if you don't like the terms of the game, don't buy it. Nobody forces you to buy video games.
For the most part, this makes sense. But I don't see why I should be forced to adhere to terms that degrade the quality of my system (CD drive wear), my purchase (CD wear), my allowable play time (I can sometimes lose CDs for months at a time), and my performance (using No-CD cracks usually gets better performance than using the CD). Moreover, I bought the game, so why am I the one treated like a pirate? That seems a little backward to me.
a vocal portion of slashdot thinks it was born with a right to take everyone else work for free.
Fixed that for you.
Anyone pointing out how selfish this is is apparently *troll*.
It is when it's irrelevant to the conversation. This is about people getting to properly use that which they already paid for, not taking other peoples' work for free. Well, except Ubisoft taking someone else's work for free, but you seem to be on the same side of the fence here with respect to that, so I won't bother to expound further.
As a final note, I just noticed your sig and realized you're the guy behind Positech (or very good as masquerading as him). I just wanted to give you kudos for your fine work and, more importantly, for demos that accurately portray your games so people know what they're buying. Keep it up!
The legality of the issue is totally peripheral to whether it is constructive or not. To use a way-blown-out-of-proportion analogy, the civil rights movement involved a lot of people breaking laws in a constructive manner. (Before I get a heap of people thinking I'm trying to equate the two, I'm not. I am merely showing that illegality and constructiveness are not mutually exclusive).
Considering that actually using a CD instead of a no CD crack leads to all sorts of fun issues like wearing both the CD and my drive, forcing me not to play a game I own if I ever lose the CD (oh the number of CDs I've lost and found months later...), and lower performance than using a no-CD crack, I believe developers of no-CD cracks are very constructive.
How is this not constructive? Game devs insist on checking for a CD in my drive which leads a a good number of problems that, as a paying customer, I honestly shouldn't have to deal with. These people provide a legitimate service by allowing to play the game without having worry about these issues, a right I should have when I buy the game.
Well, Ubisoft is French, so it's not exactly a case of someone saying "whatever is retarded is French" so much as "it's French and therefore retarded". You may still disagree with *that* statement, but it's still a vastly different one than what you said.
I can already see the torrent of people coming in to call all slashdot users hypocrites for calling this stealing but defending "piracy" as not stealing and all that, so I figure I might as well clear this up as soon as possible:
Thing the first: Slashdot is not one person, it is many people, so it's not inconsistent for vocal members of the community to call this stealing but piracy not stealing.
Thing the second: "steals" is still a bad word here. "Steals credit" would be better, if anything, but I still think the wording is bad anyway.
Thing the third: most pirates at least hold to the moral ground of giving credit where credit is due, which is clearly not the case here.
Hopefully this will head off those silly comments. Eh, who am I kidding, it's Slashdot. I'll probably wake up to 50 of them. Oh well, I tried.
Upset that a lot of people downmod you and your sockpuppets? While I'll admit a lot of moderation towards y'all is unfair "because it's twitter and deserves to be downmodded" (though some of it is also deserved), you have to understand that it's not the work of a small group of people gaming the system just to downmod you. A lot of people have taken to the cause of hating the games you play and making moderators pass a CAPTCHA won't be any more effort for them than it would be for normal people with 5, 10, or 15 mod points because that's exactly what they are.
Those are issues you're getting because you choose to spend time on them, not because you have to. By default, many distros will give you Metacity and Rhythmbox, and there's a reason for that.
I use Banshee and Compiz because I prefer them. I find that Banshee's feature set to have a 1-to-1 correspondence to my desired feature set. Compiz does everything I want it to (when it works) that Metacity doesn't. Yes, I choose to spend time on them, but what good is software freedom if I don't get to choose? It would be *more* inconvenient for me to have to switch to Rhythmbox than it is to fiddle with Banshee, so that really doesn't help your point at all.
