So we'll have a license agreement but we won't think of it as a EULA.
End User License Agreement... I suggest that we from now on use the term ANUS, which stands for "Agreement Not to Use the software Subversively". I believe it conveys the message pretty well, and will lead to fun sentences at the office like:
Did you read the ANUS?
Click OK on the ANUS.
I checked the ANUS, and if we link to it our product needs to follow its terms
You've violated the ANUS of that software package.
Exactly why are we throwing a hissy fit over this? Pop up the goddamn EULA, or rebrand it (lol, iceweasel). It's not like the end user cares enough to click Cancel while loudly gasping and saying "Oh noes, I almost agreed to those evil MPL/GPL licenses and voided my computers warranty".
Bzzzzzzt, wrong. Bioware took the chance, EA just bought Bioware. Mass Effect was released only a month after EA purchased Bioware for a whopping 860M$. (I know people who'd sell their soul for much much less) EA basicly bought a winning ticket with Mass Effect, and with it yet another franchise they can milk. The actual risk was on the side of Bioware at the time, but they knew since E3 2006 that they'd won the lottery.
The only thing EA has done so far (that I know of) with anything from Bioware is port Mass Effect to the PC, and that was easily one of the most horrible ports I've ever played.
Or the only PC single-player RPGs this decade which _weren't_ yet another medieval theme?
What a novel idea, I'm sure nobodydidthis. Oh, fuck it, have an index of RPGs from the '80s until today, notice that some of them contain the words "sci-fi" in their genre, which means the likelyhood for elves and dwarves is negligable.
So did EA screw Spore? Or maybe Spore wouldn't even have existed, if not for EA?
Will Wright! Please pee on us! I'm pretty sure someone else would've picked up Will Wrights titles. If EA didn't want it, I'm sure someone would've cupped their hands and uttered that sentence at some point.
EA might not be perfect, but it seems far less risk-averse when it comes to trying new things.
I doubt it. Spore might've been a risk for them to take, but again not a very large one.
From it's very inception they've hyped it. In the past 2 years, Spore has been hyped by ALL possible means. They even hired Robin Williams to promote it, used the "from the hands of Will Wright, the creator of Sim City and The Sims" stamp in press releases. It's like going into a DVD shop and finding an entire rack full of DVDs labeled with "From the director of the Lord of the Rings", which I'm pretty sure boosted the sales of Bad Taste and Braindead.
Companies the size of EA don't like risks. They don't like gambling with revenue when their major shareholders could turn on them at the first sign of their shares losing value.
Having said that, I bought Spore. I was pleasantly surprised until I reached space age, got annoyed and lost interest. Sure, I've messed around with the editors a couple of times after that, and I've actually played through it a few times to explore the differences between being peaceful and warlike, etc etc. But after that, the gameplay is rather meh...
I can't speak for the US, but here we have premium numbers for texting (usually they'll pay a little extra to get a 4 digit number). What it boils down to is that each SMS they receive (which is usually at 5-10 times the price of a normal SMS), they get approximatly 40% of the revenue and the carrier gets approximatly 60%. I say approximatly here because there are various plans, rates which are far too complex and boring to explain here.
The "Text us DURR to receive a new horoscope/ringtone/anal probe every hour" services, have the ability to send out SMS'es that cost money to the person receiving them. Once the person signed up for the service, they're free to start sending SMS'es whenever they see fit. There have been various customers who've received phonebills reaching into the 5000€ range.
The problem is that the whole thing was completely unregulated, and that there was no legal requirement for these companies to have a maximum of charges per day per customer. When that got regulated (in a very half-assed way) it wasn't the end of all the trouble they'd started. SMS Dating services suddenly got very popular, which required the client to SMS the "person" he was talking to, and which was basicly an OK for the company to start sending him a couple of SMS'es.
To cut this long story short and get to the interesting part, these kinds of companies were really goldmines when the whole SMS thing started picking up pace. The equipment is relatively cheap (you can buy a GSM modem for nickles and dimes), the programming for a system like that is DEAD easy (if you know Hayes commands and perl/python/whatever you can have a service like that up and running in a matter of hours).
The contract with the telephone company is very easy to obtain. All you need to do is provide some information about your company, and negotiate about how much traffic you'll be causing and receiving. As the amount of traffic goes up, the profits get higher and you get better rates.
