I've been looking at the whole Creative situation for a little while now - I used to be a big fan of their hardware. My first SB16 kicked so much ass during the Glory Days of Microprose and Windows 3.11...
So, naturally, I was disenheartened to hear how poorly this was handled. But, angry lawyer-speak aside, my understanding is that Creative had a few (legitimate) problems:
ALchemy. My understanding is that Microsoft removed DirectSound, or some part of DirectSound, from Vista because their new driver model or DirectX model or something ruined things. Create rewrote a DirectSound emulator for their new X-Fi cards, and later ported it to their older ones. Presumably because of how many man-hours go into designing something like this, they wanted to charge money for older cards to use it. This guy took the free X-Fi version and removed hardware checks so it would run on any card. This is the "stealing their goods" complaint.
Crippling Vista drivers is a "business decision that only we have the right to make"? That's true, but they're not being selfish assholes. (Well, only a little.) They licensed a bunch of technologies from other companies, but licensed it only for XP. D'oh. Now, here's a guy, on their own forums nonetheless, enabling these technologies on Vista. Can you say "lawsuit?"
I built my current rig over the summer, and I have yet to put a proper sound card in it. The onboard audio is fairly good - my Striker Extreme motherboard comes with a riser card, which seems to have taken care of most of the motherboard noise. (Or, maybe it's just to trick people into thinking they're getting a real sound card.) I have a dual core processor, so a little audio work isn't going to hurt it much. (And then there are games like Doom 3 that process all sound, in software, in a separate thread, and completely ignore hardware acceleration.) I'm not going to get a sound card and use up a precious expansion slot until I get better speakers - and living in a dorm, that won't be for quite some time.
It's a shame they're having problems like this, though. They had good, solid products, and I've been quite happy with them and their drivers up through the Audigy. (I haven't purchased one since.)
Maybe AMD will surprise the world by including kick-ass audio equipment in its spider-monkey platform or whatever...
There are characteristics in common with everything "normal" you type - for example, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing(tm) back in the Glory Days of Windows 3.11 could tell me that my 4th finger on my left hand is weak - making a lot of typos on the "w", you see. It was nifty looking at the profiles of every user in that program for little tidbits like that, and logging onto my brother's profile and laughing as it commented how much he had "improved."
But... do those things apply when typing a password? The whole consistent rhythm and speed thing? Or maybe that makes it easier.
Perhaps a better solution would be to emulate voice recognition - train the security software to recognize your typing, and have it watch you as you're logged in. Just as you can train voice recognition to work with multiple speakers, you could train the security software to recognize "sober me", "drunk me", "caffeinated me", etc. (And not let "drunk me" send e-mail, and maybe schedule my development IDE processes at a higher priority for "caffeinated me", etc.)
"Hack" in the common parlance is pretty much "to break (into) something." People who insist on other definitions of hack generally push the word "crack/cracker" to refer to this type of black-hat activity.
"Hack" in the classic MIT parlance was a nifty programming trick, or maybe just something really clever. Some people refer to awesome pranks as "hacks" (a compliment to the prankster), although normally it refers to some particularly elegant algorithm or code block.
"Hack" as referring to bad code, as in "hack-job" or "I hacked it together in three hours" is generally called a "kludge" (KLOOJ) by these people.
Maybe someone who actually went-slash-goes there could help out my amateur etymology.
I had Aero enabled on my 3.4GHz box. (This was during the public beta, mind you, but the beta was a lot slower and more unstable.) Biggest thing with Aero is having a proper video card, not memory. (Not that gaming performance was great on a 3.4GHz with 1GB of RAM and an old video card... but the system booted fairly "quickly" and ran IE7 and my Office 2007 beta just fine.
Vista will expand to fill available memory - it caches recently opened files and programs to save a few disk seeks. Try launching Office, for example. Notice how long it takes. Close it, and immediately launch it again - there will be about nil loading times.
SP1 fixes a lot of the gaming performance problems with Vista. However, the worst benchmarks (PC Gamer, Maximum PC) showed a 10% performance drop in some framerates, which is about what they were whining about XP came out with it's "massive" Luna UI.
