Mythic's claim is that Warhammer Online represents "the smoothest MMO launch to date." How do you back that up tangibly?
Hah, what a huge lie. Warhammer Europe launch was quite bad, for example compared to the LOTRO launch a year earlier. It is also obvious they shipped the game too early - because it lacks a lot of polish. There are a lot of obvious bugs that I've encountered in the first 10 or so minutes:
- The registration process for online downloads is convulted
- The game forces you to accept the EULA at every launch
- There is a cinematic button in the main menu that does nothing
- For online downoad guys we still have to use the beta client and while the FAQ states that it should work (and it does), this is still lack of attention to detail
- Every time you get a tome entry in game, there is a popup saying that you've learned about such and such. You can click on it and it displays the knowledge article. But in the tome of knowledge there is also a "new things" page. It doesn't take off entries you've viewed with any other method except through that page - so the "new things" indicator keeps flashing. Obvious bug.
- Stability problems: OK, this is the first week when they are live and they've got serious traffic. However there is no excuse for the desync - the client side getting confused without there being a mechanism to handle it, either by disconnection or just by not getting desynced in the first place. The patcher and the server list has been down a lot aswell.
- Optimization problems: I've got a high end pc, but the game is so slow that I had to go back to medium settings. But even on high, the game is kind of ugly. For comparison LOTRO has much better textures and effects while managing to put less strain on my pc.
- Lots of small interface and game bugs.
Now, I remember the slashdot article back from last december that said they delayed releasing the game, but by what I'm seeing they should have spent another year working on it.
You misunderstood my point. The point I was trying to make is that this is why it is important to perform checks on things that seem obvious. Because sometimes we turn out to be wrong, BUT when the "obvious" thing turns out to be true sometimes the media trumpets it as "oh those silly scientists confirmed again something blindingly obvious, what a waste of time". It isn't a waste of time. We increased our confidence in some information.
Yes, the fact that politics is in large part driven by fear is nothing new. So why is this interesting?
It is interesting to science. There is a marked difference between what we "know" intuitively. In a lot of cases, the intuitive answer happens to be true. Science progresses because we question the obvious. They basically strengthened an assumption. The problem with this is that the media gets these kinds of news wrong. The media doesn't know how to interpret this correctly. Cue the bruhaha about scientists confirming something obvious again.
Mozilla is quite understandably protective of its Firefox trademark, and doesn't want it applied to builds that have been patched or changed by distros.
There is nothing understandable about it. This goes against the spirit of free software. The whole point of the GPL is to preserve the freedom to modify, patch and change software and now Mozilla tries to act like they didn't know this when they used a license that in spirit absolutely requires this. Mozilla tries to undermine the license by trademarks which is unethical and is reminiscent of a power grab. It is a power grab because there is no such thing as _control_ in free software. That's the whole point - to create an ecosystem which is not in a dependency relationship!
The point that they want to ensure quality and prevent bad versions of the browser being spread under the Firefox name is utterly stupid. People infecting firefox builds with viruses aren't going to care about licenses, so this argument boils down to the quality and control issue. Who is Mozilla to tell that Ubuntu's or their version of Firefox is better? In a free software environment they don't get to have that kind of authority to proclaim and enforce things. Mozilla acts like a corporation managing one of their assets and eventually in cases like this, this means that they choose their own selfish interests before the public's interest. Real F/OSS projects don't use legalese to pretend to protect the reputation of their code, but rather improve their code.
BTW, what you described pretty much already exists in the form of IceWeasel, which was created when Debian found that the terms for use of the Firefox trademark were too harsh for them.
It wasn't too harsh, it was unacceptable because of the licensing terms. Either that or they violate the core debian guidelines the whole distribution was founded on. It wasn't just the trademark.
I wonder what further bad will come out of Mozilla being too corporate. It starts to look like an elegant way of getting a paycheck and less like about making a good browser.
It is inconcievable that Mozilla would face any legal problems due to a lack of EULA.