These days it's much cheaper to have a large third party provide the service for you. They'll give you something like a rudimentary webservice where you can submit SMS'es to, they take a piece of the cake, the operator takes a piece of the cake, but you can still make money with the entire thing. Third parties are a lot easier to negotiate good deals with because they generate a lot of SMS traffic and get rates from the operator you'll never be able to get.
Finally, to answer your question: cell phone companies aren't sponsoring other companies to drive up usage. The whole thing was and probably still is a real goldmine. There's enormous amounts of people who will subscribe to these services, and they usually don't learn after they've received their first ridiculous phonebill.
I worked together with a company that provided such services at some point for a project that was a lot more innocent than what these guys usually did. They were raking in money back then, and since they still exist my guess is that they're still raking in money right now.
If I recall correctly there used to be a scam with premium telephone numbers on landlines waaaaaaay back when. The idea is basicly that you call a regular looking number, but in fact the number you're dialing has a special tariff. The company would then keep you on hold, occupied or stall you as long as possible from hanging up. Eventually the situation got so bad that the operators were forced to block all premium numbers which weren't explicitly marked with a special prefix, unless the customer requested access to that phone number by calling his operator and enabling that number. The unprefixed premium number business then sank into a slump and was effectively killed. This was of course borderline scamming, but the telcos didn't care because they again were making enormous amounts of money. Prefixed premium numbers are still making a small fortune these days with televised games and quizzes, call-in numbers for radio stations, etc etc. A fool and his money...
I've never met bigger sharks than telco people. From what I gather the situation has somewhat improved, but not much.
I'm sure you were making an excellent point. Unfortunately your geek card is being revoked due incorrect usage of the backslash, thus stripping any meaning of your comment.
/ : this is a slash, aka forward slash, or "that weird diagonal line you use on the interwebs"
\ : this is a backslash, aka "the other one you don't use... do you? what's a share? wait wait? What's it called again?"
Have a nice day,
the geek card policy enforcement internet police.
the big problem in the 3rd world is a lack of access to information about consequences... when a population thinks you cure HIV by having sex with a virgin...
Suddenly I am reminded of the slogan of an awful website reading "The internet makes you stupid".
Case in point: I have a few family members who recently have begun using the internet. With all of this wealth of information at their fingertips, they have chosen to disregard it and use it as a medium to forward each other jokes usually involving half naked women that somehow ended up in powerpoint presentations.
What surprises me is that I'll often be asked simple technical questions like "The clock on my laptop is showing the wrong time, how can I fix this?". While I'm happy to help them with this, the question "Why didn't you look that up on the internet?" remains unanswered up until this day.
Debian isn't used by anybody even moderately serious about system security
Red Hat are very serious about security.
You've managed to convince me. I mean, with those kind of arguments it's a wonder all my boxes aren't compromised by sheer arrogance and willpower alone.
This super-hacker you speak of, surely he must exist purely out of those two elements alone. It's a good thing we're able to filter out sarcasm from the Internet with iptables these days, or we'd all be in serious trouble.
... unless there's thread contention, or memory corruption, or a deadlock, or they use a non-thread-safe library with a global lock, or one thread has to handle a signal, or there's a segfault, or....
Let's not forget my all-time favourite: hardware failure due to repeated pummeling with a blunt object.
Child does good you praise it, child does bad you put it in time out.
The problem is that this child has over a million parents telling them they don't care, and little less than a hundred parents telling them it's bad. The over a million people are the ones that make the company money, the few hundreds are those that don't.
To each his own opinion and all that, and far be it from me to judge how you spend your money. In fact, I think that DRM is a good reason not to spend your money, but saying "bad dog" to EA with a few hundred people while they're making a small fortune (on what seems to be a good game for once, compared to the usual excretions that flow forth from that company), just seems rather futile.
As for me, I bought the game in the hope that it will make them come up with something original and entertaining every once in a while instead of aforementioned excrement they've blessed the world with. The fact that it's DRM'ed doesn't bother me more than the fact that if the amount of installations is exceeded I'll download the crack and get on with life.
Am I part of "the problem"? Maybe, probably, sure. Do I care enough? Well, you can answer that one yourself I guess.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a civilization to make consisting entirely out of obscene objects. brb
Smells of fanboy to me, and that isn't a good smell.
