Is the reason they use the stolen IDs so that they cannot get busted for farming? Or are they trying to bypass having to pay a monthly fee, thereby increasing their margins significantly?
In order to play MMOs on Korean servers, you must have a Korean SSN so that you can register. To get a SSN, you have to actually live in South Korea, or be from South Korea. If you don't have one, you either have to steal it, or you simply don't play on their servers.
It's a colossal PITA to switch between OSes everytime I have the urge to play a game. Why not try to eliminate that problem so that I can work exclusively in an operating system I like as opposed to an operating system I've grown to dislike after years of general use? It makes more sense to me.
Re:Wouldn't it have been easier?-To stay put.
on
Cedega 5.1 Released
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· Score: 1
*A market that all commercial games have done poorly in so far.
Well, you have to figure that if companies such as id or Bioware can release Linux clients for their games, then why can't other companies follow suit? They're not exactly behemoths compared to, say, EA or Ubisoft, but they're well-known, and obviously they consider the platform important enough to develop for.
How about server software? A lot of multiplayer games have Windows clients predominately, but they get both Windows and Linux server software. Why not just take the extra step, especially since the Linux server software wouldn't exist if it wasn't used?
I guess the biggest problem is that you'd have to learn a whole new API, and seriously, what's wrong with that? People should be taking every effort to know more; it makes you more well-rounded and gives you something to add to your resume. Both aren't terribly bad things to aim for.
I suppose if I spoke about Mac gaming that I might get a little support, but since OSX is BSD-based, how big of a stretch can it be to make a Linux-compatible version out of the Mac version, especially since you can no longer use "differences in the PPC architecture" as a valid argument? They're both Unix-based, after all.
Wouldn't it have been easier to just simply port Civ IV to linux?
Are you kidding? That would require forethought, and research, and abandonment of the precious DirectX API! Fire would rain from the heavens! Locusts would eat all our crops! Everyone would be covered in boils! It would be the apocalypse!
Yes, all of those work. Then again, most of those would have been voted in.
But consider the people who DON'T play the latest and greatest titles. Suppose that I play FFXI instead of WoW. FFXI has never worked on Cedega, and it probably never will because of the voting system. This makes Cedega into a product that caters to the popular vote instead of a product that caters to the person that wants something to make their games actually run under a Linux environment, and that's why some people do not like it. The games list doesn't really get updated all that often, and you can't ask on the forums for information on whether Game X works or not because their forum is members-only.
So yeah, it's great if you play WoW, but God help you if you want to play something that isn't as popular.
Yep. It is possible. But it is more work than the average Windows user will want to put into it.
Just the average Windows user? Hell, it's more work than I'm willing to put in, and I feel fairly comfortable with admining Windows.
The thing I like about admining Linux is that the system tools are designed to make things so much easier and so much faster, and make the bulk of the work rest in setting up programs and configuration files.
For instance, let's try changing the password.
Linux:
Open a terminal.
Type 'passwd'
Enter your old password, followed by your new password, and again to confirm it.
Type 'exit'. Done.
Windows:
Click 'Start'.
Go to Settings > Control Panel (or click on 'Control Panel' if using the XP menu)
Double-click on 'User Accounts' and wait for applet to load.
Click on account name.
Click on 'Change Password' (or 'Create Password' if none is set)
Type in current password (only if 'Change Password' was selected), new password, and again to confirm. Also type in a hint.
It may ask if you want to make folders private. Choose yes or no.
Close window. Done.
Can you guess which is faster? Hint: the wrong answer is the one made by Microsoft. How about which one is easier? This one's a trick question, because the GUI does make things a tad easier...until you learn the syntax for the command-line version, then it's just there to be pretty.
It's the same for a bunch of other crap as well. Configuring via text files (a number of which briefly describe each setting in a commented section of the file; more details can be found in it's man entry) is infinitely faster than going thru 3-4 windows to get to a configuration screen where you can only, at best, change a handful of options, and the rest are located in the nightmarish Windows Registry with absolutely no explanation as to what each setting does.