If you want to spend less time fiddling, use Ubuntu LTS about 3-6 months after its initial release, or SuSE or some other "business" distro
I can't speak for SuSE but, to be perfectly honest, if I have to try every distro to find convenience, that's another layer of inconvenience itself. I can speak for Ubuntu: I bring up the VM I run at work again, or the Ubuntu installations many people around me often need help with. And before you question it, I am speaking of LTS releases. They have plenty of issues of their own. Significant? No, but neither are any of the issues I've run into on Windows XP in 7 years of running it.
Furthermore, buy supported hardware
I do buy supported hardware now. I put a good deal of work into making sure all of the hardware in my latest computer was supported. Which, by the way, is another layer of inconvenience. As it was when I decided to finally install Ubuntu on a laptop I already owned and I ran into issues that made it unusable. (If you're curious, the issue: if I plugged in headphones audio would play through both the headphones and the speakers. When you live with a roommate, this is patently unusable.) It was a known issue with my hardware but nobody was making any effort to fix it. And, as a poor university student, getting a new laptop was out of the question. So, back to Win XP it was. For the curious, this was a year ago, so it may be fixed by now, but it's recent enough to warrant mention.
and don't install fiddly packages when non-fiddly ones will do.
Another habit I attempt to hold to. But when I want to try new software (the latest issue was with trying media centers which required a different mutually exclusive set of plugins), I don't get these options. And when they break things, I have to fix them. You're bound to mention that it's my choice to try new software, but it's just as much my choice to try it on Windows and the same exact software didn't break anything there. The ability to choose is a factor of convenience, too.
Basically, you confirmed what I was saying: even with all the choices you make, you still spend about the same amount of time on Windows and Linux.
I make at least as many choices in regards to Windows, too and I still spend the same amount of time in Windows and Linux. So I fail to see how this helps your point. If you want, I can continue listing issues that arise in each OS, but all that it will show is that which one is more convenient depends on the person and that, in my case, the answer is "it depends on what I want to do.
If you don't want to discuss anything with him, try me. My primary machine is a dual boot Win XP 64-bit / Debian Lenny 64-bit. My primary work machine is Win XP 32-bit with a virtual session of Hardy running on the second monitor. I installed and maintain both machines myself, so I figure I've got a good idea of how much time and manpower Win XP & Linux personal desktop machines each take. I own no stock of any sort, I am a university student employed at said university, so I have no stake Microsoft at all.
That all said here's my experience: Windows took maybe 15 minutes longer to install than Lenny for partitions of approximately the same size. The work machine isn't particularly relevant since the VM is small compared to the machine. Yes, this fifteen minutes is indeed longer. But, since we're talking about personal desktop machines, a one time (or even occasional if, for whatever reason, you need to reinstall a year down the road or whatever) extra fifteen minutes isn't really a deal breaker of any sort. Especially since the extra fifteen minutes is of the "the user doesn't need to be at the computer" form.
As for maintenance, I have found that both have taken me approximately the same amount of time. For every time apt-get dist-upgrade has saved me time over Microsoft updates, I've found myself having to get some fiddly little detail (like banshee or video codecs) working again. For every time I've had something wonky happen on Windows, I've had Compiz stop working entirely (and, in fact, I've fixed all the wonky things that have happened in Windows so far and to date nobody knows what's up with Compiz).
When it comes down to it, for the average personal desktop, I have found *no considerable difference* in installation and maintenance times. At that point, the familiarity with Windows is enough for it to be the more convenient option for a lot of people.
Under the kind of browsing I do (many, many tabs; over a hundred is not unusual), all browsers I've used crash occasionally (IE, Firefox, Opera, and Epiphany).
I have no use for greasemonkey. There are few, if any, perfectly-designed sites. There are many sites that are good enough that I don't feel it's worth installing another extension just to fix the minor errors.
Why does anyone care about *your* personal browsing experience when choosing what browser *they* use? Honestly, any broadband connection will make any ads load quickly. A second or two isn't a big deal.
I have never heard anyone pronounce the final slash. Ever. I also did not type that slash. Unfortunately, the/. comment system automatically inserted it for me. As I had it typed, I assure you, there were indeed an equal number of slashes and dots.
