key in, content downloaded. Judging from past experience with steam I will be able to play my copy sometime late 16th/mid 17th. It doesn't really matter to me if the game becomes useless later as by then I will have a new game to play.
A lot of people are complaining about this system. My question is, what do you think should be done to prevent piracy of these games? Steam basically ensures that your simple "Here install my copy" piracy no longer works as a cdkey becomes tied to a fully unique steam account. It seems simple to me, and relatively unobtrusive when compared with other mechanisms (cd in drive requirements come to mind).
Yes it sucks to have to connect to the net to activate a single player game, but this is the world we're in today. Software vendors see piracy as a huge threat, and this is one method of solving it.
International Credit Card Fraud ring leads to bigger fish:
Authorities today arrested thousands of credit card fraudsters. These individuals were tracked down by tracing connections to a site currently under investigation. Visits to www.shadowcrew.com where traced to another site slashdot.org.
Slashdot.org, although supposedly a geek news site, has in fact been found to link heavily to credit card fraud and software piracy. Member lists have already been obtained, and many of the more prominent figures in this conspiracy ring have already been sent off for sodomiz^H^H^H^H^H^H^H detainment.
In a joint press release today Secret Service Officials and Microsoft Representatives noted that the site, in addition to its fraudulent and illegal activities is a strong advocate of the linux operating system. Microsoft Officials did not hesitate to point out the vague link that does not really exist between linux and software piracy.
I guess I could go on, but i've already started to get into absurd anti-microsoft fanboyism. I had to do it though, what good would a joke about the takedown of slashdot be without microsoft trying to get a shot in?
I guess the big reason I bought into it: Assurance that I would get it that day. Where I live there are a lot of problems with either A) Deliveries coming in on time, or B) Enough being delivered to go around. Steam avoids any chance of either.
That is a lot of wasted bullets. I mean, really, just take him out to the top of the courthouse and throw him off, repeat until desired effect is reached. Save the bullets for something more worthy.
Although it does not constitute much of a "need to know" most targeted advertising is handled via either phone messages or junk snailmail. Each requires your phone number or zip code to target you specifically. Usually I am ok with the zip code, as I see a benefit from it (coupons), and recieving excess mail is much less annoying than getting unwanted phone messages. Guess my point is that zip codes are one of the "nicer" options for targeted advertising.
To be honest they wouldn't need to. You can access that kind of display mode through the display properties dialog. Just use 1 and 2 from your list, then click on the second screen and check "extend my desktop onto this monitor".
That aside, the little add on tree is extended by default, and "nView Display Mode" seems like a big red flag of a place to look for me. I will grant that it being buried in the Advanced screen settings may be somehow construed as difficult, but really I think you are deliberately making the system seem more obtuse than it really is.
on Windows the necessary tab may be found only after hours of clicking, so well buried it is
right-clicks on desktop. clicks properties. clicks the settings tab.
Total time to execute this procedure ~2 seconds, and while moving slowly. How is that buried in hours of clicking through tabs? Hell I can think of two ways to get at the display properties, and I don't even use it that much. One of the involves the control panel, which is pretty high up on the "I don't have a clue" list of places that may or may not hold configuration options. In fact I think you could say that s/sax2/Display/ and s/SuSE/Windows form a correct statement as well.
So are you calling into question the quality of free software firewalls or the quality of windows systems? The former might possibly get you lynched here, and the latter is mostly nonsense. An adequately configured windows system will at least offer up some kind of signs that you have been hacked, same as any comparably set up linux box would.
So problems with the specific hardware that his customers use implies that microsoft hardly did any testing at all? Damn I wish I lived in a world where I could do things using that kind of logic.
Glad to see that someone agrees. I don't have kids, but when I do they are going to go a long time before being exposed to the net unsuprivised. A lot of the trouble kids seem to get into these days is from their parents not knowing/caring what the hell they are doing. I, for one, will not be a part of that group.
Would it not also be true that in most hacking attempts not only would it show evidence of tampering, but wouldn't the data be unusable on either the hacker or the recipient's end?
So you're saying that PDF's, HP's printer/scanner/whatever software, and whatever possibly mangled code used to run your web-based scheduling app manage to crash windows, and it is windows' fault?