I'd sooner have good admin tools that 'just work' as opposed to the programs I plan to install, 'cuz I'm going to be putting a great deal of effort into setting them up anyways. Just easier that way.
The problem with that is that earbuds have been around for years, probably a decade or more now, so there's been plenty of time to document such side-effects and make people aware of them, or pull such headphones off the market.
I don't get why people use those things anyways. They always hurt my ears (and I have friends bitch about that all the time as well), so I tend to use larger headphones that just cover my ears entirely. They do pretty much the same thing, and they're not a PITA to wear (though maybe a PITA to carry around; then again, I wear them most of the time. Like right now, for instance.)
Games fall under the same banner as books, music, television, and movies, which are all considered forms of artistic expression. All of these forms can be worked on by one person, or several hundred people. All of them are mass-produced for public consumption. A lot of what's released is crap, though not all of it. Each has critics praising and shaming respective works. Yet, despite the similarities, games aren't art because they follow the rules of every artform? What a load of shit.
If games didn't jump on the art bandwagon, we'd still be in the Pacman/Space Invaders/Galaga/etc era, with nothing to really look forward to. No Halo. No Half-Life. No Final Fantasy. Not even this guy's Metal Gear series would have made it. Why?
Because, in one way or another, all such games strive to make liberal use of artistic elements in order to create a masterwork; therefore, they fall under "art." If he had half a brain, he'd know that.
The other solution to this artificial difficulty to totally abandon Windows.
I actually wouldn't mind ditching Windows, but I still haven't settled on a distro, and Windows won't run FFXI using Cedega. It just doesn't like it at all. I also need VB.NET to do schoolwork on.
It's good to know I can create FAT32 partitions thru GNU/Linux though. I wasn't sure how I managed it before. I thought I did it thru XP, but it must have been when I started trying out different distros.
They're also kinda buggy. I'm using them right now since I couldn't format my 120GB IDE drive for FAT32 past 32GB or so (and there was no way in hell I was splitting it up into 4 pieces), and I wasn't too sure what else I could use to format for FAT32, so I used ext2.
It's been interesting what happens. If I look in a folder with thumbnails, it generates a thumb.db file, followed by a thumb.db::encryptable file. When you delete the::encryptable file, Windows tends to choke (though it still deletes), so you have to delete several times if you've got a lot of images or video to delete.
I've also had problems with installing/uninstalling software. It wouldn't allow me to install World of Warcraft at all on it. I installed Final Fantasy XI on it, but then ran into problems that it couldn't save my settings. Even worse was that when I tried to uninstall it, I'd bluescreen and have to do it again. What I ended up doing was just deleting the folder from the disk, then uninstalling (which worked, which boggled my mind because there was nothing left for it to uninstall except registry entries).
They've been fine otherwise, but I'd rather have my FAT32 back. It's far less buggy, and it's fairly stable in Linux as well.
Of course they're clueless. They schedule events that take 4-6 hours on average at 3 in the afternoon, and instead of showing what should've come after the game was SUPPOSED to be over, they jump right into whatever's supposed to be on at that time. "We now return to that shitty show called 'The War At Home', already in progress."
What they need to do is offer sports-free channels for people who aren't interested in a bunch of burly, sweaty men ramming into each other, and they can show everything that would otherwise get cancelled because of poor decisionmaking.
No they are not. Please don't overreact. Free speech does not mean free speech without consequences. Sure you have the right to say whatever you want but don't act surprised when there are repercussions to that speech. Would you think it would be outrageous if a student ran around a University Quad screaming every racial epithet known to civil society and a Dean kicked them right out of school?
The difference between your example and the one in question though is that, unlike the blog posts, you can't help but notice the content, and therefore become offended by it. The other thing, of course, being that the blog posts weren't on university property for all to see; they were online, on a seperate service, and required the effort of actually tracking it down, or hearing about it by word-of-mouth in order to view it's contents.