But http://slashdot.dot/ leads to an equal number of slashes and dots (not to mention maximizing the number of slashes and dots with out making the URL tedious). Surely this is a good thing?
Why is Microsoft like it is, greedy, criminal, and focused on PR instead of product?
I'm not denying that they're focused on PR; it's rather obvious they are. but that's ignoring my question: why would they care about twitter? Twitter is a single voice on slashdot that already annoys people who are part of the Open Source movement. Slashdot, of all places. The prevailing opinions on slashdot are either pro-open-source or pro-use-whatever-tool-gets-the-job-done. It's not exactly like downmodding twitter would do _anything_ to help Microsoft. Unless Microsoft wanted to invest a significant amount of resources in being the primary voice on Slashdot, speaking to people they wouldn't be able to get through to in the first place, they really couldn't have a major effect on anything. No matter how PR-focused they are (ie, very), there's simply not enough benefit to be had here.
It's not easy for them but the comments section is filled with endorsements of their crap and flames for everything people at Slashdot might like.
I know you're going to find this one shocking: Some people actually like Microsoft products and use them on a regular basis. Yes, even people not being paid by Microsoft. This one is also going to shock you: some people don't like GNU/Linux or other open source projects. Yes, even people not being paid by Microsoft. Not everybody thinks exactly like you. I'll give you a moment to actually think about that fact.
...
...
...
Have you processed that bit? Good.
Don't you think it's odd to find people saying good things about Vista when less than 10% of the general public wanted it and it is simply irrelevant to most Slashdot readers?
No, I don't. It makes sense. There are some people that like it that aren't paid by Microsoft. They don't have to be a significant percentage of people to even be heard on Slashdot. If you consider that not everybody think exactly the same way you do, it will start making sense to you, too. You may consider it an inferior product (as do I), but other people with different tastes don't. Or maybe they do, but consider it usable and will live with it because they need it for some work-related application or non-work-related games.
Not everybody who disagrees with you has to be paid off by somebody. Some people just have naturally differing opinion.
I've gotten tired of the entire twitter thing, too. You'll note that I'm not just calling out sockpuppets like everyone else. I'm proposing the easiest and most reasonable way to end this thing. It's far easier to convince a single person to stop than to convince the however many that are following twitter, plain and simple.
Let's assume for a moment that you are not in fact twitter, but are merely some other person with an identical writing style, identical view points, and identical paranoia and who just happens to post in the same threads as twitter sockpuppets with an alarmingly high frequency.
Hello, ibane. Please, tell me why you think Microsoft would invest money in downmodding twitter, of all people. Think what you want about Microsoft, but the one thing we can all agree that they know is marketing and PR. They know better than to spend resources downmodding one troll on slashdot.
I assure you, if twitter's views are as popular as you say AND he stated them in an intelligent matter, no PR firm could possible silence him as you say. Enough moderators read slashdot raw and uncut that they would upmod twitter no matter what the PR firm did, and there is no way any PR firm could maintain control unless they held a majority of the active accounts on slashdot.
Honestly, though, I am most interested in hearing your logic as to how we are idiots for assuming that people with identical writing styles and identical views and who always post in the same threads as each other, often with surprisingly little time between each other's posts, are sockpuppets, but y'all are perfectly reasonable in believing that everyone who has ever disagreed with you is part of some PR firm who has a grudge against you.
How is he a "fanboi" by this post? He isn't claiming open source to be perfection by any means. He's merely mocking the viewpoint some people have that open source is the answer to everything.
And I am shocked, shocked that you didn't RTFA, which made it pretty clear that this software came attached with a "we don't want fraudulent donations" agenda.
If you RTFA, you'll find that the reasoning behind the decision is one you're more likely to find from businesses than from FOSS projects. Israel was among the list of countries from which they were receiving overly many fraudulent donations.
Slashdot Mirror
if you don't like the terms of the game, don't buy it. Nobody forces you to buy video games.