On top of that what the hell do copy/paste and availability of virtual desktops have to do with system stability? I agree that there are problems with windows, lots of problems, but if you are going to make the argument try citing some non-crap examples.
Also, from a user perspective, the proper way to do something is the way they know how to do it. Regular users could care less if the implementation is done correctly from a developer point of view as long as it works how they believe it should.
One thing you failed to mention: what do those dual booting boxes do? If all you do is boot it up and say "Oooh, look, pretty linux" then of course they don't have any problems.
It is this kind of argument that makes the entire open source community look childish and petty. You are using problems running (generally crappy) third party software to declare that windows is flawed. If you are going to argue for linux spend some more time coming up with good arguments, and less time bitching about the fact that things do not work the way you believe they should.
The problem with that is that there can probably never be a "One Engine to Rule them All". It just does not work that way. The doom 3 engine is capable of things that the engine used for Battlefield 1942 simply cannot do(full dynamic lighting for example) At the same time the BF engine can do a lot that doom 3 may not be able to do (large open areas with lots of vehicles)
The point is that you are not going to see one engine that can do everything that everyone wants anytime soon. Even if everything is based from the same engine you will see so many variations of it to fit a specific need that trying to call them all the same engine is almost pointless. I agree that more standardization would be great, it would especially make the task of modding for any new games much easier. I just will not be holding my breath for it to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends, are they sco unixware servers?
Maybe they are simply looking to engage in conversation on that forum without having to decipher the messages of other posters. Computers have protocols that allow them to understand one another. We have common conventions and understandings that facilitate the process of communication. Why is it so different to expect that messages written in English be reasonably clear to someone who is proficient with the language?
I admit that I am no spelling/grammar nazi(see sig), but why does it become someone else's problem when they cannot understand the garbage that you stream of consciousnessed onto the page? That seems comparable to someone in person telling me to not pay attention to their body odor as I am not speaking to them in some kind of business or official sense.
He's just caught in the slashdot timewarp where any reference to the quality of windows must by default compare at least five year old windows products with current linux counterparts.
The level content of most games is almost always made in groups. The days of one developer per map are long gone. Especially when your mappers are working on alpha/beta tools to begin with you need them right there at the office working as a group to be able to accomplish anything in an efficient timeframe.
I know that there are loads of other problems with IE, but in this very narrow application of the software this is somewhere that I feel it beats firefox. This is for out of the box installs on both obviously, as there may be a plugin that I am not aware of which gives firefox similar functionality.
In general they seem to do a 1-2 free month subscription with game purchase. When I decided to give planetside more of a go than the seven days they hand out for free on occassion it was only ~10 dollars, so I got a month for less than the normal price. Generally that is the exception, but they always give something with the purchase.
Really though, 1.5mb per person does seem excessive. I suppose there could always be duplicate entries of people from on-line vs in-store purchases. Then there are city/state/sales region data recordings. Not to mention attempting to describe the interests of cash-wielding consumers. Maybe some kind of cross reference of adds/items viewed and the associated ip adresses.....each matched up with any possible known people who have bought something with that ip address, not to mention all the statistical calculations it would take to produce a guess of whether or not your are the same person using this dynamic ip address that bought something on-line X amount of time ago. There is a lot of data to collect.
Maybe they have it all in pdf.
So those of us who think in terms of days, months, or years are safe? Good to know that.
To be honest I am not really concerned about the whole deal. I ended up with a copy of hl2 "free" with an ATI video card purchase. I already have the key in, content downloaded. Judging from past experience with steam I will be able to play my copy sometime late 16th/mid 17th. It doesn't really matter to me if the game becomes useless later as by then I will have a new game to play.
A lot of people are complaining about this system. My question is, what do you think should be done to prevent piracy of these games? Steam basically ensures that your simple "Here install my copy" piracy no longer works as a cdkey becomes tied to a fully unique steam account. It seems simple to me, and relatively unobtrusive when compared with other mechanisms (cd in drive requirements come to mind).
Yes it sucks to have to connect to the net to activate a single player game, but this is the world we're in today. Software vendors see piracy as a huge threat, and this is one method of solving it.
International Credit Card Fraud ring leads to bigger fish:
Authorities today arrested thousands of credit card fraudsters. These individuals were tracked down by tracing connections to a site currently under investigation. Visits to www.shadowcrew.com where traced to another site slashdot.org.