So while I agree that there's free speech, but not necessarily without consequences, you have to take the forum that the person chooses into account when deciding if they need to be punished. Next you'll be telling me that people can't go to bars after work and bitch about their boss and job like regular human beings, lest it get back to them and they pettily terminate your employment for something that, in all honesty, isn't any of their damned business.
But, "cockmaster"? WTF? Yeah, the original punishment seems a little harsh (loss of scholarship!). Even so I don't see how this is "your rights online".
How so? What right did the school have to come down on him so hard originally? What right do they have now to make him do community service, and apologize for expressing his own opinions? "Because of things he said on his blog" is hardly an excuse to attempt to destroy a person's career, he's entitled to his opinion. If the school didn't like what he had to say, they could just as easily not read his blog anymore.
Yeah, this is big YRO territory. When you see people getting punished for venting their frustrations about superiors and co-workers outside of the office like regular human beings, you know that something is seriously wrong, because anything outside the office is none of their god damned business.
Whatever the reason, desktop Linux's usability is hindered by its naming practices. This is not a huge factor in its growth or lack thereof, but it is something to consider. If nothing else, its naming is indicative of a community which does not always embrace new users and an operating system which is all to often seen as being reserved for the tech elite. If a person or group develops software they should, by all means, be able to name it whatever they want, but why not help everyone out a bit and name it something which is easy to recognized and remember?
Desktop Linux's usability is only hindered by it's naming practices for those who can't wait the extra second to hold their mouse over a program and read it's description. Besides that, most Linux programs when installed get filed under the relevant group in the Launcher, so there's really no excuse for further idiocy by going "K...Multimedia...xine? What the hell is that?"
If downloading programs, then the situation changes. They can read the program description almost immediately following the game and know what it does. If it's a clever acronym like GIMP, they'll figure it out before then. If it's a word-of-mouth thing, a Google search for the program name will reveal all the information they need.
I don't think the Linux community discourages new users. I think they discourage idiots who lack basic reading comprehension and/or surrender their credit card and SSN to their long-lost uncle in Nigeria, but not a geniune new user who can read the program description. I think that kind of discouragement is a good thing.
But if a large-scale model can be built, in theory it could break codes used to scramble information on the Internet, in banking, and within federal agencies.
Can't that same concept be applied to encrypting the data as well? I mean, if it can break current encryption easily, wouldn't the logic here be that it's capable of an encryption that would take even a quantum computer decades to crack? Or am I missing something here?
Slashdot Mirror
In order to play MMOs on Korean servers, you must have a Korean SSN so that you can register. To get a SSN, you have to actually live in South Korea, or be from South Korea. If you don't have one, you either have to steal it, or you simply don't play on their servers.
It's a colossal PITA to switch between OSes everytime I have the urge to play a game. Why not try to eliminate that problem so that I can work exclusively in an operating system I like as opposed to an operating system I've grown to dislike after years of general use? It makes more sense to me.
Well, you have to figure that if companies such as id or Bioware can release Linux clients for their games, then why can't other companies follow suit? They're not exactly behemoths compared to, say, EA or Ubisoft, but they're well-known, and obviously they consider the platform important enough to develop for.
How about server software? A lot of multiplayer games have Windows clients predominately, but they get both Windows and Linux server software. Why not just take the extra step, especially since the Linux server software wouldn't exist if it wasn't used?
I guess the biggest problem is that you'd have to learn a whole new API, and seriously, what's wrong with that? People should be taking every effort to know more; it makes you more well-rounded and gives you something to add to your resume. Both aren't terribly bad things to aim for.
I suppose if I spoke about Mac gaming that I might get a little support, but since OSX is BSD-based, how big of a stretch can it be to make a Linux-compatible version out of the Mac version, especially since you can no longer use "differences in the PPC architecture" as a valid argument? They're both Unix-based, after all.
