Okay, I highly doubt that Blizzard isn't porting Starcraft to linux because they "just don't like open source". Obviously, Blizzard programmers are highly paid, and are developing either new games or patches for existing ones. Starcraft, remember, is quite an old game, and I doubt much of any dev team is currently working on it.
And Blizzard's right! Sure, linux is great yada yada I love it too, but the crowd they're targetting isn't the < 1% of the gaming population that uses linux.
I don't mean this to be a flame, but you have to consider Blizzard's economic decisions here; I know they have lots of money, but I doubt that they're not porting out of spite.
Let me briefly talk about friends online. I've made some posts about gaming addiction in other places, but this is something that really deserves it's own special place.
You can make friends online. Yeah. You can. As I type this, I'm listening to six people talk to each other-- about everything, Counter-Strike among topics, on TeamSpeak, a VoIP chat software. One of those people go to school with me. All of them, I'd consider a true friend.
Yeah, it started with a (now defunct) CS team. But we're friends. Even when I'm not gaming, I'm on TeamSpeak, and I talk to my friends. I love these guys.
It's not all about gaming, but the friends you can make through gaming*.
- dshaw
*: Yeah, I know this isn't the case for everyone, and there are "real" addicts. However, it's true that for a lot of online gamers, this is part of the cause of 'addiction'.
One of the key points of addiction is the inability to stop even when something is no longer fun.
Right, I fully and utterly agree- however, 'gaming addiction' might be the most misdiagnosed addiction ever. Why? Because when I (for example) played 40 hours of Counter-Strike a week, it was very much a need to me to play: this is because it was fun for me. Eventually, the game lost the fun it once had, and I eventually stopped playing. Now, I play maybe 5 hours a week, because it's fun again.
The point I'm trying to make here is that according to what you said, and what others have stated, I would have been 'addicted' to Counter-Strike for 2 weeks... but truthfully, I could have stopped whenever I wanted to; and, in fact, when the game lost it's gleam, I did stop.
Maybe I'm wording this badly (I'm pretty tired). My point is that yeah, some poeple are addicted, but just because people play a lot because they have fun, it doesn't mean that they need psychological help!
I concur, with parent, grandparent, and most of all great-grandparent.
There have been times when I've spent 40 hours a week gaming. So what? Okay, fine, that was a little bit obsessive (I had just gotten Counter-Strike, come on now), but the point remains that there are far more who watch 6-8hours of television daily, and more on weekends. There are people who are addicted to drugs (different entirely), exercising, betting (gambling), reading... gaming isn't addiction, it's entertainment. Everyone wants to have a good time, right?
Now I can download a program that improves my Internet Explorer to look, act, and feel just like Firefox! I mean, sure it won't be kept up to date, or really fix the security holes, but it's the look that matters!
Or, I could just download Firefox.
This is a cool project, but I have to say, I'd rather just use the real thing.
I'm not totally sure if this is what you're asking for, but this book by Alan R. Feuer has some interesting (and sometimes frustrating) puzzles in C. I'm sure that there are similar books for C++, Java, Python, perl, etc. It's worth looking into, in my opinion; I have a copy sitting on my printer about an arm's reach away (for when I need a distraction from a project).
I have to say, I've used a Telephreak.org voice mailbox for about a year now. It's a lifesaver. The guys over there have an awesome way of doing things. I've met the crew online (irc.telephreak.org), and (as you may or may not be able to tell), they're pretty awesome. I'm a huge Telephreak fan. Glad to hear they're up to more cool stuff:)
I fully agree with you on most of these points, but just to play the devil's advocate... if we didn't have team kill punishing enabled, what's to stop those same asshats from teamkilling everyone? 'Well, you could votekick them out then', you say. But, your first point was that the voting system sucks... so, what's the answer?
The e-books are free, but you have to pay for the actual books. Okay, that's pretty nice of them, and it makes sense to me. But what if I decide that, for ease of reading, I want to print out my e-book? Am I legally allowed to print it? If I'm allowed to distribute the free e-book (and I don't know if I am), couldn't I print many of them, and give them to people at Barnes & Noble? There are some borderlines there, and I'm quite interested in figuring it all out.
But from a gamer's standpoint, the patch is really really good. Er, let me add a disclaimer in that this isn't a flame. Right. Anyway, the original version of BF2 is much harder to play from the bug perspective. Okay, yeah, the new patch introduced a memory leak, which is needless to say horrible. In general, however, the UI and number of (noticable) bugs decreased dramatically. This story is quite a bit biased; I'm sure that gamers are mostly sad to hear this news, since not only must they go back to the buggy original release, but they don't know what their favorite servers will be running!