Slashdot.org, although supposedly a geek news site, has in fact been found to link heavily to credit card fraud and software piracy. Member lists have already been obtained, and many of the more prominent figures in this conspiracy ring have already been sent off for sodomiz^H^H^H^H^H^H^H detainment.
In a joint press release today Secret Service Officials and Microsoft Representatives noted that the site, in addition to its fraudulent and illegal activities is a strong advocate of the linux operating system. Microsoft Officials did not hesitate to point out the vague link that does not really exist between linux and software piracy.
I guess I could go on, but i've already started to get into absurd anti-microsoft fanboyism. I had to do it though, what good would a joke about the takedown of slashdot be without microsoft trying to get a shot in?
I guess the big reason I bought into it: Assurance that I would get it that day. Where I live there are a lot of problems with either A) Deliveries coming in on time, or B) Enough being delivered to go around. Steam avoids any chance of either.
Yeah, politicians do their lying with pants on.... and not from behind a computer.
That is a lot of wasted bullets. I mean, really, just take him out to the top of the courthouse and throw him off, repeat until desired effect is reached. Save the bullets for something more worthy.
Although it does not constitute much of a "need to know" most targeted advertising is handled via either phone messages or junk snailmail. Each requires your phone number or zip code to target you specifically. Usually I am ok with the zip code, as I see a benefit from it (coupons), and recieving excess mail is much less annoying than getting unwanted phone messages. Guess my point is that zip codes are one of the "nicer" options for targeted advertising.
That aside, the little add on tree is extended by default, and "nView Display Mode" seems like a big red flag of a place to look for me. I will grant that it being buried in the Advanced screen settings may be somehow construed as difficult, but really I think you are deliberately making the system seem more obtuse than it really is.
right-clicks on desktop.
clicks properties.
clicks the settings tab.
Total time to execute this procedure ~2 seconds, and while moving slowly. How is that buried in hours of clicking through tabs? Hell I can think of two ways to get at the display properties, and I don't even use it that much. One of the involves the control panel, which is pretty high up on the "I don't have a clue" list of places that may or may not hold configuration options. In fact I think you could say that s/sax2/Display/ and s/SuSE/Windows form a correct statement as well.
So are you calling into question the quality of free software firewalls or the quality of windows systems? The former might possibly get you lynched here, and the latter is mostly nonsense. An adequately configured windows system will at least offer up some kind of signs that you have been hacked, same as any comparably set up linux box would.
I for one welcome our new Phisopher-King-Electoral-College Member Overlords.
Here, have some FUD points for a job well done.
Glad to see that someone agrees. I don't have kids, but when I do they are going to go a long time before being exposed to the net unsuprivised. A lot of the trouble kids seem to get into these days is from their parents not knowing/caring what the hell they are doing. I, for one, will not be a part of that group.
Hey no one else seems to actually read the articles, why should they have to?
Would it not also be true that in most hacking attempts not only would it show evidence of tampering, but wouldn't the data be unusable on either the hacker or the recipient's end?
On top of that what the hell do copy/paste and availability of virtual desktops have to do with system stability? I agree that there are problems with windows, lots of problems, but if you are going to make the argument try citing some non-crap examples.
Also, from a user perspective, the proper way to do something is the way they know how to do it. Regular users could care less if the implementation is done correctly from a developer point of view as long as it works how they believe it should.
One thing you failed to mention: what do those dual booting boxes do? If all you do is boot it up and say "Oooh, look, pretty linux" then of course they don't have any problems.
It is this kind of argument that makes the entire open source community look childish and petty. You are using problems running (generally crappy) third party software to declare that windows is flawed. If you are going to argue for linux spend some more time coming up with good arguments, and less time bitching about the fact that things do not work the way you believe they should.
What you should have said is I bet I could get past this guy's setup. Give me a sock and twenty dollars in quarters.
The point is that you are not going to see one engine that can do everything that everyone wants anytime soon. Even if everything is based from the same engine you will see so many variations of it to fit a specific need that trying to call them all the same engine is almost pointless. I agree that more standardization would be great, it would especially make the task of modding for any new games much easier. I just will not be holding my breath for it to happen.
I smell another firefox plugin....if it doesn't already exist.