You did it wrong. Should've done it the Peter Griffin way:
It was his sled. There. I've saved you two boring, boobless hours.
Are you kidding? That would require forethought, and research, and abandonment of the precious DirectX API! Fire would rain from the heavens! Locusts would eat all our crops! Everyone would be covered in boils! It would be the apocalypse!
True, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of trying to get rid of Windows?
Yes, all of those work. Then again, most of those would have been voted in.
But consider the people who DON'T play the latest and greatest titles. Suppose that I play FFXI instead of WoW. FFXI has never worked on Cedega, and it probably never will because of the voting system. This makes Cedega into a product that caters to the popular vote instead of a product that caters to the person that wants something to make their games actually run under a Linux environment, and that's why some people do not like it. The games list doesn't really get updated all that often, and you can't ask on the forums for information on whether Game X works or not because their forum is members-only.
So yeah, it's great if you play WoW, but God help you if you want to play something that isn't as popular.
I always forget about that, but that's usually because I fail to turn off the Welcome Screen, so CTRL+ALT+DEL just brings me to the Task Manager.
You win, good sir. Well played. :)
Just the average Windows user? Hell, it's more work than I'm willing to put in, and I feel fairly comfortable with admining Windows.
The thing I like about admining Linux is that the system tools are designed to make things so much easier and so much faster, and make the bulk of the work rest in setting up programs and configuration files.
For instance, let's try changing the password.
Can you guess which is faster? Hint: the wrong answer is the one made by Microsoft. How about which one is easier? This one's a trick question, because the GUI does make things a tad easier...until you learn the syntax for the command-line version, then it's just there to be pretty.
It's the same for a bunch of other crap as well. Configuring via text files (a number of which briefly describe each setting in a commented section of the file; more details can be found in it's man entry) is infinitely faster than going thru 3-4 windows to get to a configuration screen where you can only, at best, change a handful of options, and the rest are located in the nightmarish Windows Registry with absolutely no explanation as to what each setting does.
I'd sooner have good admin tools that 'just work' as opposed to the programs I plan to install, 'cuz I'm going to be putting a great deal of effort into setting them up anyways. Just easier that way.
The problem with that is that earbuds have been around for years, probably a decade or more now, so there's been plenty of time to document such side-effects and make people aware of them, or pull such headphones off the market.
I don't get why people use those things anyways. They always hurt my ears (and I have friends bitch about that all the time as well), so I tend to use larger headphones that just cover my ears entirely. They do pretty much the same thing, and they're not a PITA to wear (though maybe a PITA to carry around; then again, I wear them most of the time. Like right now, for instance.)
And I just finished washing my car. Damned Borg.
Then I recommend the following:
Games fall under the same banner as books, music, television, and movies, which are all considered forms of artistic expression. All of these forms can be worked on by one person, or several hundred people. All of them are mass-produced for public consumption. A lot of what's released is crap, though not all of it. Each has critics praising and shaming respective works. Yet, despite the similarities, games aren't art because they follow the rules of every artform? What a load of shit.
If games didn't jump on the art bandwagon, we'd still be in the Pacman/Space Invaders/Galaga/etc era, with nothing to really look forward to. No Halo. No Half-Life. No Final Fantasy. Not even this guy's Metal Gear series would have made it. Why?
Because, in one way or another, all such games strive to make liberal use of artistic elements in order to create a masterwork; therefore, they fall under "art." If he had half a brain, he'd know that.
Well, let's see:
Based on the above, probably not.
Farnsworth: No, no. That was all just special effects! Now let's have breakfast. I hope everyone likes eggs.
I actually wouldn't mind ditching Windows, but I still haven't settled on a distro, and Windows won't run FFXI using Cedega. It just doesn't like it at all. I also need VB.NET to do schoolwork on.
