Why are game makers not smarter than this by now? They create a game that people absolutely love and then instead of nurturing the franchise to make lots of money in the long run they exploit it for a few bucks short term and ultimately kill it. Big hits like Tomb Raider are the lifeblood of these companies. What are they treated so trivially? Can someone with industry knowledge please explain this to me?
I can't wait till they start DRM'ing film. You have developed this film more than one time. Please call this activation hotline you god damn pirate. Thank you
I know it's been said before but I must vent. I'm tired of being treated like consumer cattle scum. Simple as that. You have no competition so you must listen to what your customers are saying or they will stop spending money in the market entirely.
1. Stop charging so much
2. Stop showing so many commercials
3. Stop treating me like a criminal
Show your customers some respect and profits will boom. I can't even remember how many businesses I spend my money with solely because they're laid back and trust me.
My local health food store lady doesn't try shoving products down my throat. I'm not treated like a criminal. She knows my name. No cameras making me nervous. She even leaves the store unattended sometimes while I'm looking around. She treats me like a normal human being, and she gets my money because of it. I realize absolute faith in humanity doesn't work completely for large businesses but they could learn a thing or two from small Mom & Pop stores. Sure you will lose a few bucks here and there but the money you make from treating your customers like humans will be far greater.
They don't need to log everything in the beginning. The goal is not to take all our freedoms and privacies all at once. They just want to get the ball rolling. They will ask the ISPs to log a totally unreasonable amount of data knowing they will settle for a lesser but still privacy killing amount. Then every few years as storage technology improves, more and more will be logged.
This beautifully refined process of slowly chipping away at our rights always begins like this. Figure out a way to kill this right now or you never will.
I have the ultimate solution to all of our trademark issues. Simply use MD5 hashes instead of the original names. d6a5c9544eca9b5ce2266d1c34a93222 is catchier than Firefox anyways.
Technically the more places your personal information is the greater you risk identity theft. Government institutions are not invulnerable. In this case your SSN and other information is handled by the IRS and whatnot, but also by tax preparers.
How is it that every time I see some unique law or way of governing it's in California? I'm genuinely interested. Do they have a fundamentally different way of thinking? Can someone who lives there comment?
I don't understand what is so complicated. Simply viewing illegal content willingly is illegal right? If there was some way for someone to hack their TV to pick up some secret child porn channel, that's still illegal... Right? They are not recording anything, just watching. The browser cache is created without most users even knowing. As far as they know they are just viewing the content.
I wonder if eventually we will see malicious software that randomly goes out on the net, finds child porn, saves it, then the software deletes it's self. This could be a popular tool for revenge.
1. Email program to person you don't like.
2. Child porn is stuck on victims computer
3. Report him
4. ???
5. Profit!
Is willingly viewing illegal content still possession or is it call something else? Most people do not even know what caches are. They automatically and invisibly save content. Having something in your cache does not mean you purposely saved it. It happened without your knowledge.
1. By viewing the images of exploited children you are creating a demand. Higher demand means more kids life's are ruined to create more pictures.
2. Punishments generally reflect how hard it is to catch a crime, not how much damage it causes. This is why you can go to prison for 209320938 years just for copying a movie for your friend.
Good point. I just wish if these companies were going to have crappy tech support they wouldn't brag left and right about AWARD WINNING SUPPORT!!!1 (Dell I'm looking at you). Maybe the solution is when you buy the laptop you can pay extra for enhanced phone support. They would need to figure a way to sell the enhanced support without implying the normal support is crap.
That is a huge pet peeve of mine as well. I can zone out while the hold music is playing and work on other things. But being interrupted every 30 seconds keeps making me think someone has picked up the phone. Grrrrrrrrrr. Yes stupid repeating message I understand how being on hold works. I listen to music until you get around to talking to me. And even if I didn't know this I probably figured out the first 20 times you explained it to me.
I'm not sure if they still do it but Gateway used to have a fake Gateway Radio station for hold music. It was strangely entertaining. Next up is the band blablabla who is currently on tour at....
The biggest problem I run into with tech support is the huge amount of rules and regulations the call center people have to follow. Instead of me calling up Gateway and saying "Hey my modem is fried, I know what I'm doing with computers, send me a new one" I have to go through an hour of pointless troubleshooting. For a $5 part with $3 shipping they should just send me the part.
Also the call center person has his/her hands tied when fixing the problem. Recently my cable internet service did not discontinue my service when I told them to. Even though it was obvious they needed to credit my account for the extra month they charged me for, the representative could not due to some rule. If he was trusted to just make the decision things would go much smoother.
You may think EQ1 is going to die but remember that people still play Ultima Online. I admit that 2d graphics from the mid 90's have a certain charm to them... But not that much charm.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are game makers not smarter than this by now? They create a game that people absolutely love and then instead of nurturing the franchise to make lots of money in the long run they exploit it for a few bucks short term and ultimately kill it. Big hits like Tomb Raider are the lifeblood of these companies. What are they treated so trivially? Can someone with industry knowledge please explain this to me?
I can't wait till they start DRM'ing film. You have developed this film more than one time. Please call this activation hotline you god damn pirate. Thank you
First page of this article: Star Wars bashing. Ok great I like it.