A contract cuts both ways. People were ranting about personal responsibility when that family got hit by $18k roaming charges a few stories ago by AT&T. Companies need to hold themselves to the contract too, they signed the contract saying they'll provide a service under the given terms, so when a user takes advantage of it they have nothing to complain about. If they have oversold their capacity that is solely the ISPs problem.
and is not as big of a deal in most countries outside of the U.S.A
That is because outside the USA, it has been virtually eradicated from livestock. Sweden began a program to do so more than 40 years ago and now less than 0.1% of Swedish cattle is infected with Salmonella. Compare that to the US with 2.1%...
Basically, the meat packing industry's favourite tactic is that when some contamination, like salmonella is found in the meat they will just sit on it. If the media gets wind of the story, they'll voluntarily recall a small fraction of the meat unfit for human consumption.
At least Nvidia by doing the same thing is not directly endangering human lives...
It seems that there is still a problem with RedHat's packaged perl 5.8."8"**. RedHat seem to have an aggressive policy of incorporating pre-release changes in their released production code. This would not be so bad if they actually communicated back with upstream (i.e. me and the other people on the perl5-porters mailing list), or demonstrated that they had sufficient in-house knowledge that they didn't need to. But evidence suggests that neither is true, certainly for 5.8.x
Let me stress that there has never been this problem in any released Perl, 5.8.7, 5.8.8, 5.10.0, and it won't be in 5.8.9 either when it comes out. The problem was caused by changes I made in the 5.8.x tree that RedHat integrated. End users reported the first bug something like 2 years ago, and RedHat closed it as "upstream patch" rather than reporting back "you know that pre-release change you made, that we integrated - well, it seems to have some problems"
(...)
For their versions affected, RedHat merely need to put out a patch integrating changes 31996, 32018, 32019 and 32025 which FIX IT, are documented as FIXING IT, and are from NOVEMBER 2007.
Uptime: 46 days, 15:09:03
Video: Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [MB/GB]: 395,20 / 522,76
Internet: Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [GB/GB]: 17,38 / 105,68
That's the traffic statistics from my home gateway. The former data transfer amount refers to digital television, the latter to what my household uses for our internet needs. The digital tv is not turned on at all that much and it's mostly not high def.
Yeah, I wouldn't probably use 250GB for my regular internet usage, but I could damn well conceive subscribing to digital television with my ISP only providing the bandwidth and another company providing the service over my internet line. Lawmakers would want to encourage decoupling things like this, because it prevents monopolies.
So yeah, in the digital era you can easily use at least 350GB per every month, just so that someone watches the TV.
Currently LOTRO appears to be the best fantasy themed MMO out there if you're looking for content. They went live in 2007 and had _7_ major content dumps called 'books' while a major expansion is launching this fall. I'd say that sets the industry standard.
- Perl is not dying, in fact see this presentation about how well it actually does in terms of Perl jobs vs Ruby or Python.
- Says who? I find Perl syntactically beautiful and _consistent_. Much more so than php or ruby. Python is nice, but whitespace sensitivity is a burden some people are not willing to bear.
- While I certainly respect personal decisions as to which tool is the best for a given job, I personally would be hard presssed to find a better language for web development. That is even without talking about CPAN - because with CPAN Perl wins with a landslide.
- It's easy to write bad code for those who don't have the willingness to learn the language basics. Or to answer you with a quote: "If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, Perl will give you ten bullets and a laser scope, then stand by and cheer you on". This doesn't mean however that the language doesn't lend itself to good practices! There are reasonable community standards that are well known to anyone even tangentially involved with Perl. Perl let's you write code that is trully messed up, but only if the programmer writing it deliberately formulates it so. If a programmer decides it's a good idea to violate all reasonable coding standards and write code in a mess of a fashion, then that's the incompetence of the programmer. True, Perl doesn't actually FORCE you to avoid that kind of behaviour, but if you don't avoid it by yourself, then you have no idea about programming anyway. Comparing this to java, I'd rather be able to tell by glancing at a programmer's code in Perl that he's no idea what he's doing than to use java like strictness where source code looks like it's from a cookie cutter and discover that a programmer is lousy based on business code. This whole "Perl is unreadable wah wah wah" is just another tired chestnut, sorry.
While you're at it, why not just say that Apache is dieing too, based on that logic? The fact is, if you look at the Perl job market, it's booming.
Posting about it is not the equivalent of a slashdot story, besides they've been presenting the link to large IT conferences all around the world - the cat is not exactly in the bag...
