A trolling parody account based on the main flamebate/troll-ish creator of parody accounts? The plot thickens.. are you the open source twitter competitor that TFA is talking about?
It kind of is a good way to get people to be more sympathetic of MS though. Most slashdotters jump on any little mistake, and I personally can't help playing devil's advocate myself when I notice flaws in an argument. Arguing against twitter's inanity often ends up with people who in essence agree with twitter's views (but not the way he presents them), defending MS. That can only be good for them because I doubt most of us would have any reason to try to defend them otherwise.. they have made a few good products but they still keep fscking up all the time, and it's just demoralising how they can get away with it because of their market position.
I wasn't exactly cranky, and I do have a sense of humour. I get the joke, but if it had any basis in truth, I just found the complaining kind of stupid. "I really shouldn't eat rice pudding while reading about disinfecting viruses" would have been more in line with my own personal sense of humour, and it would have shown an element of rationality:P Complaining about something that is your own fault just seems dumb to me. Sowwy.
He was kidding, and it was funny. FUNNY. That you could even consider it 'fear-mongering' is very sad, either because it shows that you think it has a chance of happening, or because you believe (and possibly rightly, some people just shouldn't be allocated any air) that some idiots may think it has a chance of happening.
You have no evidence that they were stolen from a locked storage unit under his control. Anyway, it would be far more impressive if he had a clever story on how he recovered his stolen laptops rather than asking about how to go about it..
I actually almost created that address just to see if you'd send anything:p
Surely an intelligent girl like yourself (with an awesome palindromic user ID, no less) would have a boyfriend anyway? Away with you, foul temptress - you and your flirtacious emoticons!
If that's so fun and exciting to do, why not do it while the PS3 is working? After parting with the currency I dropped on the console, I'd like to actually use it from time to time.
Wow, does FF really take something like a year to install, and you have to spend 20 more hours every day updating? It's a disaster recovery situation, not a daily occurence.. you can't have your instant gratification here.
I don't think system update and game patches are incremental, they just download the latest one and you're done with it. I know it's a PITA, but like I said it's not a common occurence. I've certainly had no issues so far with any system or game updates, and neither have millions of others. Hopefully Sony will figure out what the issue is, and learn from it.
I'm usually quite a cynical person but people are just going too far with the flamebait in this thread..
Sounds like something they should implement when they finally get round to releasing 'Home'. To be honest I'm happy that consoles even have games that can patch themselves, and downloadable content. That was one of the major failings before. I like your ideas as well though, but such a level of service would probably require a subscription (unless someone came up with a crack to just backup everything automatically to GMail or Hotmail, that would be pretty cool)
I don't really get why any game maker would try to restrict the copying of saved games. Even if it does mean that someone can just propagate a 'fully unlocked' save, so what? If gamers have bought the game and want to skip most of the content, that's their own fault..
If you were even more talented then you'd be able to control your fingers better and not wear out the buttons:P I've grown kinda bored of the game after completing everything but TTFAF on expert, and not had any button/whammy issues so far - even on my cheap Chinese knock-off that I got from eBay, that has 10 buttons. I don't really use the 5 next to the body though, even though it would be funny for some high-up soloing. If my other set started wearing out I could just play up there all the time though =p
I was actually fine with 98, Firefox, Spybot and no AV for years, obviously behind a firewall (just a basic hardware firewall). I got AV when I got XP because it kept whining about no AV. Now I just have AV on my Windows install through work, but obviously don't need anything for my OSX install (yet.. and hopefully never).
You don't seem to be getting it. A good poker player won't always play the same hand the same way, so he can easily fool a computer that is judging everything by what has happened so far. And the AI also has to be able to bluff and do slow play effectively otherwise the professional can just fold every time the computer raises. Poker is not a 'simple' game. The maths involved in calculating pot odds isn't that spectacular as all the pros can do it in their heads, so it obviously isn't just about that.
I would expect it's more because the first hand has to go someone's way, and then even if it went back the opposite way next hand, the other player was still in the lead for a while. But if one player has a couple of good hands and then they both keep winning one at a time then one of the players will still be 'ahead' that whole time. In perfect play in a limits game, I don't think the amount of money that a player has would make a difference..