Second page: What the hell? Does anyone know what he was talking about? Did he take two different articles and put them together?
I know it's been said before but I must vent. I'm tired of being treated like consumer cattle scum. Simple as that. You have no competition so you must listen to what your customers are saying or they will stop spending money in the market entirely.
1. Stop charging so much
2. Stop showing so many commercials
3. Stop treating me like a criminal
Show your customers some respect and profits will boom. I can't even remember how many businesses I spend my money with solely because they're laid back and trust me.
My local health food store lady doesn't try shoving products down my throat. I'm not treated like a criminal. She knows my name. No cameras making me nervous. She even leaves the store unattended sometimes while I'm looking around. She treats me like a normal human being, and she gets my money because of it. I realize absolute faith in humanity doesn't work completely for large businesses but they could learn a thing or two from small Mom & Pop stores. Sure you will lose a few bucks here and there but the money you make from treating your customers like humans will be far greater.
They don't need to log everything in the beginning. The goal is not to take all our freedoms and privacies all at once. They just want to get the ball rolling. They will ask the ISPs to log a totally unreasonable amount of data knowing they will settle for a lesser but still privacy killing amount. Then every few years as storage technology improves, more and more will be logged.
This beautifully refined process of slowly chipping away at our rights always begins like this. Figure out a way to kill this right now or you never will.
Too bad it doesn't work on newer versions of Firefox :-(
I have the ultimate solution to all of our trademark issues. Simply use MD5 hashes instead of the original names. d6a5c9544eca9b5ce2266d1c34a93222 is catchier than Firefox anyways.
Technically the more places your personal information is the greater you risk identity theft. Government institutions are not invulnerable. In this case your SSN and other information is handled by the IRS and whatnot, but also by tax preparers.
How is it that every time I see some unique law or way of governing it's in California? I'm genuinely interested. Do they have a fundamentally different way of thinking? Can someone who lives there comment?
How dare you imply that our government would try stealing our money. Insanity!
I don't understand what is so complicated. Simply viewing illegal content willingly is illegal right? If there was some way for someone to hack their TV to pick up some secret child porn channel, that's still illegal... Right? They are not recording anything, just watching. The browser cache is created without most users even knowing. As far as they know they are just viewing the content.
I wonder if eventually we will see malicious software that randomly goes out on the net, finds child porn, saves it, then the software deletes it's self. This could be a popular tool for revenge.
1. Email program to person you don't like.
2. Child porn is stuck on victims computer
3. Report him
4. ???
5. Profit!
Is willingly viewing illegal content still possession or is it call something else? Most people do not even know what caches are. They automatically and invisibly save content. Having something in your cache does not mean you purposely saved it. It happened without your knowledge.
Or create a folder in the root of C:\ called "Temporary Internet Files" and stick all your folders including \Windows in there. Haha cops I Win!
No it's more like finding blood in crack that cops arrrr.r.r.dfskdjf [automatic analogy maker error]
There is a distinction between content being forced on you and actively searching for it.
There are two things to consider
1. By viewing the images of exploited children you are creating a demand. Higher demand means more kids life's are ruined to create more pictures.
2. Punishments generally reflect how hard it is to catch a crime, not how much damage it causes. This is why you can go to prison for 209320938 years just for copying a movie for your friend.
Uhh what's GNAA?
Good point. I just wish if these companies were going to have crappy tech support they wouldn't brag left and right about AWARD WINNING SUPPORT!!!1 (Dell I'm looking at you). Maybe the solution is when you buy the laptop you can pay extra for enhanced phone support. They would need to figure a way to sell the enhanced support without implying the normal support is crap.
That is a huge pet peeve of mine as well. I can zone out while the hold music is playing and work on other things. But being interrupted every 30 seconds keeps making me think someone has picked up the phone. Grrrrrrrrrr. Yes stupid repeating message I understand how being on hold works. I listen to music until you get around to talking to me. And even if I didn't know this I probably figured out the first 20 times you explained it to me.
I'm not sure if they still do it but Gateway used to have a fake Gateway Radio station for hold music. It was strangely entertaining. Next up is the band blablabla who is currently on tour at....
The biggest problem I run into with tech support is the huge amount of rules and regulations the call center people have to follow. Instead of me calling up Gateway and saying "Hey my modem is fried, I know what I'm doing with computers, send me a new one" I have to go through an hour of pointless troubleshooting. For a $5 part with $3 shipping they should just send me the part.
Also the call center person has his/her hands tied when fixing the problem. Recently my cable internet service did not discontinue my service when I told them to. Even though it was obvious they needed to credit my account for the extra month they charged me for, the representative could not due to some rule. If he was trusted to just make the decision things would go much smoother.
You may think EQ1 is going to die but remember that people still play Ultima Online. I admit that 2d graphics from the mid 90's have a certain charm to them... But not that much charm.
From the article:
This is, strictly speaking, terrorism: harming innocent people as a way to pressure some central authority into doing what you want.
Can we please stop throwing the word terrorism into every sentence? Please? No? Damn.
Oh my mistake sir. Carry on.
So what if Slashdot uses a certain technology poorly? How does it make them hypocritical to report a news story on it? I don't get it.