Exactly *how*, is Microsoft going to capitalize on a fracture of Firefox... within *Debian*? This doesn't touch the userbase that is competing with IE etc whatsoever.
Not *entirely* true. Javascript (perhaps originally even) has some hooks to try and dig functionality out of actual Java Applets - code can be passed back and forth between them. But this was back from the bad old days when everybody thought that Applets would be the way of *everything*, when in fact it turns out they are just good for making spinning cubes and water effects and such.
The problem here is that there isn't a scientific definition that would...
a) include pluto
b) exclude everything else.
Thusly, any definition at all (other than 'because its tradition') would cause a change in the rankings. This change is actually the one with the least strange fallout... the nearest other alternative ended up creating 3-4 extra planets, possibly including the Moon.
1) Any individual struck by munitions powered by OSS is entitled to whatever rights are licensed to users of said software. For instance, if the missile was GPLed, any victims would be entitled to be cremated with a full copy of the source code and any encryption keys necessary to run said code on any homebrew missiles.
I think the appropriate metaphor would be that it punches the baby in the nose. How you get your fist up there without losing momentuum due to friction is an exercise for the reader.
In fact, several people I know (WOW addicts), are so amazed by the amount of extra money they save by not buying 3-4 games a month that they re-evaluate buying that many games even after they kick the WOW habit. So it isn't just a temporary loss... it could very well be a permanent one.
Not entirely true. If you haven't preemptively disabled online mode *before* it starts updating one of your games, you're out of luck. From a game in the 'Update Paused" state:
--- Game unavailable
"This game is not ready to be played in offline mode." ---
Steam doesn't give you any warning that its about to do an update, it just goes ahead and does it when you start. I don't ever remember having a chance to change my mind and retreat to offline mode.
I don't believe they are out to screw me, I just believe that their centrally controlled delivery system is a poor value. In the future, I will be avoiding such systems as much as possible. I'm bothering to post this here because I hope that people who design and implement these systems might pick up on the negative feedback and do things differently next time.
As for the bug report: I don't feel that its worth my time. I'm not 'nailing myself to a cross' or anything, I just don't feel like playing HL2 anymore. The fact that Steam conveniently self-destructed my copy was just the last straw.
Now, contact them and report the bug. Really, you do sound like a crank and a zealot because you refuse to do that. Have you actually called their customer service, or filled out a form? If not, everything you believe about their service is baseless.
It takes quite a bit of time and effort to properly document and prepare a *useful* bug report, even had I known at the time where to submit it or that they would be amicable to reading it. Its not like I had any packaging with the customer service number on it, at any rate.
I don't like dealing with customer service. I had a bad experience with Steam and Halflife 2. The one does not make the other meaningless. I have worked with the public before, one of the types of customers you get are the ones that won't bother trying to fix a mistake, they will just take their business elsewhere in the future. I guess I'm one of those people, but I don't think that that makes me a crank. Maybe cranky.
Keep in mind, you despise the delivery system because of this issue.
Not true. I have other issues with the delivery system as well.
- It was slow for me, much slower than it would have been to install from a CD/DVD, even with preloading.
- I could never manage to get the 'friends' setting or whatever it was called to work well enough to join a friend in the same multiplayer game without a tedious amount of manually finding the IP address of the servers and trying to connect by hand. The server lists were like a badly fractured IRC network. (again, this might be fixed now, I stopped trying a long time ago)
- Especially if you haven't played in awhile, there can be long, unskippable, "updating" periods when starting the game. I can understand this for multiplayer consistency, but I'm not interested in multiplayer. I just want to pick up and play every now and then, but this is impossible the way HL2/Steam are set up. Last time I ran into this it happened in series... first an update of the steam service itself for 20 minutes or so, and then another half hour of HL2. By the time it was done, I didn't feel like playing anymore anyway.
- This is at least partially impression and conjecture, but the Steam app seems to want to run all the time. Always there, always ready for you to click on it and *buy* something from the marketplace. I removed it from startup and all the rest, but on a personal level I do resent being 'sold' at. Steam felt pushy. Again, personal opinion and impressions there.
- Bandwidth hungry apps are fine when you are the only computer on your connection. They are noticably less cool when you have more than one person sharing a cable modem, for instance.
No, I haven't. It didn't even occur to me as something that would be a likely solution.... what would Valve do, give me a *special* patch for special customers? If I had called at all, it would have been to demand my money back... but since this happened quite some time after purchase I didn't think it was particularly worth it.