Most of the comments here smell like fanboyism, both from the perl camp and the other camps. I like the way articles like this always get 500+ comments in no time eventually ending in language du jour-camp claiming to have a better language with awesome syntax, language of old-camp claiming they can rapidly do things (it's called experience, btw), language-of-non-related-camp chiming in on having better OO-support, and language-of-years-of-training-in-acronyms-camp loudly proclaiming to be dominating the market in acronym.
Language wars aren't productive. I spent a year in an office with two guys that loved flaming eachother over their favourite language. 3 years later both of them have chosen other languages to go all zaelot about, and I'm so incredibly happy not to have to listen to it all day long.
But for completeness, I used to use perl a lot in my previous job, mostly for CGIs and quickly hacking together something I'd rather not do in bash. These days I spend a lot of time in java and C++, with every now and then a dash of python. I like to think that each programming language comes with its own mindset, idioms (and idiots) and each has their own advantages and disadvantages. I still use perl for small personal projects or quickly parsing a 200MB textfile and formatting it to another kind of textfile, simply because I can use it to things quickly or because it only needs to be done once.
Perl may have the elegant look of an infuriated elephant ramming a jeep (depending on the sloppiness of the programmer), but it's helped me do things on so many occasions in a matter of minutes that would take a lot longer in another language that I occasionally grab back to it. I still prefer it over bash for something more complicated than piping a couple of programs, and that will probably not change until it's no longer included in the operating system I will be using then.
As for all the regex hate on slashdot... I don't really get that. They're incredibly handy for parsing text quickly, but like with all things: if you take it too far you're just asking for trouble. I actually saw someone hack together an XML parser in 3 very complicated regexes, while thinking "That's impressive, but probably a very bad idea". A few days later I saw him throw a hissyfit over XML namespaces and thought "That was a bad idea".
There was also one called, "I've Found Her" which, in spite of the strange name, I recall being an impressive looking demo.
Yeah, that's the one. "I've found her" was the name and they released a prequel campaign called "Danger and opportunity". You can still download it from the site.
The site looks kinda dead on a first glance since januari last year. Too bad.
if they were spent 99% of time outside weapon range after flying past your target
Maybe it's one of those games where you get to shout "RAMMING SPEED!" once and then try to oneshot your opponent with several tons of hyperaccelerated steel of doom (coincidentally named the same as your spaceship)?
No offense to those who worked hard on vega-strike, but it is a stunning example of the horrors of realism in a game.
I never tried Vega strike, but one game that did "realistic" space combat remarkably well (as in "fun"-well, not "physics"-well) that I tried was a demo for a fan-made Babylon 5 game. This was several years ago, but it the demo was quite fun and it looked pretty neat (back then) and for a fan made game it was remarkably polished.
I don't think they ever got past the demo stage, and I forgot the title. Before someone mentions the Freespace 2 mods, that wasn't it.
Why don't they remove the obvious time wasting aspects of the game that turn a fun challenge into "grinding".
The idea behind grinding (and timesinks in general) is that you have a cheap way of keeping your players occupied. Various materials for crafting, gold, etc etc etc. In fact, why bother with creating actual content when you can keep people busy for an hour or two a day by killing the same type of monsters over and over.
kill x monster then come back [snip] kill y monster
Most RPGs suffer from this:
kill X and bring me his head for shiny coins
fetch the amulet of Y and I shall reward you handsomely
talk to Z to find out where we can find the magic donkey
Single player RPGs suffer from it, and with MMOs it's even more obvious because most people play MMOs for months. MMOs don't exactly lend themselves to epic storytelling either, because any large-scale event would affect all players. In a single player RPG you could have a character open the gates of the nine hells and have the world flooded with demons that you have to dispatch, in an MMO you can't really have that happen. "Oh great, player #239483 opened the gates to the nine hells again" "Ugh, another week of demons"
While WoW had some large scale events, such as the opening of AQ, and there was something with the undead or something, the experience is a lot less fun than when YOU are doing something.
I'm just getting tot he high level stuff and it seems to be more along these lines.
I stopped playing WoW on a regular basis when our guild started waltzing through MC. I'd noticed that casual play with friends had started to devolve to getting 40 people organized to be on time, have the correct gear and potions, spend time grinding for gold and materials and generally not having fun.