I'm kind of suprised that my ISP in Hungary is switching over it's infrastructure to IPv6 and making IPv6 available for the users by the end of this year. I consider it a huge step forward, plus the free porn here is a welcome bonus.
Reminds me of the false anecdote that while NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that worked in zero-g, the russians had an elegant solution: pencils.
If NASA had that attitude, we never would have had a decade of stagnation after the first Shuttle accident
NASA made the error of designing the shuttle in a top-down manner, which is a clear design procedure mistake. According to their engineering estimates the shuttle has about 1:100 chance of failure per flight, which means a high-profile shuttle disaster every few decades or so. The public and politicians are not willing to put up with that and NASA has no options to fix this, given that redesigning the shuttle from the ground up is out of budget. Instead they put the shuttle on the backburner and went for other areas to spend money on. It's looks like less progress, but I think it's taking the longer view atm.
A new architecture means there are thousands of things to be worked out and fixed before it can get to the same level as the current implementation. Think a decade or two, with significant funding (think billions).
Systems that evolved are often not ideal or perfect, but they do work. Iterative evolution is important, because sometimes it's just not feasible to design something.
I live in Hungary which makes this a bit easier. Credit cards are less widespread in Europe. I prefer to pay with cash anyway.
I try to avoid Coca-Cola or go to the McDonalds, because I just prefer healthier drinks and food. Staples? They don't do business around here. I'm not buying Adidas for years now, due to the quality decrease they managed to come up with when they moved production out of Germany. I don't watch NBC or use any GE products. I had a GE CFL 3-4 years ago, but it sucked and I promptly replaced it with another brand.
I don't like snickers because of the nuts. I drive a Volvo not a Volkswagen. My laptop is a Dell not a Lenovo. I use DHS and not UPS. I drink mostly austrian, german and belgian beers not Budweiser.
The only item on the list that inconveniences me is Samsung. I quite like their products, but looks like my next phone will be a Nokia. So all in all the olympics sponsorship just reinforces my belief not to do business with these companies, because with the exception of Samsung, I've had either no experience or bad experience with them.
Some might say that not buying from companies that I wasn't intending to buy from anyway isn't really a big hit for them, however that's not the case. I would still check from time to time whether they'd made a good product or not and I would have decided based on that. With their sponsorship of the olympics, I don't care if they make the best product in the world, I'm not buying from them based on principle and that's quite different. Getting off someone's personal shitlist is going to be harder than just coming up with a good product.
I'm boycotting the olympics but not primarily because of China. The whole overcommercialized, performance enhancing drug fueled, censorship and copyright problem ridden thing disgusts me to the core. It is the polar opposite of what the olympic spirit was.
I'm automatically excluding every brand on my purchase list as long as they feature ads in the Olympics theme or sponsor the Olympics.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah, what a huge lie. Warhammer Europe launch was quite bad, for example compared to the LOTRO launch a year earlier. It is also obvious they shipped the game too early - because it lacks a lot of polish. There are a lot of obvious bugs that I've encountered in the first 10 or so minutes:
- The registration process for online downloads is convulted
- The game forces you to accept the EULA at every launch
- There is a cinematic button in the main menu that does nothing
- For online downoad guys we still have to use the beta client and while the FAQ states that it should work (and it does), this is still lack of attention to detail
- Every time you get a tome entry in game, there is a popup saying that you've learned about such and such. You can click on it and it displays the knowledge article. But in the tome of knowledge there is also a "new things" page. It doesn't take off entries you've viewed with any other method except through that page - so the "new things" indicator keeps flashing. Obvious bug.
- Stability problems: OK, this is the first week when they are live and they've got serious traffic. However there is no excuse for the desync - the client side getting confused without there being a mechanism to handle it, either by disconnection or just by not getting desynced in the first place. The patcher and the server list has been down a lot aswell.
- Optimization problems: I've got a high end pc, but the game is so slow that I had to go back to medium settings. But even on high, the game is kind of ugly. For comparison LOTRO has much better textures and effects while managing to put less strain on my pc.
- Lots of small interface and game bugs.
Now, I remember the slashdot article back from last december that said they delayed releasing the game, but by what I'm seeing they should have spent another year working on it.