Customer support always assumes that the customer doesn't know what you're doing. I'd rather not spend an hour or more having somebody walk me through a re-install just to see the problem recur. (I had already done this). Further, I had already verified that it was a HL2 update issue (rather than a change of a machine) because it literally changed from working -> broken within a single Steam update. I had played some time before, shut it off, turned it back on, watched Steam update itself, then watched it not work anymore. All my other intensive games, (Doom3, FarCry)... working perfectly.
The game was simply fucked, which turned me off as a customer permanently. I'm sure you guys offer great customer service or whatever, but I'm one of those people that doesn't want to waste hours of my life talking to you over a problem that *may* or may not be resolved to retain me as a customer for a delivery system that I have grown to absolutely despise.
I'm not trying to sound like a crank or a zealot here: I just feel strongly that customer service, regardless of its quality, does *not* make up for a shitty situation. Prevention vs Cure, etc.
---
On a related note, I've just given up on purchasing computer games at all. Even without steam, return of 'bad games' is just aboute completely impossible. No store will accept returns for any reason anymore out of fear of piracy. This includes situations where the game simply sucks. Steam is worse, because you can't even dump off your mistaken purchase on the used game stores and get *something* back.
I'm not sold on digital delivery at all. As much as I hate the way the publishers do business, at least I have something to show for my money that they can't take away.
... because Steam forces an update that causes HL2 to freak out and crashs on my machine. Older versions were fine, more recent ones are absolutely unplayable. Since you basically can't only run *some* updates, its impossible to get the old version of the game back, so I'm screwed out of my $80 or whatever I paid on zero day. I will never suggest to anyone that they buy anything under this business model, its rape city.
So its a problem, when you are talking to the developers, for them to say that it is already fixed and where you can get the fix? If this is a business concern, you should take it up with the people you are paying for support (if they exist).
"Wanting to be a parent and handhold hundreds of strangers" isn't on the list of pre-requirements for someone to be an open source developer. There quite frankly isn't physically enough *time* for that sort of thing.
They aren't talking about predicting the mutations. They are talking about predicting the *surviving* mutations, which in a case where they are actively and in a somewhat controlled way killing off the least fittest really isn't as remarkable as the headline implies.
Are there any estimate as to what percentage of the Tor (or Freenet, or etc etc) nodes are actually run by the Three-Letter-Agencies themselves? Considering that just about every nation has its own intelligence/security type agencies, thats easily a couple hundred nodes right there, probably on 'decent enough' links to get a decent share of traffic but not so fast as to attract suspicion.
I remember reading about the Freenet Guy's planned changes (moving freenet to a friend-based system where you connect along lines of trust rather than completely anonymously, and immediately thought that the unstated goal was to cut *those* people out as much as possible rather (or in addition to) than the scalability reasons given.
You use his theories to construct and run a model, and then you compare the results of that model to what you can observe in the sky. The differences between what is observable and what the model indicates are where the new knowledge is, even if things don't match up.
At first glance, this move on Claria's part seems nonsensical. They are gutting their business model and walking away from a very lucrative source of revenue, all in the name of (more or less) doing the right thing.
Well, here's the rub.
Vista is coming in 2007. Vista is going to have antispyware built directly into the operating system. By 2009, when XP is going to be a minority OS as people's crummy hardware dies (helped along by spyware infestations), there isn't going to be a market for Claria's BS.
They quite simply have no other choice but to cash out what they can and change their profit model. (Of course, this is assuming that the anti-spyware elements of Vista will work at all... but like it or not, MS *does* have a lot of very bright people, and preventing modifications to critical system files *should* be a bit of a no brainer.)
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly *how*, is Microsoft going to capitalize on a fracture of Firefox... within *Debian*? This doesn't touch the userbase that is competing with IE etc whatsoever.
I live in Maryland. We are historically a blue state.
The way politics works these days is as follows:
In the red states, the Republican party is crooked as hell.
In the blue states, the Democratic party is crooked as hell.
Not *entirely* true. Javascript (perhaps originally even) has some hooks to try and dig functionality out of actual Java Applets - code can be passed back and forth between them. But this was back from the bad old days when everybody thought that Applets would be the way of *everything*, when in fact it turns out they are just good for making spinning cubes and water effects and such.
The problem here is that there isn't a scientific definition that would... a) include pluto b) exclude everything else. Thusly, any definition at all (other than 'because its tradition') would cause a change in the rankings. This change is actually the one with the least strange fallout... the nearest other alternative ended up creating 3-4 extra planets, possibly including the Moon.