As for DX10 not offering much in visuals, I beg to differ. It costs me about 40fps to turn DX10 mode on which, yes, is ridiculous - but Crysis and Hellgate: London look completely different in DX10 mode. Not that you'd notice much from screenshots, but little things like motion blur and smoke effects are the reasons I bought an 8800 GTX on my gaming rig.
Left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing... Or, to extend your metaphor, what the feet are doing, and where you are in proverbial traffic.
I've heard that the hardest part of software development isn't writing the code, nor is it debugging, but getting the friggin' specs out of the user/customer!
Not that I'm in that industry yet, but I do statistics work for my college. They'll give me a stack of paper surveys, and say "Can you turn this into a chart? Kthx." Regular paper generally has two axes, and they ask for a 200 question survey to be turned into "a chart."
Eventually, I beat out of them that they're the Associate Dean of the Office of Student Life Special Committee for Acronym Development on Alcoholism and Student Pregancy and want to grind their axe that drunk kids have kids, so you shouldn't get drunk. After you figure out what they're trying to do, you can twist a graph out of the data proving that drunk college students are promiscuous... Shocking, isn't it?
I can definitely see the Census Bureau going all, like, "Dude, we count things. Can you digitize this?" and getting a calculator. "No, we ask people questions and count the answers!" and getting a scantron machine. "No, no, dude, we go to people's houses!" and getting a PDA. "But, that's too complicated. Can you make it simpler?" and getting a pencil.
Luddites, especially government luddites, fail at describing what they want when ordering computers and software. In compsci classes, you'll get a nice assignment like "write a program that, utilizing the O(n log n) sorting algorithms discussed in class, accomplishes X, Y, and Z for Q points." In real life, you'll get "We're the FBI. We install wiretaps and occaisionally fight crime. Can you computerize that?" and end up with a sytem that requires 13 steps to save a file.
First, your salesman was an idiot. My gaming rig runs Vista (I want DirectX 10 without hacks!), and I only have 2 GB of memory.
Even games like Crysis are hard-pressed to use more than 2; 4 is just a waste of money unless you're doing video editing.
Vista runs just fine on less, too. I ran Beta 2 and RC1 on my old machine - 3.4GHz Pentium 4, 1 GB of RAM, and a nVidia GeForce 6800. Aero ran smoothly, my Office 2007 beta ran smoothly, and I could even play some games! (The beta was rather unstable on my machine.)
But... how couldn't your step-dad, who's only using a web browser, figure out Vista? The big "E" (or fox picture, for the discriminating luddite) are in the same spot. It's not like the 2D desktop has changed much since Windows 95.
Other than DirectX 10, there are a lot of quirks in Vista that I absolutely love. In XP, manually typing in a path into a "Save As" dialog will obliterate the original filename. (I.e., overwriting longfilename.torrent with e:\data\.torrents will obliterate the original longfilename.torrent. If you want to keep the original filename, you have to copy-paste it, or click everywhere to navigate instead of typing in the path by hand.) In Vista, the original filename will appear again after typing in a save path. There's also a little search filter in Explorer and in Save dialogs, and stacks are nifty. (Right click -> stack by -> type will put all of the PDFs in a directory and subdirectories into one "stack" icon.)
But... other people may not care, and the hardware requirements are definitely higher if you want the shiny. But, the start menu's round, and right-click desktop -> personalize brings up a slightly different menu. It's not like, say, switching to Linux, where all of your buttons are really different.
I'd say that's quite a right wing definition- I'd put it more as: Left: Looking after society from the bottom up. Right: Looking after society from the top down.
And I'd say that's more of a left-wing definition.
You think Republicans (generally, the "right") care only about the rich? ("Looking after society from the top down?") Last time I checked, there was much more of a middle-class than the uber-rich-light-cigars-with-$100-bills-burgeois-cosmopolitan-monopoly-man-Mister-Moneybags class. (Although I assume both parties simply pandor to get votes.)