Nor will I ever know. System updates, GT5 Prologue, GTA4 and MGS takes ages to install too, but I can go eat, go out, go to bed, watch TV, whatever, while that's happening. If your system is that badly fscked up then what do you expect? Is a restore of your data on an already working system going to be any quicker than installing Final Fantasy whatevertheheckversionitisnow? It's not like you have to do it every day too. Wow people are impatient these days..
Of course this isn't great on Sony's part, I can't excuse the fact that they have broken a lot of PS3 installs with this mess, but at the end of the day, it's just a console and the problem is relatively easy to fix compared to for example the whole RROD fiasco. Most people will know someone who could fix it for them.
Well, I didn't know that, and some file formats stay compatible between releases (I just checked the PST file versioning and it was the same from Office 97 to Office 2002/XP) - but the guy who used to complain just about his interface not being as fancy had 97. I hate when people want to upgrade just because there is a newer version out. Especially when new versions aren't even any better (for example I said that nobody in the office is allowed to purchase a Vista machine, and I was even going to disallow Office 2007, but MS were pretty quick with cutting off stock of 2003..).
BTW I'm not being a hypocrite when I talk about upgrading either - I stuck with Windows 98 until games I like started *requiring* XP (and I still prefer the original Quake deathmatch to the others in the series, hehe:P). I even just used hand-me-down machines with old versions of office and Windows etc here at work until last year when I decided I may as well buy a new machine for myself. So admittedly I do have Office 2003, but I certainly don't want or need Office 2007. We've had annoying issues with Outlook 2007 not being able to perform certain calendar functions (that work fine on earlier versions of Office even for the same account), or client upgrades from Outlook 2003->2007 generating a lot of synch errors when connecting to the Exchange server. The second problem was fairly easily sorted by simply copying the Outlook profile, which sorted whatever was causing the problem, but it just shows poor testing on MS's part, and it was a needless waste of my time searching for solutions to the problem. When MS can't even get their software interoperating properly, what chance do the rest of the world have? The sad thing is that people put up with it with Office because it's authentic Office, and it's new so it must be awesome. If I installed the latest version of OpenOffice and some feature wasn't working, I'd get people whining for MS Office.
The system update is not a 'firmware' update, otherwise you wouldn't have to download the system updates again after reformatting the drive. I know from experience that you do indeed have to do this. That's all I'm trying to point out.
If putting in a fresh formatted drive fixes the system, then the problem is with the code that was on the HD, not in the firmware. Saying that the firmware is broken is like saying your BIOS is broken because a Windows startup file has been corrupted.
Yeah I know, I was just pointing out that that's the OS, not the firmware. I take 'firmware' to mean the actual code that is held on the mobo somewhere and nothing to do with what is on the HD. I'd say this is the equivalent of messing up your Windows installation and not having a CD to restore/repair from.
I'm aware that the thing is essentially bricked unless you take it apart, but for most slashdotters that's quite an easy fix and certainly doesn't require you to send the machine away or buy a new one like some people here are on about.
Yep, a reset option should definitely be available. There is a hard reset option on the PS3 by holding down the power button for 10 seconds, but apparently that doesn't do anything in this case.. lame.
Yep, Office 97 is adequate IMO, but when you buy in new machines they often come with newer versions of office, so those with 97 start whining because their interface isn't as shiny, or features like shared email folders are harder to access. Or, worse, they actually need a newer version to cope with the files that those with newer versions are churning out. Yes you can save to older formats, but most people will just regard that as a PITA, especially when it comes to things like PST files..
If someone came up with a good free shared email/calendar alternative to Outlook then that would be awesome. I meant to try out the latest version of thunderbird, still haven't got around to it.. basically Exchange and Outlook are quite a good solution. I definitely don't want to get rid of Exchange right now as it means road warriors can easily access their email through their phones without having to deal with Crapberry network issues all the time etc, but if Outlook was dethroned then OpenOffice would be a very viable solution for a lot of our desktops. And that also means that Linux would be quite viable in some cases too:) I can dream at least..
Thankfully only 2 of our machines have been ordered with Vista so far - one by our MD, and one by an insubordinate IT assistant who needed a multimedia spec machine for presentations, and it doesn't even work for it - why do Dell laptops always seem to have strange problems with projectors??. If MS keep forcing Vista on businesses then I'd make a concerted effort to replace as many of our machines as possible with FOSS alternatives though, rather than having to get Volume licensing stuff for all new machines just so that we can downgrade. And that's only if drivers are even available for the newer stuff - for some new Dells like the one I mentioned, you can't! Perhaps there are some hacked drivers out there that will allow me to 'downgrade' it though..