"Dear Mr. Katz. I am 10. My parents took my computer away today, because of what they saw on television. They told me they just couldn't be around enough to make sure that I'm doing the right things on the Internet. My Mom and Dad told me they didn't want to be standing at my funeral some day because of things I was doing that they didn't know about. I am at my best friend's house, and am pretty bummed, because things are boring now. I hope I'll get it back."
I'm not exaggerating or being sarcastic when I say that that statement brought tears to my eyes. I'm sixteen years old, and I know so very many parents who react like this. It really makes me think of the age-old statement of how people fear what they don't understand. Columbine was a tragedy, and just because us geeks don't play all-American sports (at least not all of us), and we don't (all) cheer at said games, it doesn't mean that we're not affected by killers.
It's sad what the media sometimes portrays geeks and nerds as.
Yeah, if you're convincing, universities will hire you (sometimes). I'm doing an internship at UCSD this summer, and worked at SDSC (sdsc.edu) programming last year. If you're a convincing guy, you'll do fine:) University guys appreciate helpful high school kids.
Isn't this a lot like Netcraft's new Anti-Phishing plugin? I'm glad that all these people are finally taking initiative against phishers, even though it's almost definitely due to the heightened media attention that phishing is currently getting.
In practice though, I think the only way this would really work is if it's shipped by default in Firefox. The peoplen that would install this anti-phishing plugin aren't usually the people that would get tricked by phishing scams anyway.
- dshaw
Note: This is all IMO; and yes, I understand that some scams are so realistic that anyone could get caught in their webs.
If you RTFA - its a study of how downloading affects Canadian artistes and the Canadian body is the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), not the RIAA.
Yeah, but don't you think the CRIA's data would mirror that of the RIAA? What, piracy would be a major problem here, but not the Canada? That doesn't make much sense. I was speaking preemtively- what will the RIAA say when Americans point to this study.
Always revealing the truth. Of course, the question remains if this data was strictly for Canada, or for the global music industry itself. And, more important, what will the RIAA retort? Maybe now the **AA will stop trying to sue everyone and his sister and actually work on competing with what appears to be free media. One can only hope...
I know it's stuff out of sci-fi movies, but wouldn't a large electromagnetic pulse render the robots useless, leaving the DMZ wide open to a foreign military?
I think if she wants to get admitted into a US university, her best bet would probably be to finish high school in Egypt (or get a GED from the US), and apply to a US college as a foreigner. Colleges like diversity and foreigners.
People play games like this because they like to feel immersed in the world in which they're playing. Putting modern advertisements like this into games breaks the immersion (as the article pointed out) and in the end result would (1) cause people to stop wanting to play the game and (2) not make people buy these products. People that feel pissed of at Sprite, for example, because they're interfering in their game are not going to want to buy that product.
[...] which is the last remaining pinball manufacturer in the world.
You'd think that with a lot of arcades around the world using pinball machines, some other companies would want to compete with these guys... or perhaps there's such a huge monopoly that everyone else just gives up. Makes you wonder about monopoly laws, though...
Well, without an article it's a little hard to comment a lot. However, I think that this means that people can download games via their cable... quite a lot like downloading a game via cable internet. Sounds like an interesting idea, though... let's see if it flies.
Despite the problem originating from a handful of IP addresses, MAPS saw it appropriate to block over 180,000 IP addresses just before the weekend! I had already made several phone calls and emails to my co-location facility, and they told me they were doing their best to get a hold of someone there.
That's a little bit unreasonable. If you, one of the customers, was trying to deal with them, it would have been much more reasonable to simply unblock your IP(s). Blocking an entire block due to one single issue (or so it seems) is pretty unreasonable. I'd send them a formal letter of complaint, rather than talk to one of their phone operators.
A lot of people (*cough*microsoft*cough*) would have you know that OSS software "costs more in the end" or something. I personally disagree, but yes- it's a duh type of thing that "free is less money than costly".
I don't know why, but I get a distinctly bad feeling about GMail going public. I, myself, am an avid GMail user, and I do care about the program deeply. However, I do feel that once the program reaches it's peak users (who don't know to *delete* old mail), the GMail hard drives might start to be full... and I know Google's awesome, but I'm just amazed that they'll be able to handle terrabytes of information as accounts start to fill.
And, of course the spammers... but I'm sure those have tried already.
Also... what about the services, that GMail reserved for Beta Testers? I can't recall them offhand, but will they cost money now?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I highly doubt that Blizzard isn't porting Starcraft to linux because they "just don't like open source". Obviously, Blizzard programmers are highly paid, and are developing either new games or patches for existing ones. Starcraft, remember, is quite an old game, and I doubt much of any dev team is currently working on it.