You think Democrats (generally, the "left") care only about the poor? Or care at all? Last time I checked, it was men like George Soros who gave them money to run. The lower classes are terrible targets for campaign fundraising - will food stamps cover your $100 a plate fundraiser? In this way, Democrats fit the Republican stereotype, too - both parties love the "rich" during election years.
Now, if we ignore political parties and talk strictly about competing philosphies, then I'd say the parent poster is more accurate.
The modern left evolved from the "progressive" movement. They were the first mainstream American movement to view government as a tool for social change. They focused on rooting out corruption and fixing societal problems.
The rightists (right-wingers? Are we birds?) look for private sector solutions. Their solution to government corruption is to get rid of the government. Is this good in every case? Or most cases? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. (Full disclosure: I fall right of center.)
But, neither ideology preaches "rich first" or "poor first," although each will have different solutions to issues like "poverty" and "wealth distribution."
Reading the article, it sounds like all he did was hack the ALchemy driver so you wouldn't have to pay for it:
Well, I did manage to patch the latest version of ALchemy X-Fi to run on any card, without even removing Safecast, but I'm done with that.
The driver hacker didn't write a DirectSound emulation program - he just hacked up Creative's drivers so they would:
Enable ALchemy features on "any" card - i.e., make the free version they released with their new card work on other cards, eliminating the need to pay for the other version.
Enable features "purposely disabled" when Vista is detected. I'm sure Creative has a reason to do this - probably the whole "we haven't licensed anything for Vista for our older cards, so don't get us sued" bit from the summary.
He didn't hack together an ALchemy replacement; he just hacked it up so that it would run better on Vista, and so you wouldn't have to pay for it. It's more like writing a "no-CD hack" for a game, rather than writing your own game.
Developers weren't "outdone" by a hobbyist - they were the ones that wrote the XP code, and then disabled it in the Vista drivers. This hobbyist is just removing those checks, which it seems could get Creative in trouble.
You're referring to Vista's lack of (now "legacy") DirectSound support.
Creative created an "ALchemy" program to emulate DirectSound in Vista at considerable expense and manpower.
They ported it to their older cards, but want $10 for the Alchemy program. Now, free drivers are great and all, but rewriting a part of XP lacking in Vista is a bit more than a driver update.
Besides, I haven't had any problems with "bugged drivers." Unless if you use their "auto-updater" program. Don't use it; find your drivers manually. Otherwise, you will have drivers bugged to hell.
I agree, but the suing weapon manufacturers analogy is a little flawed. Weapons, though generally disliked, have legitimate purposes. Everyone knows about hunting and home defense.
There isn't such a "legitimate" purpose for a cheat program.
No they don't. Earplugs in general cause the pressure in your inner ear to equalize with the cabin pressure more slowly, building up/releasing less pressure. If it happens slowly, you won't notice as much.
Why your ears don't pop if you live at a hojillion feet, but they do if you fly up that high.
I wonder if they'll try and force him to give up his source during discovery. That might very well be the angle they're looking at in this whole thing.
That's realling interesting! Two outcomes if they manage to do that:
He is using infringing code somehow and has to pay $bucks.
Blizzard has his source code and can defend against it now.
You miss the point - operating systems are made and designed to run and execute programs. APIs are evidence of this mind-numbingly obvious point.
Games, however, are not designed to be cheated. Sports analogy time: WoW is major-league baseball, this guy is selling steroids, and you're saying people should be able to put whatever they want into their bodies.
Loads the game twice. One clean copy to defeat Warden, one botted copy to cheat with.
You bought one copy; you were running two. Technically, that's pretty infringing.
And, no, I'm not going to be okay with a guy having "financial success" with ruining a game people pay to play. It's like selling clubs to children on playgrounds so the club-wielders have better access to playground equipment.
Wrong! Operating systems release special "Application Programming Interfaces" just for that purpose. The correct anology would be "then they'd have to sue everyone who wrote a LUA script."
The better analogy is "it's like people 'cheating' at Windows Activation and getting something for nothing." (Still a stretch and doesn't involve cars, but still better.)
Great - but I have no problems with them trying to break the part of society that cheats for money. Especially if it's just a game, for crying out loud.
But, a hack that works by copying the entire game wholesale, sounds like a copyright violation to me.