TFA boils down to a single premise:
1) Any individual struck by munitions powered by OSS is entitled to whatever rights are licensed to users of said software. For instance, if the missile was GPLed, any victims would be entitled to be cremated with a full copy of the source code and any encryption keys necessary to run said code on any homebrew missiles.
I think the appropriate metaphor would be that it punches the baby in the nose. How you get your fist up there without losing momentuum due to friction is an exercise for the reader.
The primary concern of course, in any bio-replacement scheme, is to make the naked robot chicks *totally* hot.
So, what happens when a terrorist is 16 years old in this continuum? Do we all self destruct?
Yes. Next?
In fact, several people I know (WOW addicts), are so amazed by the amount of extra money they save by not buying 3-4 games a month that they re-evaluate buying that many games even after they kick the WOW habit. So it isn't just a temporary loss... it could very well be a permanent one.
My reviews of the 360's current lineup are thus...
Oblivion
Runs horribly slow compared to PC version... (loading...)
Condemned: Criminal Origins
Struck me as too dark to play during the daytime, but I didnt play it long.
G.R.A.W
Ok I guess. I don't much like FPS's anymore, they're all the same.
Hitman
Haven't played this one, but the series have been going downhill so I'm unlikely to bother.
Kameo
Sucked. Really, really incredibly lame.
Gun
Sucked *hardcore*
Final Fanasy XI
Haven't played, admittedly.
Tomb Raider
Sucked. Again.
Having "https://www.google.com" *actually* exist, rather than simply redirecting to the non-https version would be incredibly non-evil.
I don't know the overhead difference between http and https offhand, though, that might be a dealbreaker.
Not entirely true. If you haven't preemptively disabled online mode *before* it starts updating one of your games, you're out of luck. From a game in the 'Update Paused" state:
---
Game unavailable
"This game is not ready to be played in offline mode."
---
Steam doesn't give you any warning that its about to do an update, it just goes ahead and does it when you start. I don't ever remember having a chance to change my mind and retreat to offline mode.
I don't believe they are out to screw me, I just believe that their centrally controlled delivery system is a poor value. In the future, I will be avoiding such systems as much as possible. I'm bothering to post this here because I hope that people who design and implement these systems might pick up on the negative feedback and do things differently next time.
:)
As for the bug report: I don't feel that its worth my time. I'm not 'nailing myself to a cross' or anything, I just don't feel like playing HL2 anymore. The fact that Steam conveniently self-destructed my copy was just the last straw.
Its not my fault that I got first post
Now, contact them and report the bug. Really, you do sound like a crank and a zealot because you refuse to do that. Have you actually called their customer service, or filled out a form? If not, everything you believe about their service is baseless.
It takes quite a bit of time and effort to properly document and prepare a *useful* bug report, even had I known at the time where to submit it or that they would be amicable to reading it. Its not like I had any packaging with the customer service number on it, at any rate.
I don't like dealing with customer service. I had a bad experience with Steam and Halflife 2. The one does not make the other meaningless. I have worked with the public before, one of the types of customers you get are the ones that won't bother trying to fix a mistake, they will just take their business elsewhere in the future. I guess I'm one of those people, but I don't think that that makes me a crank. Maybe cranky.
Keep in mind, you despise the delivery system because of this issue.
Not true. I have other issues with the delivery system as well.
- It was slow for me, much slower than it would have been to install from a CD/DVD, even with preloading.
- I could never manage to get the 'friends' setting or whatever it was called to work well enough to join a friend in the same multiplayer game without a tedious amount of manually finding the IP address of the servers and trying to connect by hand. The server lists were like a badly fractured IRC network. (again, this might be fixed now, I stopped trying a long time ago) - Especially if you haven't played in awhile, there can be long, unskippable, "updating" periods when starting the game. I can understand this for multiplayer consistency, but I'm not interested in multiplayer. I just want to pick up and play every now and then, but this is impossible the way HL2/Steam are set up. Last time I ran into this it happened in series... first an update of the steam service itself for 20 minutes or so, and then another half hour of HL2. By the time it was done, I didn't feel like playing anymore anyway.
- This is at least partially impression and conjecture, but the Steam app seems to want to run all the time. Always there, always ready for you to click on it and *buy* something from the marketplace. I removed it from startup and all the rest, but on a personal level I do resent being 'sold' at. Steam felt pushy. Again, personal opinion and impressions there.