For the most part, this makes sense. But I don't see why I should be forced to adhere to terms that degrade the quality of my system (CD drive wear), my purchase (CD wear), my allowable play time (I can sometimes lose CDs for months at a time), and my performance (using No-CD cracks usually gets better performance than using the CD). Moreover, I bought the game, so why am I the one treated like a pirate? That seems a little backward to me.
a vocal portion of slashdot thinks it was born with a right to take everyone else work for free.
Fixed that for you.
Anyone pointing out how selfish this is is apparently *troll*.
It is when it's irrelevant to the conversation. This is about people getting to properly use that which they already paid for, not taking other peoples' work for free. Well, except Ubisoft taking someone else's work for free, but you seem to be on the same side of the fence here with respect to that, so I won't bother to expound further.
As a final note, I just noticed your sig and realized you're the guy behind Positech (or very good as masquerading as him). I just wanted to give you kudos for your fine work and, more importantly, for demos that accurately portray your games so people know what they're buying. Keep it up!
The legality of the issue is totally peripheral to whether it is constructive or not. To use a way-blown-out-of-proportion analogy, the civil rights movement involved a lot of people breaking laws in a constructive manner. (Before I get a heap of people thinking I'm trying to equate the two, I'm not. I am merely showing that illegality and constructiveness are not mutually exclusive).
Considering that actually using a CD instead of a no CD crack leads to all sorts of fun issues like wearing both the CD and my drive, forcing me not to play a game I own if I ever lose the CD (oh the number of CDs I've lost and found months later...), and lower performance than using a no-CD crack, I believe developers of no-CD cracks are very constructive.
How is this not constructive? Game devs insist on checking for a CD in my drive which leads a a good number of problems that, as a paying customer, I honestly shouldn't have to deal with. These people provide a legitimate service by allowing to play the game without having worry about these issues, a right I should have when I buy the game.
Well, Ubisoft is French, so it's not exactly a case of someone saying "whatever is retarded is French" so much as "it's French and therefore retarded". You may still disagree with *that* statement, but it's still a vastly different one than what you said.
I can already see the torrent of people coming in to call all slashdot users hypocrites for calling this stealing but defending "piracy" as not stealing and all that, so I figure I might as well clear this up as soon as possible:
Thing the first: Slashdot is not one person, it is many people, so it's not inconsistent for vocal members of the community to call this stealing but piracy not stealing.
Thing the second: "steals" is still a bad word here. "Steals credit" would be better, if anything, but I still think the wording is bad anyway.
Thing the third: most pirates at least hold to the moral ground of giving credit where credit is due, which is clearly not the case here.
Hopefully this will head off those silly comments. Eh, who am I kidding, it's Slashdot. I'll probably wake up to 50 of them. Oh well, I tried.
Upset that a lot of people downmod you and your sockpuppets? While I'll admit a lot of moderation towards y'all is unfair "because it's twitter and deserves to be downmodded" (though some of it is also deserved), you have to understand that it's not the work of a small group of people gaming the system just to downmod you. A lot of people have taken to the cause of hating the games you play and making moderators pass a CAPTCHA won't be any more effort for them than it would be for normal people with 5, 10, or 15 mod points because that's exactly what they are.
It will, in fact, be on Fox. But it's okay, people have already started the movement to bring it back.
Those are issues you're getting because you choose to spend time on them, not because you have to. By default, many distros will give you Metacity and Rhythmbox, and there's a reason for that.
I use Banshee and Compiz because I prefer them. I find that Banshee's feature set to have a 1-to-1 correspondence to my desired feature set. Compiz does everything I want it to (when it works) that Metacity doesn't. Yes, I choose to spend time on them, but what good is software freedom if I don't get to choose? It would be *more* inconvenient for me to have to switch to Rhythmbox than it is to fiddle with Banshee, so that really doesn't help your point at all.
If you want to spend less time fiddling, use Ubuntu LTS about 3-6 months after its initial release, or SuSE or some other "business" distro
I can't speak for SuSE but, to be perfectly honest, if I have to try every distro to find convenience, that's another layer of inconvenience itself. I can speak for Ubuntu: I bring up the VM I run at work again, or the Ubuntu installations many people around me often need help with. And before you question it, I am speaking of LTS releases. They have plenty of issues of their own. Significant? No, but neither are any of the issues I've run into on Windows XP in 7 years of running it.