If you start spending more time preparing to have fun than actually having fun that sort of defeats the purpose of playing a game in my opinion.
why they don't try and improve the older work is beyond me
I think they did that. A few months ago an old guildmate of mine sent me a mail talking about new questhubs in low level areas (the area where Onyxia is located, I forgot the name). The thing is that there's very little to gain for Blizzard to add new low level quests. Most of their playerbase is maxed out and creates a new character or two to keep themselves occupied while they're waiting on new high level content. I think most players will start going away if there isn't new high level content regularly than low level content.
Binaries aside, usenet suffers from a far too great spam problem to ever be reborn in something that resembles what it used to be. Spammers aside, many residents can still in a fit of rage (and you know it happens) flood an entire newsgroup to death with crap for weeks if not months without getting the middle finger from their provider.
Usenet has become the backalley of the Internet. We're all so goddamn nostalgic about what it was once, that we'll oppose to it being torn down.
Despite everything some people actually still use usenet as a means of communication, but it takes a lot of effort to keep the experience somewhat spam-free, and even then. I lost a lot of my slrn configuration a couple of years ago in a move of gigantic stupidity involving rm and a poorly written shell script. Let me reassure you that I wasn't exactly joyful that evening.
it wouldn't be that hard to remove all encoded material from usenet. just set up a simple rule and restrict by size
You'd just start yet another encoding format that eludes your proposed uuencode- and yenc-filters, and large binaries would just be splitted into parts over more messages. This would then further devolve into a cat and mouse game where usenet becomes even less usable so that the last few who haunt it for its original purpose leave.
I've been using usenet for far too long to deny that save for the nails in its coffin it is dead. I still use it at least once a week, but it has far outlived its original use. The fact that software/music/movie piracy is rampant in the a.b.* hierarchy doesn't really bother me, most ISPs in my country stopped carrying alt.binaries 5 years ago and referred their customers to commercial internet providers. This probably has more to do with the cost of storage/bandwidth or contracts than the actual legal issues.
As for the whole childporn issue, there are more ways than one to skin a cat (sadly enough for the cat). If these people aren't spreading their material over usenet I'm sure they'll find more than one way to spread it effectively. From what I gather things like Tor and Freenet are suited for material of that nature as well. Before someone mentions the whole "but we need anonymous networks" thing, the point if we need it or not is moot. If tor or freenet weren't used, I'm sure something else would be used with badly secured proxies or hacked servers.
With the massive alt.* drops I'm hearing about, I'm pretty sure that the next target for the RIAA and MPAA will be the commercial usenet providers (some of them were even dumb enough to advertise with "Download full length movies" as a feature, and I hope for them they have a good lawyer). Instead of suing someone who provides access to a medium every ISP provides, it would be like suing a few large companies that are promoting unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.
The commercial usenet providers are todays backbone of usenet, Kill them off and you'll have effectively killed off usenet. I'll start crying that usenet is truly dead when those companies start closing shop.
Apparently to be evil you had to go on killing sprees amongst villagers.
This would explain a lot. For some reason those villagers just kept on running into my sword. I mean, there I was minding my own business just waving around a sharp object in some random direction and suddenly they can't wait to jump into it. Don't these people know how dangerous that is?
I still find it strange that sniping bandits who can't even see you is considered good.
You're pro-actively preventing them from doing harm. That's "good", right?
but you got a monkey that learned and did most of what you asked it.
My monkey wouldn't stop pooping in the villagers food supply, it ate half a village before it learned that villagers != food (they're for sacrificing you foolish monkey).
The only real redeemable quality of that game was that I got to hurl rocks at houses, throw villagers into mountains or other hard objects, and generally be a really really nasty god.
the movies did everything i thought it should, that didn't disappoint.
Like many people who played the game I got in trouble with my staff about halfway the game. I never had enough people, and the game stopped spawning new applicants. No matter how many awards I got, nobody ever showed up. Sandbox mode was a blast though.
I remember getting to the end of the game and looking insanely old.
I remember getting to the end of the game and having insanely big horns...
Having said that, when I played it the thing that bothered me most was that halfway the game your character becomes uber and the game becomes a laugh while you spend most of your time using two or three abilities over and over and...
That, and the fact that it was way too short. I waltzed through it on two or three evenings after work, which I think is way too short.