You misunderstood my point. The point I was trying to make is that this is why it is important to perform checks on things that seem obvious. Because sometimes we turn out to be wrong, BUT when the "obvious" thing turns out to be true sometimes the media trumpets it as "oh those silly scientists confirmed again something blindingly obvious, what a waste of time". It isn't a waste of time. We increased our confidence in some information.
Yes, the fact that politics is in large part driven by fear is nothing new. So why is this interesting?
It is interesting to science. There is a marked difference between what we "know" intuitively. In a lot of cases, the intuitive answer happens to be true. Science progresses because we question the obvious. They basically strengthened an assumption. The problem with this is that the media gets these kinds of news wrong. The media doesn't know how to interpret this correctly. Cue the bruhaha about scientists confirming something obvious again.
There is nothing understandable about it. This goes against the spirit of free software. The whole point of the GPL is to preserve the freedom to modify, patch and change software and now Mozilla tries to act like they didn't know this when they used a license that in spirit absolutely requires this. Mozilla tries to undermine the license by trademarks which is unethical and is reminiscent of a power grab. It is a power grab because there is no such thing as _control_ in free software. That's the whole point - to create an ecosystem which is not in a dependency relationship!
The point that they want to ensure quality and prevent bad versions of the browser being spread under the Firefox name is utterly stupid. People infecting firefox builds with viruses aren't going to care about licenses, so this argument boils down to the quality and control issue. Who is Mozilla to tell that Ubuntu's or their version of Firefox is better? In a free software environment they don't get to have that kind of authority to proclaim and enforce things. Mozilla acts like a corporation managing one of their assets and eventually in cases like this, this means that they choose their own selfish interests before the public's interest. Real F/OSS projects don't use legalese to pretend to protect the reputation of their code, but rather improve their code.
It wasn't too harsh, it was unacceptable because of the licensing terms. Either that or they violate the core debian guidelines the whole distribution was founded on. It wasn't just the trademark.
I wonder what further bad will come out of Mozilla being too corporate. It starts to look like an elegant way of getting a paycheck and less like about making a good browser.
It is inconcievable that Mozilla would face any legal problems due to a lack of EULA.
Honestly, I'm not sure if I believe that. They have their system's reputation to protect...
A contract cuts both ways. People were ranting about personal responsibility when that family got hit by $18k roaming charges a few stories ago by AT&T. Companies need to hold themselves to the contract too, they signed the contract saying they'll provide a service under the given terms, so when a user takes advantage of it they have nothing to complain about. If they have oversold their capacity that is solely the ISPs problem.
That is because outside the USA, it has been virtually eradicated from livestock. Sweden began a program to do so more than 40 years ago and now less than 0.1% of Swedish cattle is infected with Salmonella. Compare that to the US with 2.1%...
Basically, the meat packing industry's favourite tactic is that when some contamination, like salmonella is found in the meat they will just sit on it. If the media gets wind of the story, they'll voluntarily recall a small fraction of the meat unfit for human consumption.
At least Nvidia by doing the same thing is not directly endangering human lives...
This is what a perl core hacker has to say about the issue:
That's the traffic statistics from my home gateway. The former data transfer amount refers to digital television, the latter to what my household uses for our internet needs. The digital tv is not turned on at all that much and it's mostly not high def.
Yeah, I wouldn't probably use 250GB for my regular internet usage, but I could damn well conceive subscribing to digital television with my ISP only providing the bandwidth and another company providing the service over my internet line. Lawmakers would want to encourage decoupling things like this, because it prevents monopolies.
So yeah, in the digital era you can easily use at least 350GB per every month, just so that someone watches the TV.
Currently LOTRO appears to be the best fantasy themed MMO out there if you're looking for content. They went live in 2007 and had _7_ major content dumps called 'books' while a major expansion is launching this fall. I'd say that sets the industry standard.
That still gives me trouble when I want to visit postgresql.org and my gf is sitting next to me...
Why not just use the inertial dampeners from the puddle jumpers?
Except of course...
- Perl is not dying, in fact see this presentation about how well it actually does in terms of Perl jobs vs Ruby or Python.
- Says who? I find Perl syntactically beautiful and _consistent_. Much more so than php or ruby. Python is nice, but whitespace sensitivity is a burden some people are not willing to bear.