Furthermore, buy supported hardware
I do buy supported hardware now. I put a good deal of work into making sure all of the hardware in my latest computer was supported. Which, by the way, is another layer of inconvenience. As it was when I decided to finally install Ubuntu on a laptop I already owned and I ran into issues that made it unusable. (If you're curious, the issue: if I plugged in headphones audio would play through both the headphones and the speakers. When you live with a roommate, this is patently unusable.) It was a known issue with my hardware but nobody was making any effort to fix it. And, as a poor university student, getting a new laptop was out of the question. So, back to Win XP it was. For the curious, this was a year ago, so it may be fixed by now, but it's recent enough to warrant mention.
and don't install fiddly packages when non-fiddly ones will do.
Another habit I attempt to hold to. But when I want to try new software (the latest issue was with trying media centers which required a different mutually exclusive set of plugins), I don't get these options. And when they break things, I have to fix them. You're bound to mention that it's my choice to try new software, but it's just as much my choice to try it on Windows and the same exact software didn't break anything there. The ability to choose is a factor of convenience, too.
Basically, you confirmed what I was saying: even with all the choices you make, you still spend about the same amount of time on Windows and Linux.
I make at least as many choices in regards to Windows, too and I still spend the same amount of time in Windows and Linux. So I fail to see how this helps your point. If you want, I can continue listing issues that arise in each OS, but all that it will show is that which one is more convenient depends on the person and that, in my case, the answer is "it depends on what I want to do.
If you don't want to discuss anything with him, try me. My primary machine is a dual boot Win XP 64-bit / Debian Lenny 64-bit. My primary work machine is Win XP 32-bit with a virtual session of Hardy running on the second monitor. I installed and maintain both machines myself, so I figure I've got a good idea of how much time and manpower Win XP & Linux personal desktop machines each take. I own no stock of any sort, I am a university student employed at said university, so I have no stake Microsoft at all.
That all said here's my experience: Windows took maybe 15 minutes longer to install than Lenny for partitions of approximately the same size. The work machine isn't particularly relevant since the VM is small compared to the machine. Yes, this fifteen minutes is indeed longer. But, since we're talking about personal desktop machines, a one time (or even occasional if, for whatever reason, you need to reinstall a year down the road or whatever) extra fifteen minutes isn't really a deal breaker of any sort. Especially since the extra fifteen minutes is of the "the user doesn't need to be at the computer" form.
As for maintenance, I have found that both have taken me approximately the same amount of time. For every time apt-get dist-upgrade has saved me time over Microsoft updates, I've found myself having to get some fiddly little detail (like banshee or video codecs) working again. For every time I've had something wonky happen on Windows, I've had Compiz stop working entirely (and, in fact, I've fixed all the wonky things that have happened in Windows so far and to date nobody knows what's up with Compiz).
When it comes down to it, for the average personal desktop, I have found *no considerable difference* in installation and maintenance times. At that point, the familiarity with Windows is enough for it to be the more convenient option for a lot of people.
While our previous understanding of the Piraha language would in fact suggest his failure, we now know that he is just one of four first posts!
Reading TFS, it says they'll be bound by contract, so I'd assume the recourse is a breach of contract suit.
Somebody didn't read the GP's screenname...
Under the kind of browsing I do (many, many tabs; over a hundred is not unusual), all browsers I've used crash occasionally (IE, Firefox, Opera, and Epiphany).
I have no use for greasemonkey. There are few, if any, perfectly-designed sites. There are many sites that are good enough that I don't feel it's worth installing another extension just to fix the minor errors.
--Sent from Firefox 3
Why does anyone care about *your* personal browsing experience when choosing what browser *they* use? Honestly, any broadband connection will make any ads load quickly. A second or two isn't a big deal.
I'll take that into account when I think of all the... never that that has occurred to me.