It's pretty neat and in a couple of evenings reading and experimenting you'll have figured most of it out (even if you're new to python).
I've used it for a few personal projects, but not at work yet so I don't have any experience with it on larger projects. Still, it's pretty neat to get something done quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
So we'll have a license agreement but we won't think of it as a EULA.
End User License Agreement... I suggest that we from now on use the term ANUS, which stands for "Agreement Not to Use the software Subversively". I believe it conveys the message pretty well, and will lead to fun sentences at the office like:
Exactly why are we throwing a hissy fit over this? Pop up the goddamn EULA, or rebrand it (lol, iceweasel). It's not like the end user cares enough to click Cancel while loudly gasping and saying "Oh noes, I almost agreed to those evil MPL/GPL licenses and voided my computers warranty".
EA taking a chance with MassEffect.
Bzzzzzzt, wrong. Bioware took the chance, EA just bought Bioware. Mass Effect was released only a month after EA purchased Bioware for a whopping 860M$. (I know people who'd sell their soul for much much less) EA basicly bought a winning ticket with Mass Effect, and with it yet another franchise they can milk. The actual risk was on the side of Bioware at the time, but they knew since E3 2006 that they'd won the lottery.
The only thing EA has done so far (that I know of) with anything from Bioware is port Mass Effect to the PC, and that was easily one of the most horrible ports I've ever played.
Or the only PC single-player RPGs this decade which _weren't_ yet another medieval theme?
What a novel idea, I'm sure nobody didthis. Oh, fuck it, have an index of RPGs from the '80s until today, notice that some of them contain the words "sci-fi" in their genre, which means the likelyhood for elves and dwarves is negligable.
So did EA screw Spore? Or maybe Spore wouldn't even have existed, if not for EA?
Will Wright! Please pee on us! I'm pretty sure someone else would've picked up Will Wrights titles. If EA didn't want it, I'm sure someone would've cupped their hands and uttered that sentence at some point.
EA might not be perfect, but it seems far less risk-averse when it comes to trying new things.
I doubt it. Spore might've been a risk for them to take, but again not a very large one.
From it's very inception they've hyped it. In the past 2 years, Spore has been hyped by ALL possible means. They even hired Robin Williams to promote it, used the "from the hands of Will Wright, the creator of Sim City and The Sims" stamp in press releases. It's like going into a DVD shop and finding an entire rack full of DVDs labeled with "From the director of the Lord of the Rings", which I'm pretty sure boosted the sales of Bad Taste and Braindead.
Companies the size of EA don't like risks. They don't like gambling with revenue when their major shareholders could turn on them at the first sign of their shares losing value.
Having said that, I bought Spore. I was pleasantly surprised until I reached space age, got annoyed and lost interest. Sure, I've messed around with the editors a couple of times after that, and I've actually played through it a few times to explore the differences between being peaceful and warlike, etc etc. But after that, the gameplay is rather meh...
Ah godsdamnit, you beat me to it
the toy consists partially of broken glass, rusty nails, and a rabid badger
Pure and utter genius! I smell a winning product. You should go work for hasbro or mattel.
I can't speak for the US, but here we have premium numbers for texting (usually they'll pay a little extra to get a 4 digit number). What it boils down to is that each SMS they receive (which is usually at 5-10 times the price of a normal SMS), they get approximatly 40% of the revenue and the carrier gets approximatly 60%. I say approximatly here because there are various plans, rates which are far too complex and boring to explain here.
The "Text us DURR to receive a new horoscope/ringtone/anal probe every hour" services, have the ability to send out SMS'es that cost money to the person receiving them. Once the person signed up for the service, they're free to start sending SMS'es whenever they see fit. There have been various customers who've received phonebills reaching into the 5000€ range.
The problem is that the whole thing was completely unregulated, and that there was no legal requirement for these companies to have a maximum of charges per day per customer. When that got regulated (in a very half-assed way) it wasn't the end of all the trouble they'd started. SMS Dating services suddenly got very popular, which required the client to SMS the "person" he was talking to, and which was basicly an OK for the company to start sending him a couple of SMS'es.
To cut this long story short and get to the interesting part, these kinds of companies were really goldmines when the whole SMS thing started picking up pace. The equipment is relatively cheap (you can buy a GSM modem for nickles and dimes), the programming for a system like that is DEAD easy (if you know Hayes commands and perl/python/whatever you can have a service like that up and running in a matter of hours).