And Blizzard's right! Sure, linux is great yada yada I love it too, but the crowd they're targetting isn't the < 1% of the gaming population that uses linux.
I don't mean this to be a flame, but you have to consider Blizzard's economic decisions here; I know they have lots of money, but I doubt that they're not porting out of spite.
- dshaw
Let me briefly talk about friends online. I've made some posts about gaming addiction in other places, but this is something that really deserves it's own special place.
You can make friends online. Yeah. You can. As I type this, I'm listening to six people talk to each other-- about everything, Counter-Strike among topics, on TeamSpeak, a VoIP chat software. One of those people go to school with me. All of them, I'd consider a true friend.
Yeah, it started with a (now defunct) CS team. But we're friends. Even when I'm not gaming, I'm on TeamSpeak, and I talk to my friends. I love these guys.
It's not all about gaming, but the friends you can make through gaming*.
- dshaw
*: Yeah, I know this isn't the case for everyone, and there are "real" addicts. However, it's true that for a lot of online gamers, this is part of the cause of 'addiction'.
One of the key points of addiction is the inability to stop even when something is no longer fun.
Right, I fully and utterly agree- however, 'gaming addiction' might be the most misdiagnosed addiction ever. Why? Because when I (for example) played 40 hours of Counter-Strike a week, it was very much a need to me to play: this is because it was fun for me. Eventually, the game lost the fun it once had, and I eventually stopped playing. Now, I play maybe 5 hours a week, because it's fun again.
The point I'm trying to make here is that according to what you said, and what others have stated, I would have been 'addicted' to Counter-Strike for 2 weeks... but truthfully, I could have stopped whenever I wanted to; and, in fact, when the game lost it's gleam, I did stop.
Maybe I'm wording this badly (I'm pretty tired). My point is that yeah, some poeple are addicted, but just because people play a lot because they have fun, it doesn't mean that they need psychological help!
- dshaw
I concur, with parent, grandparent, and most of all great-grandparent.
There have been times when I've spent 40 hours a week gaming. So what? Okay, fine, that was a little bit obsessive (I had just gotten Counter-Strike, come on now), but the point remains that there are far more who watch 6-8hours of television daily, and more on weekends. There are people who are addicted to drugs (different entirely), exercising, betting (gambling), reading... gaming isn't addiction, it's entertainment. Everyone wants to have a good time, right?
- dshaw
Now I can download a program that improves my Internet Explorer to look, act, and feel just like Firefox! I mean, sure it won't be kept up to date, or really fix the security holes, but it's the look that matters!
Or, I could just download Firefox.
This is a cool project, but I have to say, I'd rather just use the real thing.
- dshaw
I'm not totally sure if this is what you're asking for, but this book by Alan R. Feuer has some interesting (and sometimes frustrating) puzzles in C. I'm sure that there are similar books for C++, Java, Python, perl, etc. It's worth looking into, in my opinion; I have a copy sitting on my printer about an arm's reach away (for when I need a distraction from a project).
- dshaw
I have to say, I've used a Telephreak.org voice mailbox for about a year now. It's a lifesaver. The guys over there have an awesome way of doing things. I've met the crew online (irc.telephreak.org), and (as you may or may not be able to tell), they're pretty awesome. I'm a huge Telephreak fan. Glad to hear they're up to more cool stuff :)
- dshaw
I fully agree with you on most of these points, but just to play the devil's advocate... if we didn't have team kill punishing enabled, what's to stop those same asshats from teamkilling everyone? 'Well, you could votekick them out then', you say. But, your first point was that the voting system sucks... so, what's the answer?
- dshaw
The e-books are free, but you have to pay for the actual books. Okay, that's pretty nice of them, and it makes sense to me. But what if I decide that, for ease of reading, I want to print out my e-book? Am I legally allowed to print it? If I'm allowed to distribute the free e-book (and I don't know if I am), couldn't I print many of them, and give them to people at Barnes & Noble? There are some borderlines there, and I'm quite interested in figuring it all out.
- dshaw
But from a gamer's standpoint, the patch is really really good. Er, let me add a disclaimer in that this isn't a flame. Right. Anyway, the original version of BF2 is much harder to play from the bug perspective. Okay, yeah, the new patch introduced a memory leak, which is needless to say horrible. In general, however, the UI and number of (noticable) bugs decreased dramatically. This story is quite a bit biased; I'm sure that gamers are mostly sad to hear this news, since not only must they go back to the buggy original release, but they don't know what their favorite servers will be running!
- dshaw
"Dear Mr. Katz. I am 10. My parents took my computer away today, because of what they saw on television. They told me they just couldn't be around enough to make sure that I'm doing the right things on the Internet. My Mom and Dad told me they didn't want to be standing at my funeral some day because of things I was doing that they didn't know about. I am at my best friend's house, and am pretty bummed, because things are boring now. I hope I'll get it back."