- Bandwidth hungry apps are fine when you are the only computer on your connection. They are noticably less cool when you have more than one person sharing a cable modem, for instance.
No, I haven't. It didn't even occur to me as something that would be a likely solution.... what would Valve do, give me a *special* patch for special customers? If I had called at all, it would have been to demand my money back... but since this happened quite some time after purchase I didn't think it was particularly worth it.
Customer support always assumes that the customer doesn't know what you're doing. I'd rather not spend an hour or more having somebody walk me through a re-install just to see the problem recur. (I had already done this). Further, I had already verified that it was a HL2 update issue (rather than a change of a machine) because it literally changed from working -> broken within a single Steam update. I had played some time before, shut it off, turned it back on, watched Steam update itself, then watched it not work anymore. All my other intensive games, (Doom3, FarCry)... working perfectly.
The game was simply fucked, which turned me off as a customer permanently. I'm sure you guys offer great customer service or whatever, but I'm one of those people that doesn't want to waste hours of my life talking to you over a problem that *may* or may not be resolved to retain me as a customer for a delivery system that I have grown to absolutely despise.
I'm not trying to sound like a crank or a zealot here: I just feel strongly that customer service, regardless of its quality, does *not* make up for a shitty situation. Prevention vs Cure, etc.
---
On a related note, I've just given up on purchasing computer games at all. Even without steam, return of 'bad games' is just aboute completely impossible. No store will accept returns for any reason anymore out of fear of piracy. This includes situations where the game simply sucks. Steam is worse, because you can't even dump off your mistaken purchase on the used game stores and get *something* back.
I'm not sold on digital delivery at all. As much as I hate the way the publishers do business, at least I have something to show for my money that they can't take away.
... because Steam forces an update that causes HL2 to freak out and crashs on my machine. Older versions were fine, more recent ones are absolutely unplayable. Since you basically can't only run *some* updates, its impossible to get the old version of the game back, so I'm screwed out of my $80 or whatever I paid on zero day. I will never suggest to anyone that they buy anything under this business model, its rape city.
Here is the link to the leaked AT&T Court documents that were released on Wired this morning:
p df
http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/att_klein_wired.
So its a problem, when you are talking to the developers, for them to say that it is already fixed and where you can get the fix? If this is a business concern, you should take it up with the people you are paying for support (if they exist).
"Wanting to be a parent and handhold hundreds of strangers" isn't on the list of pre-requirements for someone to be an open source developer. There quite frankly isn't physically enough *time* for that sort of thing.
Because the CIA/NSA/etc require a satellite-servicing capability and NASA is a wonderful distraction. NASA *is* a cold war agency.
They aren't talking about predicting the mutations. They are talking about predicting the *surviving* mutations, which in a case where they are actively and in a somewhat controlled way killing off the least fittest really isn't as remarkable as the headline implies.
Are there any estimate as to what percentage of the Tor (or Freenet, or etc etc) nodes are actually run by the Three-Letter-Agencies themselves? Considering that just about every nation has its own intelligence/security type agencies, thats easily a couple hundred nodes right there, probably on 'decent enough' links to get a decent share of traffic but not so fast as to attract suspicion.
I remember reading about the Freenet Guy's planned changes (moving freenet to a friend-based system where you connect along lines of trust rather than completely anonymously, and immediately thought that the unstated goal was to cut *those* people out as much as possible rather (or in addition to) than the scalability reasons given.
Hmm, better post this anonymously...
Here, have some clicks. Good luck... my student debt is a tenth of yours and its still pissing me off.
You use his theories to construct and run a model, and then you compare the results of that model to what you can observe in the sky. The differences between what is observable and what the model indicates are where the new knowledge is, even if things don't match up.
At first glance, this move on Claria's part seems nonsensical. They are gutting their business model and walking away from a very lucrative source of revenue, all in the name of (more or less) doing the right thing.
Well, here's the rub.
Vista is coming in 2007. Vista is going to have antispyware built directly into the operating system. By 2009, when XP is going to be a minority OS as people's crummy hardware dies (helped along by spyware infestations), there isn't going to be a market for Claria's BS.
They quite simply have no other choice but to cash out what they can and change their profit model. (Of course, this is assuming that the anti-spyware elements of Vista will work at all... but like it or not, MS *does* have a lot of very bright people, and preventing modifications to critical system files *should* be a bit of a no brainer.)
Here's hoping that the party is over.
Spelling, please fix:
r/Odama/Adama/g
r/Psylon/Cylon/g