The contract with the telephone company is very easy to obtain. All you need to do is provide some information about your company, and negotiate about how much traffic you'll be causing and receiving. As the amount of traffic goes up, the profits get higher and you get better rates.
These days it's much cheaper to have a large third party provide the service for you. They'll give you something like a rudimentary webservice where you can submit SMS'es to, they take a piece of the cake, the operator takes a piece of the cake, but you can still make money with the entire thing. Third parties are a lot easier to negotiate good deals with because they generate a lot of SMS traffic and get rates from the operator you'll never be able to get.
Finally, to answer your question: cell phone companies aren't sponsoring other companies to drive up usage. The whole thing was and probably still is a real goldmine. There's enormous amounts of people who will subscribe to these services, and they usually don't learn after they've received their first ridiculous phonebill.
I worked together with a company that provided such services at some point for a project that was a lot more innocent than what these guys usually did. They were raking in money back then, and since they still exist my guess is that they're still raking in money right now.
If I recall correctly there used to be a scam with premium telephone numbers on landlines waaaaaaay back when. The idea is basicly that you call a regular looking number, but in fact the number you're dialing has a special tariff. The company would then keep you on hold, occupied or stall you as long as possible from hanging up. Eventually the situation got so bad that the operators were forced to block all premium numbers which weren't explicitly marked with a special prefix, unless the customer requested access to that phone number by calling his operator and enabling that number. The unprefixed premium number business then sank into a slump and was effectively killed. This was of course borderline scamming, but the telcos didn't care because they again were making enormous amounts of money. Prefixed premium numbers are still making a small fortune these days with televised games and quizzes, call-in numbers for radio stations, etc etc. A fool and his money...
I've never met bigger sharks than telco people. From what I gather the situation has somewhat improved, but not much.
\.
I'm sure you were making an excellent point. Unfortunately your geek card is being revoked due incorrect usage of the backslash, thus stripping any meaning of your comment.
/ : this is a slash, aka forward slash, or "that weird diagonal line you use on the interwebs"
\ : this is a backslash, aka "the other one you don't use... do you? what's a share? wait wait? What's it called again?"
Have a nice day,
the geek card policy enforcement internet police.
I guess I touched a nerve by criticizing the Great God Rowling.
You should try saying something positive about Steve Ballmer sometime. It's like a thousand angry geeks throwing chairs at you over TCP/IP.
the big problem in the 3rd world is a lack of access to information about consequences... when a population thinks you cure HIV by having sex with a virgin...
Suddenly I am reminded of the slogan of an awful website reading "The internet makes you stupid".
Case in point: I have a few family members who recently have begun using the internet. With all of this wealth of information at their fingertips, they have chosen to disregard it and use it as a medium to forward each other jokes usually involving half naked women that somehow ended up in powerpoint presentations.
What surprises me is that I'll often be asked simple technical questions like "The clock on my laptop is showing the wrong time, how can I fix this?". While I'm happy to help them with this, the question "Why didn't you look that up on the internet?" remains unanswered up until this day.
Google will sell these eyeballs to advertisers.
6 billion eyeballs... I'm pretty sure there's a Nigerian guy who'll sell them to you for a lot cheaper than the cost of launching a single satellite.
Debian isn't used by anybody even moderately serious about system security
Red Hat are very serious about security.
You've managed to convince me. I mean, with those kind of arguments it's a wonder all my boxes aren't compromised by sheer arrogance and willpower alone.
This super-hacker you speak of, surely he must exist purely out of those two elements alone. It's a good thing we're able to filter out sarcasm from the Internet with iptables these days, or we'd all be in serious trouble.
Let's not forget my all-time favourite: hardware failure due to repeated pummeling with a blunt object.
Let's see browser tabs solve that one
The problem is that this child has over a million parents telling them they don't care, and little less than a hundred parents telling them it's bad. The over a million people are the ones that make the company money, the few hundreds are those that don't.
To each his own opinion and all that, and far be it from me to judge how you spend your money. In fact, I think that DRM is a good reason not to spend your money, but saying "bad dog" to EA with a few hundred people while they're making a small fortune (on what seems to be a good game for once, compared to the usual excretions that flow forth from that company), just seems rather futile.