Most of these quests can be avoided now if you want - the easy ones are, well, easy XP. The hard ones you really no longer need to do - before, zones were desinged where you had to finish almost every quest to be a reasonable leve for the next zone. Now that you get more XP and need less, you only have to do some or most.
Then, there are other zones. At levels 25-35, I could quest in Duskwood, Stranglethorn Vale, Menethil Harbor, Thousand Needles, or Arathi Basin. There are a lot of "kill x" ones - but you don't have to do them.
As for splitting up the loot, this is only partially true. The two of you can kill boars faster, so you get livers faster. And, if your friend finishes first, you can still pick up the quest item (if it spawned at your comical 2.5% rate) from the corpses he loots. WoW knows he no longer needs them, so will let you take them instead.
And... the "not enough boars" problem is generally fixed in patches. I've been leveling a few level 30 characters (friend discovers game, plays for a while, so I make a new level 1 to quest with him. Then another friend wants someone to quest with, so I make another level 1...) and all the spawn rates that used to be painful have been fixed. (Besides, there's a lot fewer lowbies now, so there's less competition than there was!)
And... complicated quest chains are solved by going to thottbot.com. Time saver for ridiculousness.
I've had to do this before. My friend successfully installed and activated XP, but over the years upgraded his computer piece by piece. Motherboard, CPU, video card, sound card, etc.
Microsoft notes your hardware when you activate. If it changes significantly, it thinks it's on a new computer. So, you call a human and ask politely. 9 times out of 10 (another friend works in a repair show downtown) they'll reactivate your XP, no questions asked. Friend got his XP working again.
But, your problem was you "thrashed the installation." So, I assume you formatted your drive, reinstalled XP, and it wouldn't activate?
If that's the case, try installing your drivers before activating. Without any drivers, Windows thinks you have different hardware than you do with drivers. Different computer = no activation.
I had the same problem. I upgraded the RAM. Then I upgraded the video card. Then I added a sound card. There's a fudge factor, but these three components was enough to make my XP machine do another activation check. I just had to say "Okie-dokie, reactivate" and it worked.
Try installing your drivers again and reactivating. Otherwise, there's a phone number, and a nice human operator will fix your install.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference between J Random Shaman farming motes for 10 hours straight and J Random Botter botting for 10 hours. They're both paying.
You're right; it's "a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks."
EXCEPT that this program makes it easier - botting for 10 hours requires no effort, farming for 10 hours is effing tedious.
So... there'll be a lot more J Random Shamen if this becomes terribly popular. Before, only a small percentage had the patience to farm for 10 hours; the overly zealous (and generally griefing) players are few. BUT, after the program, everyone can do it.
Just another example of a company aiming its litigation at the wrong target.
Or... the right target. They could cut off every individual botting user... and they've tried that. But, these users are impossible to find because of this one individual millionaire who managed to make his program (currently) undetectable.
So... they could sue every individual user. But, we run into the "finding them" problem again.
So... they could sue the one person making it all possible, and profiting handsomely for it. This is the logical target - go for the one person responsible rather than lots of individuals - but also, apparently, the most difficult. Going for WoW Glider's maker solves the problem; going for his customers doesn't. So, you can't fault them for trying.
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I've been looking at the whole Creative situation for a little while now - I used to be a big fan of their hardware. My first SB16 kicked so much ass during the Glory Days of Microprose and Windows 3.11...
So, naturally, I was disenheartened to hear how poorly this was handled. But, angry lawyer-speak aside, my understanding is that Creative had a few (legitimate) problems:
I built my current rig over the summer, and I have yet to put a proper sound card in it. The onboard audio is fairly good - my Striker Extreme motherboard comes with a riser card, which seems to have taken care of most of the motherboard noise. (Or, maybe it's just to trick people into thinking they're getting a real sound card.) I have a dual core processor, so a little audio work isn't going to hurt it much. (And then there are games like Doom 3 that process all sound, in software, in a separate thread, and completely ignore hardware acceleration.) I'm not going to get a sound card and use up a precious expansion slot until I get better speakers - and living in a dorm, that won't be for quite some time.