For the record, I always run the latest version of Firefox and never felt the need to install any form of adblocker.
Why do I care? As long as they're not actively diverting my attention, how is that actually affecting my browsing experience in a negative fashion?
*sigh*
I have never heard anyone pronounce the final slash. Ever. I also did not type that slash. Unfortunately, the /. comment system automatically inserted it for me. As I had it typed, I assure you, there were indeed an equal number of slashes and dots.
But http://slashdot.dot/ leads to an equal number of slashes and dots (not to mention maximizing the number of slashes and dots with out making the URL tedious). Surely this is a good thing?
I'm not denying that they're focused on PR; it's rather obvious they are. but that's ignoring my question: why would they care about twitter? Twitter is a single voice on slashdot that already annoys people who are part of the Open Source movement. Slashdot, of all places. The prevailing opinions on slashdot are either pro-open-source or pro-use-whatever-tool-gets-the-job-done. It's not exactly like downmodding twitter would do _anything_ to help Microsoft. Unless Microsoft wanted to invest a significant amount of resources in being the primary voice on Slashdot, speaking to people they wouldn't be able to get through to in the first place, they really couldn't have a major effect on anything. No matter how PR-focused they are (ie, very), there's simply not enough benefit to be had here.
I know you're going to find this one shocking: Some people actually like Microsoft products and use them on a regular basis. Yes, even people not being paid by Microsoft. This one is also going to shock you: some people don't like GNU/Linux or other open source projects. Yes, even people not being paid by Microsoft. Not everybody thinks exactly like you. I'll give you a moment to actually think about that fact.
Have you processed that bit? Good.
Don't you think it's odd to find people saying good things about Vista when less than 10% of the general public wanted it and it is simply irrelevant to most Slashdot readers?
No, I don't. It makes sense. There are some people that like it that aren't paid by Microsoft. They don't have to be a significant percentage of people to even be heard on Slashdot. If you consider that not everybody think exactly the same way you do, it will start making sense to you, too. You may consider it an inferior product (as do I), but other people with different tastes don't. Or maybe they do, but consider it usable and will live with it because they need it for some work-related application or non-work-related games.
Not everybody who disagrees with you has to be paid off by somebody. Some people just have naturally differing opinion.
I've gotten tired of the entire twitter thing, too. You'll note that I'm not just calling out sockpuppets like everyone else. I'm proposing the easiest and most reasonable way to end this thing. It's far easier to convince a single person to stop than to convince the however many that are following twitter, plain and simple.
Let's assume for a moment that you are not in fact twitter, but are merely some other person with an identical writing style, identical view points, and identical paranoia and who just happens to post in the same threads as twitter sockpuppets with an alarmingly high frequency.
Hello, ibane. Please, tell me why you think Microsoft would invest money in downmodding twitter, of all people. Think what you want about Microsoft, but the one thing we can all agree that they know is marketing and PR. They know better than to spend resources downmodding one troll on slashdot.
I assure you, if twitter's views are as popular as you say AND he stated them in an intelligent matter, no PR firm could possible silence him as you say. Enough moderators read slashdot raw and uncut that they would upmod twitter no matter what the PR firm did, and there is no way any PR firm could maintain control unless they held a majority of the active accounts on slashdot.
Honestly, though, I am most interested in hearing your logic as to how we are idiots for assuming that people with identical writing styles and identical views and who always post in the same threads as each other, often with surprisingly little time between each other's posts, are sockpuppets, but y'all are perfectly reasonable in believing that everyone who has ever disagreed with you is part of some PR firm who has a grudge against you.
How is he a "fanboi" by this post? He isn't claiming open source to be perfection by any means. He's merely mocking the viewpoint some people have that open source is the answer to everything.
And I am shocked, shocked that you didn't RTFA, which made it pretty clear that this software came attached with a "we don't want fraudulent donations" agenda.
If you RTFA, you'll find that the reasoning behind the decision is one you're more likely to find from businesses than from FOSS projects. Israel was among the list of countries from which they were receiving overly many fraudulent donations.