As for me, I bought the game in the hope that it will make them come up with something original and entertaining every once in a while instead of aforementioned excrement they've blessed the world with. The fact that it's DRM'ed doesn't bother me more than the fact that if the amount of installations is exceeded I'll download the crack and get on with life.
Am I part of "the problem"? Maybe, probably, sure. Do I care enough? Well, you can answer that one yourself I guess.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a civilization to make consisting entirely out of obscene objects. brb
Do people still play that? I thought they just botted through the entire thing.
Most of the comments here smell like fanboyism, both from the perl camp and the other camps. I like the way articles like this always get 500+ comments in no time eventually ending in language du jour-camp claiming to have a better language with awesome syntax, language of old-camp claiming they can rapidly do things (it's called experience, btw), language-of-non-related-camp chiming in on having better OO-support, and language-of-years-of-training-in-acronyms-camp loudly proclaiming to be dominating the market in acronym.
Language wars aren't productive. I spent a year in an office with two guys that loved flaming eachother over their favourite language. 3 years later both of them have chosen other languages to go all zaelot about, and I'm so incredibly happy not to have to listen to it all day long.
But for completeness, I used to use perl a lot in my previous job, mostly for CGIs and quickly hacking together something I'd rather not do in bash. These days I spend a lot of time in java and C++, with every now and then a dash of python. I like to think that each programming language comes with its own mindset, idioms (and idiots) and each has their own advantages and disadvantages. I still use perl for small personal projects or quickly parsing a 200MB textfile and formatting it to another kind of textfile, simply because I can use it to things quickly or because it only needs to be done once.
Perl may have the elegant look of an infuriated elephant ramming a jeep (depending on the sloppiness of the programmer), but it's helped me do things on so many occasions in a matter of minutes that would take a lot longer in another language that I occasionally grab back to it. I still prefer it over bash for something more complicated than piping a couple of programs, and that will probably not change until it's no longer included in the operating system I will be using then.
As for all the regex hate on slashdot... I don't really get that. They're incredibly handy for parsing text quickly, but like with all things: if you take it too far you're just asking for trouble. I actually saw someone hack together an XML parser in 3 very complicated regexes, while thinking "That's impressive, but probably a very bad idea". A few days later I saw him throw a hissyfit over XML namespaces and thought "That was a bad idea".
That reminded me of brainfuck, while not exactly punctuation it does look like an explosion
For some reason I'm reminded of the southpark episode where Cartman competes in the paralympics
Knitting Master 2 : the revenge of the wool
Oh I think I struck gold... brb programming
Yeah, that's the one. "I've found her" was the name and they released a prequel campaign called "Danger and opportunity". You can still download it from the site.
The site looks kinda dead on a first glance since januari last year. Too bad.
Maybe it's one of those games where you get to shout "RAMMING SPEED!" once and then try to oneshot your opponent with several tons of hyperaccelerated steel of doom (coincidentally named the same as your spaceship)?
I never tried Vega strike, but one game that did "realistic" space combat remarkably well (as in "fun"-well, not "physics"-well) that I tried was a demo for a fan-made Babylon 5 game. This was several years ago, but it the demo was quite fun and it looked pretty neat (back then) and for a fan made game it was remarkably polished.
I don't think they ever got past the demo stage, and I forgot the title. Before someone mentions the Freespace 2 mods, that wasn't it.
The idea behind grinding (and timesinks in general) is that you have a cheap way of keeping your players occupied. Various materials for crafting, gold, etc etc etc. In fact, why bother with creating actual content when you can keep people busy for an hour or two a day by killing the same type of monsters over and over.
Most RPGs suffer from this:
Single player RPGs suffer from it, and with MMOs it's even more obvious because most people play MMOs for months. MMOs don't exactly lend themselves to epic storytelling either, because any large-scale event would affect all players. In a single player RPG you could have a character open the gates of the nine hells and have the world flooded with demons that you have to dispatch, in an MMO you can't really have that happen. "Oh great, player #239483 opened the gates to the nine hells again" "Ugh, another week of demons"
While WoW had some large scale events, such as the opening of AQ, and there was something with the undead or something, the experience is a lot less fun than when YOU are doing something.
I stopped playing WoW on a regular basis when our guild started waltzing through MC. I'd noticed that casual play with friends had started to devolve to getting 40 people organized to be on time, have the correct gear and potions, spend time grinding for gold and materials and generally not having fun.