I'm not exaggerating or being sarcastic when I say that that statement brought tears to my eyes. I'm sixteen years old, and I know so very many parents who react like this. It really makes me think of the age-old statement of how people fear what they don't understand. Columbine was a tragedy, and just because us geeks don't play all-American sports (at least not all of us), and we don't (all) cheer at said games, it doesn't mean that we're not affected by killers.
It's sad what the media sometimes portrays geeks and nerds as.
- dshaw
Yeah, if you're convincing, universities will hire you (sometimes). I'm doing an internship at UCSD this summer, and worked at SDSC (sdsc.edu) programming last year. If you're a convincing guy, you'll do fine :) University guys appreciate helpful high school kids.
- dshaw
Isn't this a lot like Netcraft's new Anti-Phishing plugin? I'm glad that all these people are finally taking initiative against phishers, even though it's almost definitely due to the heightened media attention that phishing is currently getting.
In practice though, I think the only way this would really work is if it's shipped by default in Firefox. The peoplen that would install this anti-phishing plugin aren't usually the people that would get tricked by phishing scams anyway.
- dshaw
Note: This is all IMO; and yes, I understand that some scams are so realistic that anyone could get caught in their webs.
Some /. poster told me that BSD was dead! What the hell!?
:)
Er, yeah, that was a joke. I love BSD, in fact my servers run NetBSD 2.0
- dshaw
Some /. poster told me that BSD was dead! What the hell!?
- dshaw
If you RTFA - its a study of how downloading affects Canadian artistes and the Canadian body is the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), not the RIAA.
Yeah, but don't you think the CRIA's data would mirror that of the RIAA? What, piracy would be a major problem here, but not the Canada? That doesn't make much sense. I was speaking preemtively- what will the RIAA say when Americans point to this study.
- dshaw
Always revealing the truth. Of course, the question remains if this data was strictly for Canada, or for the global music industry itself. And, more important, what will the RIAA retort? Maybe now the **AA will stop trying to sue everyone and his sister and actually work on competing with what appears to be free media. One can only hope...
- dshaw
I know it's stuff out of sci-fi movies, but wouldn't a large electromagnetic pulse render the robots useless, leaving the DMZ wide open to a foreign military?
- dshaw
I think if she wants to get admitted into a US university, her best bet would probably be to finish high school in Egypt (or get a GED from the US), and apply to a US college as a foreigner. Colleges like diversity and foreigners.
- dshaw
People play games like this because they like to feel immersed in the world in which they're playing. Putting modern advertisements like this into games breaks the immersion (as the article pointed out) and in the end result would (1) cause people to stop wanting to play the game and (2) not make people buy these products. People that feel pissed of at Sprite, for example, because they're interfering in their game are not going to want to buy that product.
- dshaw
[...] which is the last remaining pinball manufacturer in the world.
You'd think that with a lot of arcades around the world using pinball machines, some other companies would want to compete with these guys... or perhaps there's such a huge monopoly that everyone else just gives up. Makes you wonder about monopoly laws, though...
- dshaw
Well, without an article it's a little hard to comment a lot. However, I think that this means that people can download games via their cable... quite a lot like downloading a game via cable internet. Sounds like an interesting idea, though... let's see if it flies.
- dshaw
Despite the problem originating from a handful of IP addresses, MAPS saw it appropriate to block over 180,000 IP addresses just before the weekend! I had already made several phone calls and emails to my co-location facility, and they told me they were doing their best to get a hold of someone there.
That's a little bit unreasonable. If you, one of the customers, was trying to deal with them, it would have been much more reasonable to simply unblock your IP(s). Blocking an entire block due to one single issue (or so it seems) is pretty unreasonable. I'd send them a formal letter of complaint, rather than talk to one of their phone operators.
- dshaw
A lot of people (*cough*microsoft*cough*) would have you know that OSS software "costs more in the end" or something. I personally disagree, but yes- it's a duh type of thing that "free is less money than costly".
- dshaw
I don't know why, but I get a distinctly bad feeling about GMail going public. I, myself, am an avid GMail user, and I do care about the program deeply. However, I do feel that once the program reaches it's peak users (who don't know to *delete* old mail), the GMail hard drives might start to be full... and I know Google's awesome, but I'm just amazed that they'll be able to handle terrabytes of information as accounts start to fill.
And, of course the spammers... but I'm sure those have tried already.
Also... what about the services, that GMail reserved for Beta Testers? I can't recall them offhand, but will they cost money now?
- dshaw