They only let me out once a year, and I already used up my day this year going to a museum exhibit of 20th century storage technology. Sorry. Feel free to send pictures, erotic stories and spam to leave_me_alone_you_crazy_woman@hotmail.com though.
I was only talking about backing up the saves, all of which have been fine for me so far, and basically I don't even need the saves either.
Even my saved game data isn't that important to me at the moment: I can complete all the guitar hero songs apart from the battle against the devil and Through the Fire and Flames on Expert, and my Battlefield Bad Company profile data is just held on the EA/DICE servers. I was thinking about restarting MGS from the start anyway now that my skills and confidence have improved somewhat, and as for my other games, I've either completed them, or it wouldn't take much time to get to the same place (apart from maybe GTA, I've spent a lot of time doing other stuff than just the main missions).
As for downloaded content, I don't see it disappearing anytime soon. Maybe in a couple of years yeah, but by then I'll have Guitar Hero IV, etc etc.
Downloading and reinstalling system updates would take a long time, sure. It's maybe better to start off from a fresh system if you don't play some games anymore anyway, to avoid defragmentation if you've installed and deleted a lot of games..
That's great - when I was a student I couldn't justify £30 a month of being tied down to a minimum 12 month contract though. I don't actually think any plans offered unlimited texts back then (3-4 years ago) in the UK either, otherwise I would probably have been able to justify it to myself.
13000 messages in a month is pretty nuts:P I have a friend who until recently had 2 phones though, and with the way she was allllways texting people I can imagine she would have been getting close to 13k a month too. No idea why she didn't just get a decent contract on one phone in the first place, she recently cut down to one though. Maybe I'm just getting old (24!) but I find it pretty rude and disconcerting when people spend so much time texting:/ I also don't really see how someone can enjoy time with friends if they are spending most of that time just texting other friends!
Slashdot Mirror
A trolling parody account based on the main flamebate/troll-ish creator of parody accounts? The plot thickens.. are you the open source twitter competitor that TFA is talking about?
It kind of is a good way to get people to be more sympathetic of MS though. Most slashdotters jump on any little mistake, and I personally can't help playing devil's advocate myself when I notice flaws in an argument. Arguing against twitter's inanity often ends up with people who in essence agree with twitter's views (but not the way he presents them), defending MS. That can only be good for them because I doubt most of us would have any reason to try to defend them otherwise.. they have made a few good products but they still keep fscking up all the time, and it's just demoralising how they can get away with it because of their market position.
I wasn't exactly cranky, and I do have a sense of humour. I get the joke, but if it had any basis in truth, I just found the complaining kind of stupid. "I really shouldn't eat rice pudding while reading about disinfecting viruses" would have been more in line with my own personal sense of humour, and it would have shown an element of rationality :P Complaining about something that is your own fault just seems dumb to me. Sowwy.
Do you often read about biological maladies while eating, just so that you can complain about people being icky?
He was kidding, and it was funny. FUNNY. That you could even consider it 'fear-mongering' is very sad, either because it shows that you think it has a chance of happening, or because you believe (and possibly rightly, some people just shouldn't be allocated any air) that some idiots may think it has a chance of happening.
You have no evidence that they were stolen from a locked storage unit under his control. Anyway, it would be far more impressive if he had a clever story on how he recovered his stolen laptops rather than asking about how to go about it..
They were talking about bricking the computer rather than having the thieves brick their pants.
I actually almost created that address just to see if you'd send anything :p
Surely an intelligent girl like yourself (with an awesome palindromic user ID, no less) would have a boyfriend anyway? Away with you, foul temptress - you and your flirtacious emoticons!
If that's so fun and exciting to do, why not do it while the PS3 is working? After parting with the currency I dropped on the console, I'd like to actually use it from time to time.
Wow, does FF really take something like a year to install, and you have to spend 20 more hours every day updating? It's a disaster recovery situation, not a daily occurence.. you can't have your instant gratification here.
I don't think system update and game patches are incremental, they just download the latest one and you're done with it. I know it's a PITA, but like I said it's not a common occurence. I've certainly had no issues so far with any system or game updates, and neither have millions of others. Hopefully Sony will figure out what the issue is, and learn from it.