- While I certainly respect personal decisions as to which tool is the best for a given job, I personally would be hard presssed to find a better language for web development. That is even without talking about CPAN - because with CPAN Perl wins with a landslide.
- It's easy to write bad code for those who don't have the willingness to learn the language basics. Or to answer you with a quote: "If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, Perl will give you ten bullets and a laser scope, then stand by and cheer you on". This doesn't mean however that the language doesn't lend itself to good practices! There are reasonable community standards that are well known to anyone even tangentially involved with Perl. Perl let's you write code that is trully messed up, but only if the programmer writing it deliberately formulates it so. If a programmer decides it's a good idea to violate all reasonable coding standards and write code in a mess of a fashion, then that's the incompetence of the programmer. True, Perl doesn't actually FORCE you to avoid that kind of behaviour, but if you don't avoid it by yourself, then you have no idea about programming anyway. Comparing this to java, I'd rather be able to tell by glancing at a programmer's code in Perl that he's no idea what he's doing than to use java like strictness where source code looks like it's from a cookie cutter and discover that a programmer is lousy based on business code. This whole "Perl is unreadable wah wah wah" is just another tired chestnut, sorry.
While you're at it, why not just say that Apache is dieing too, based on that logic? The fact is, if you look at the Perl job market, it's booming.
Too expensive my ass.
Posting about it is not the equivalent of a slashdot story, besides they've been presenting the link to large IT conferences all around the world - the cat is not exactly in the bag...
I'm kind of suprised that my ISP in Hungary is switching over it's infrastructure to IPv6 and making IPv6 available for the users by the end of this year. I consider it a huge step forward, plus the free porn here is a welcome bonus.
Reminds me of the false anecdote that while NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that worked in zero-g, the russians had an elegant solution: pencils.
Your sister is easy too?
NASA made the error of designing the shuttle in a top-down manner, which is a clear design procedure mistake. According to their engineering estimates the shuttle has about 1:100 chance of failure per flight, which means a high-profile shuttle disaster every few decades or so. The public and politicians are not willing to put up with that and NASA has no options to fix this, given that redesigning the shuttle from the ground up is out of budget. Instead they put the shuttle on the backburner and went for other areas to spend money on. It's looks like less progress, but I think it's taking the longer view atm.
You cannae change the laws of physics!
A new architecture means there are thousands of things to be worked out and fixed before it can get to the same level as the current implementation. Think a decade or two, with significant funding (think billions).
Systems that evolved are often not ideal or perfect, but they do work. Iterative evolution is important, because sometimes it's just not feasible to design something.
I live in Hungary which makes this a bit easier. Credit cards are less widespread in Europe. I prefer to pay with cash anyway.
I try to avoid Coca-Cola or go to the McDonalds, because I just prefer healthier drinks and food. Staples? They don't do business around here. I'm not buying Adidas for years now, due to the quality decrease they managed to come up with when they moved production out of Germany. I don't watch NBC or use any GE products. I had a GE CFL 3-4 years ago, but it sucked and I promptly replaced it with another brand.
I don't like snickers because of the nuts. I drive a Volvo not a Volkswagen. My laptop is a Dell not a Lenovo. I use DHS and not UPS. I drink mostly austrian, german and belgian beers not Budweiser.
The only item on the list that inconveniences me is Samsung. I quite like their products, but looks like my next phone will be a Nokia. So all in all the olympics sponsorship just reinforces my belief not to do business with these companies, because with the exception of Samsung, I've had either no experience or bad experience with them.
Some might say that not buying from companies that I wasn't intending to buy from anyway isn't really a big hit for them, however that's not the case. I would still check from time to time whether they'd made a good product or not and I would have decided based on that. With their sponsorship of the olympics, I don't care if they make the best product in the world, I'm not buying from them based on principle and that's quite different. Getting off someone's personal shitlist is going to be harder than just coming up with a good product.
I'm boycotting the olympics but not primarily because of China. The whole overcommercialized, performance enhancing drug fueled, censorship and copyright problem ridden thing disgusts me to the core. It is the polar opposite of what the olympic spirit was.
I'm automatically excluding every brand on my purchase list as long as they feature ads in the Olympics theme or sponsor the Olympics.