If you start spending more time preparing to have fun than actually having fun that sort of defeats the purpose of playing a game in my opinion.
I think they did that. A few months ago an old guildmate of mine sent me a mail talking about new questhubs in low level areas (the area where Onyxia is located, I forgot the name). The thing is that there's very little to gain for Blizzard to add new low level quests. Most of their playerbase is maxed out and creates a new character or two to keep themselves occupied while they're waiting on new high level content. I think most players will start going away if there isn't new high level content regularly than low level content.
Binaries aside, usenet suffers from a far too great spam problem to ever be reborn in something that resembles what it used to be. Spammers aside, many residents can still in a fit of rage (and you know it happens) flood an entire newsgroup to death with crap for weeks if not months without getting the middle finger from their provider.
Usenet has become the backalley of the Internet. We're all so goddamn nostalgic about what it was once, that we'll oppose to it being torn down.
Despite everything some people actually still use usenet as a means of communication, but it takes a lot of effort to keep the experience somewhat spam-free, and even then. I lost a lot of my slrn configuration a couple of years ago in a move of gigantic stupidity involving rm and a poorly written shell script. Let me reassure you that I wasn't exactly joyful that evening.
You'd just start yet another encoding format that eludes your proposed uuencode- and yenc-filters, and large binaries would just be splitted into parts over more messages. This would then further devolve into a cat and mouse game where usenet becomes even less usable so that the last few who haunt it for its original purpose leave.
I've been using usenet for far too long to deny that save for the nails in its coffin it is dead. I still use it at least once a week, but it has far outlived its original use. The fact that software/music/movie piracy is rampant in the a.b.* hierarchy doesn't really bother me, most ISPs in my country stopped carrying alt.binaries 5 years ago and referred their customers to commercial internet providers. This probably has more to do with the cost of storage/bandwidth or contracts than the actual legal issues.
As for the whole childporn issue, there are more ways than one to skin a cat (sadly enough for the cat). If these people aren't spreading their material over usenet I'm sure they'll find more than one way to spread it effectively. From what I gather things like Tor and Freenet are suited for material of that nature as well. Before someone mentions the whole "but we need anonymous networks" thing, the point if we need it or not is moot. If tor or freenet weren't used, I'm sure something else would be used with badly secured proxies or hacked servers.
With the massive alt.* drops I'm hearing about, I'm pretty sure that the next target for the RIAA and MPAA will be the commercial usenet providers (some of them were even dumb enough to advertise with "Download full length movies" as a feature, and I hope for them they have a good lawyer). Instead of suing someone who provides access to a medium every ISP provides, it would be like suing a few large companies that are promoting unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.
The commercial usenet providers are todays backbone of usenet, Kill them off and you'll have effectively killed off usenet. I'll start crying that usenet is truly dead when those companies start closing shop.
This would explain a lot. For some reason those villagers just kept on running into my sword. I mean, there I was minding my own business just waving around a sharp object in some random direction and suddenly they can't wait to jump into it. Don't these people know how dangerous that is?
You're pro-actively preventing them from doing harm. That's "good", right?
My monkey wouldn't stop pooping in the villagers food supply, it ate half a village before it learned that villagers != food (they're for sacrificing you foolish monkey).
The only real redeemable quality of that game was that I got to hurl rocks at houses, throw villagers into mountains or other hard objects, and generally be a really really nasty god.
Like many people who played the game I got in trouble with my staff about halfway the game. I never had enough people, and the game stopped spawning new applicants. No matter how many awards I got, nobody ever showed up. Sandbox mode was a blast though.
I remember getting to the end of the game and having insanely big horns...
Having said that, when I played it the thing that bothered me most was that halfway the game your character becomes uber and the game becomes a laugh while you spend most of your time using two or three abilities over and over and ...
That, and the fact that it was way too short. I waltzed through it on two or three evenings after work, which I think is way too short.
I'm sure this'll upset someone, but it's rails for python. Django Project Homepage
It's pretty neat and in a couple of evenings reading and experimenting you'll have figured most of it out (even if you're new to python).
I've used it for a few personal projects, but not at work yet so I don't have any experience with it on larger projects. Still, it's pretty neat to get something done quickly.