It's good to know I can create FAT32 partitions thru GNU/Linux though. I wasn't sure how I managed it before. I thought I did it thru XP, but it must have been when I started trying out different distros.
Thanks for the info. :)
They're also kinda buggy. I'm using them right now since I couldn't format my 120GB IDE drive for FAT32 past 32GB or so (and there was no way in hell I was splitting it up into 4 pieces), and I wasn't too sure what else I could use to format for FAT32, so I used ext2.
It's been interesting what happens. If I look in a folder with thumbnails, it generates a thumb.db file, followed by a thumb.db::encryptable file. When you delete the ::encryptable file, Windows tends to choke (though it still deletes), so you have to delete several times if you've got a lot of images or video to delete.
I've also had problems with installing/uninstalling software. It wouldn't allow me to install World of Warcraft at all on it. I installed Final Fantasy XI on it, but then ran into problems that it couldn't save my settings. Even worse was that when I tried to uninstall it, I'd bluescreen and have to do it again. What I ended up doing was just deleting the folder from the disk, then uninstalling (which worked, which boggled my mind because there was nothing left for it to uninstall except registry entries).
They've been fine otherwise, but I'd rather have my FAT32 back. It's far less buggy, and it's fairly stable in Linux as well.
It's the kissing disease, you know. Our little OS is growing up! :)
Of course they're clueless. They schedule events that take 4-6 hours on average at 3 in the afternoon, and instead of showing what should've come after the game was SUPPOSED to be over, they jump right into whatever's supposed to be on at that time. "We now return to that shitty show called 'The War At Home', already in progress."
What they need to do is offer sports-free channels for people who aren't interested in a bunch of burly, sweaty men ramming into each other, and they can show everything that would otherwise get cancelled because of poor decisionmaking.
The difference between your example and the one in question though is that, unlike the blog posts, you can't help but notice the content, and therefore become offended by it. The other thing, of course, being that the blog posts weren't on university property for all to see; they were online, on a seperate service, and required the effort of actually tracking it down, or hearing about it by word-of-mouth in order to view it's contents.
So while I agree that there's free speech, but not necessarily without consequences, you have to take the forum that the person chooses into account when deciding if they need to be punished. Next you'll be telling me that people can't go to bars after work and bitch about their boss and job like regular human beings, lest it get back to them and they pettily terminate your employment for something that, in all honesty, isn't any of their damned business.
How so? What right did the school have to come down on him so hard originally? What right do they have now to make him do community service, and apologize for expressing his own opinions? "Because of things he said on his blog" is hardly an excuse to attempt to destroy a person's career, he's entitled to his opinion. If the school didn't like what he had to say, they could just as easily not read his blog anymore.
Yeah, this is big YRO territory. When you see people getting punished for venting their frustrations about superiors and co-workers outside of the office like regular human beings, you know that something is seriously wrong, because anything outside the office is none of their god damned business.
That's just air escaping from the folds of his fat!
Desktop Linux's usability is only hindered by it's naming practices for those who can't wait the extra second to hold their mouse over a program and read it's description. Besides that, most Linux programs when installed get filed under the relevant group in the Launcher, so there's really no excuse for further idiocy by going "K...Multimedia...xine? What the hell is that?"
If downloading programs, then the situation changes. They can read the program description almost immediately following the game and know what it does. If it's a clever acronym like GIMP, they'll figure it out before then. If it's a word-of-mouth thing, a Google search for the program name will reveal all the information they need.
I don't think the Linux community discourages new users. I think they discourage idiots who lack basic reading comprehension and/or surrender their credit card and SSN to their long-lost uncle in Nigeria, but not a geniune new user who can read the program description. I think that kind of discouragement is a good thing.
I bet you're one of those assholes that bitched at the DM for hours after his character died. :)
Can't that same concept be applied to encrypting the data as well? I mean, if it can break current encryption easily, wouldn't the logic here be that it's capable of an encryption that would take even a quantum computer decades to crack? Or am I missing something here?