I'm usually quite a cynical person but people are just going too far with the flamebait in this thread..
Sounds like something they should implement when they finally get round to releasing 'Home'. To be honest I'm happy that consoles even have games that can patch themselves, and downloadable content. That was one of the major failings before. I like your ideas as well though, but such a level of service would probably require a subscription (unless someone came up with a crack to just backup everything automatically to GMail or Hotmail, that would be pretty cool)
I don't really get why any game maker would try to restrict the copying of saved games. Even if it does mean that someone can just propagate a 'fully unlocked' save, so what? If gamers have bought the game and want to skip most of the content, that's their own fault..
If you were even more talented then you'd be able to control your fingers better and not wear out the buttons :P I've grown kinda bored of the game after completing everything but TTFAF on expert, and not had any button/whammy issues so far - even on my cheap Chinese knock-off that I got from eBay, that has 10 buttons. I don't really use the 5 next to the body though, even though it would be funny for some high-up soloing. If my other set started wearing out I could just play up there all the time though =p
I was actually fine with 98, Firefox, Spybot and no AV for years, obviously behind a firewall (just a basic hardware firewall). I got AV when I got XP because it kept whining about no AV. Now I just have AV on my Windows install through work, but obviously don't need anything for my OSX install (yet.. and hopefully never).
You don't seem to be getting it. A good poker player won't always play the same hand the same way, so he can easily fool a computer that is judging everything by what has happened so far. And the AI also has to be able to bluff and do slow play effectively otherwise the professional can just fold every time the computer raises. Poker is not a 'simple' game. The maths involved in calculating pot odds isn't that spectacular as all the pros can do it in their heads, so it obviously isn't just about that.
I would expect it's more because the first hand has to go someone's way, and then even if it went back the opposite way next hand, the other player was still in the lead for a while. But if one player has a couple of good hands and then they both keep winning one at a time then one of the players will still be 'ahead' that whole time. In perfect play in a limits game, I don't think the amount of money that a player has would make a difference..
8|
He's doing the eyes again! May as well fold.
Nor will I ever know. System updates, GT5 Prologue, GTA4 and MGS takes ages to install too, but I can go eat, go out, go to bed, watch TV, whatever, while that's happening. If your system is that badly fscked up then what do you expect? Is a restore of your data on an already working system going to be any quicker than installing Final Fantasy whatevertheheckversionitisnow? It's not like you have to do it every day too. Wow people are impatient these days..
Of course this isn't great on Sony's part, I can't excuse the fact that they have broken a lot of PS3 installs with this mess, but at the end of the day, it's just a console and the problem is relatively easy to fix compared to for example the whole RROD fiasco. Most people will know someone who could fix it for them.
Well, I didn't know that, and some file formats stay compatible between releases (I just checked the PST file versioning and it was the same from Office 97 to Office 2002/XP) - but the guy who used to complain just about his interface not being as fancy had 97. I hate when people want to upgrade just because there is a newer version out. Especially when new versions aren't even any better (for example I said that nobody in the office is allowed to purchase a Vista machine, and I was even going to disallow Office 2007, but MS were pretty quick with cutting off stock of 2003..).
BTW I'm not being a hypocrite when I talk about upgrading either - I stuck with Windows 98 until games I like started *requiring* XP (and I still prefer the original Quake deathmatch to the others in the series, hehe :P). I even just used hand-me-down machines with old versions of office and Windows etc here at work until last year when I decided I may as well buy a new machine for myself. So admittedly I do have Office 2003, but I certainly don't want or need Office 2007. We've had annoying issues with Outlook 2007 not being able to perform certain calendar functions (that work fine on earlier versions of Office even for the same account), or client upgrades from Outlook 2003->2007 generating a lot of synch errors when connecting to the Exchange server. The second problem was fairly easily sorted by simply copying the Outlook profile, which sorted whatever was causing the problem, but it just shows poor testing on MS's part, and it was a needless waste of my time searching for solutions to the problem. When MS can't even get their software interoperating properly, what chance do the rest of the world have? The sad thing is that people put up with it with Office because it's authentic Office, and it's new so it must be awesome. If I installed the latest version of OpenOffice and some feature wasn't working, I'd get people whining for MS Office.
Commonly known as the 'not enough coffee' theme
The system update is not a 'firmware' update, otherwise you wouldn't have to download the system updates again after reformatting the drive. I know from experience that you do indeed have to do this. That's all I'm trying to point out.
If putting in a fresh formatted drive fixes the system, then the problem is with the code that was on the HD, not in the firmware. Saying that the firmware is broken is like saying your BIOS is broken because a Windows startup file has been corrupted.
Seems a lot of people here need to look up the definition of firmware.
Yeah I know, I was just pointing out that that's the OS, not the firmware. I take 'firmware' to mean the actual code that is held on the mobo somewhere and nothing to do with what is on the HD. I'd say this is the equivalent of messing up your Windows installation and not having a CD to restore/repair from.
I'm aware that the thing is essentially bricked unless you take it apart, but for most slashdotters that's quite an easy fix and certainly doesn't require you to send the machine away or buy a new one like some people here are on about.
Yep, a reset option should definitely be available. There is a hard reset option on the PS3 by holding down the power button for 10 seconds, but apparently that doesn't do anything in this case.. lame.
Yep, Office 97 is adequate IMO, but when you buy in new machines they often come with newer versions of office, so those with 97 start whining because their interface isn't as shiny, or features like shared email folders are harder to access. Or, worse, they actually need a newer version to cope with the files that those with newer versions are churning out. Yes you can save to older formats, but most people will just regard that as a PITA, especially when it comes to things like PST files..
If someone came up with a good free shared email/calendar alternative to Outlook then that would be awesome. I meant to try out the latest version of thunderbird, still haven't got around to it.. basically Exchange and Outlook are quite a good solution. I definitely don't want to get rid of Exchange right now as it means road warriors can easily access their email through their phones without having to deal with Crapberry network issues all the time etc, but if Outlook was dethroned then OpenOffice would be a very viable solution for a lot of our desktops. And that also means that Linux would be quite viable in some cases too :) I can dream at least..
Thankfully only 2 of our machines have been ordered with Vista so far - one by our MD, and one by an insubordinate IT assistant who needed a multimedia spec machine for presentations, and it doesn't even work for it - why do Dell laptops always seem to have strange problems with projectors??. If MS keep forcing Vista on businesses then I'd make a concerted effort to replace as many of our machines as possible with FOSS alternatives though, rather than having to get Volume licensing stuff for all new machines just so that we can downgrade. And that's only if drivers are even available for the newer stuff - for some new Dells like the one I mentioned, you can't! Perhaps there are some hacked drivers out there that will allow me to 'downgrade' it though..
Gays are hardly a minority compared to psychopaths :p
They only let me out once a year, and I already used up my day this year going to a museum exhibit of 20th century storage technology. Sorry. Feel free to send pictures, erotic stories and spam to leave_me_alone_you_crazy_woman@hotmail.com though.
I was only talking about backing up the saves, all of which have been fine for me so far, and basically I don't even need the saves either.
Even my saved game data isn't that important to me at the moment: I can complete all the guitar hero songs apart from the battle against the devil and Through the Fire and Flames on Expert, and my Battlefield Bad Company profile data is just held on the EA/DICE servers. I was thinking about restarting MGS from the start anyway now that my skills and confidence have improved somewhat, and as for my other games, I've either completed them, or it wouldn't take much time to get to the same place (apart from maybe GTA, I've spent a lot of time doing other stuff than just the main missions).
As for downloaded content, I don't see it disappearing anytime soon. Maybe in a couple of years yeah, but by then I'll have Guitar Hero IV, etc etc.
Downloading and reinstalling system updates would take a long time, sure. It's maybe better to start off from a fresh system if you don't play some games anymore anyway, to avoid defragmentation if you've installed and deleted a lot of games..
That's great - when I was a student I couldn't justify £30 a month of being tied down to a minimum 12 month contract though. I don't actually think any plans offered unlimited texts back then (3-4 years ago) in the UK either, otherwise I would probably have been able to justify it to myself.
13000 messages in a month is pretty nuts :P I have a friend who until recently had 2 phones though, and with the way she was allllways texting people I can imagine she would have been getting close to 13k a month too. No idea why she didn't just get a decent contract on one phone in the first place, she recently cut down to one though. Maybe I'm just getting old (24!) but I find it pretty rude and disconcerting when people spend so much time texting :/ I also don't really see how someone can enjoy time with friends if they are spending most of that time just texting other friends!