It's a shame they're having problems like this, though. They had good, solid products, and I've been quite happy with them and their drivers up through the Audigy. (I haven't purchased one since.)
Maybe AMD will surprise the world by including kick-ass audio equipment in its spider-monkey platform or whatever...
Interesting! I'll have to do a little real-world reading... Unless they make a Kindling^H^H^He version... *ducks*
There are characteristics in common with everything "normal" you type - for example, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing(tm) back in the Glory Days of Windows 3.11 could tell me that my 4th finger on my left hand is weak - making a lot of typos on the "w", you see. It was nifty looking at the profiles of every user in that program for little tidbits like that, and logging onto my brother's profile and laughing as it commented how much he had "improved."
But... do those things apply when typing a password? The whole consistent rhythm and speed thing? Or maybe that makes it easier.
Perhaps a better solution would be to emulate voice recognition - train the security software to recognize your typing, and have it watch you as you're logged in. Just as you can train voice recognition to work with multiple speakers, you could train the security software to recognize "sober me", "drunk me", "caffeinated me", etc. (And not let "drunk me" send e-mail, and maybe schedule my development IDE processes at a higher priority for "caffeinated me", etc.)
"Hack" in the common parlance is pretty much "to break (into) something." People who insist on other definitions of hack generally push the word "crack/cracker" to refer to this type of black-hat activity.
"Hack" in the classic MIT parlance was a nifty programming trick, or maybe just something really clever. Some people refer to awesome pranks as "hacks" (a compliment to the prankster), although normally it refers to some particularly elegant algorithm or code block.
"Hack" as referring to bad code, as in "hack-job" or "I hacked it together in three hours" is generally called a "kludge" (KLOOJ) by these people.
Maybe someone who actually went-slash-goes there could help out my amateur etymology.
I had Aero enabled on my 3.4GHz box. (This was during the public beta, mind you, but the beta was a lot slower and more unstable.) Biggest thing with Aero is having a proper video card, not memory. (Not that gaming performance was great on a 3.4GHz with 1GB of RAM and an old video card... but the system booted fairly "quickly" and ran IE7 and my Office 2007 beta just fine.
Vista will expand to fill available memory - it caches recently opened files and programs to save a few disk seeks. Try launching Office, for example. Notice how long it takes. Close it, and immediately launch it again - there will be about nil loading times.
SP1 fixes a lot of the gaming performance problems with Vista. However, the worst benchmarks (PC Gamer, Maximum PC) showed a 10% performance drop in some framerates, which is about what they were whining about XP came out with it's "massive" Luna UI.
As for DX10 not offering much in visuals, I beg to differ. It costs me about 40fps to turn DX10 mode on which, yes, is ridiculous - but Crysis and Hellgate: London look completely different in DX10 mode. Not that you'd notice much from screenshots, but little things like motion blur and smoke effects are the reasons I bought an 8800 GTX on my gaming rig.
Left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing... Or, to extend your metaphor, what the feet are doing, and where you are in proverbial traffic.
I've heard that the hardest part of software development isn't writing the code, nor is it debugging, but getting the friggin' specs out of the user/customer!
Not that I'm in that industry yet, but I do statistics work for my college. They'll give me a stack of paper surveys, and say "Can you turn this into a chart? Kthx." Regular paper generally has two axes, and they ask for a 200 question survey to be turned into "a chart."
Eventually, I beat out of them that they're the Associate Dean of the Office of Student Life Special Committee for Acronym Development on Alcoholism and Student Pregancy and want to grind their axe that drunk kids have kids, so you shouldn't get drunk. After you figure out what they're trying to do, you can twist a graph out of the data proving that drunk college students are promiscuous... Shocking, isn't it?
I can definitely see the Census Bureau going all, like, "Dude, we count things. Can you digitize this?" and getting a calculator. "No, we ask people questions and count the answers!" and getting a scantron machine. "No, no, dude, we go to people's houses!" and getting a PDA. "But, that's too complicated. Can you make it simpler?" and getting a pencil.
Luddites, especially government luddites, fail at describing what they want when ordering computers and software. In compsci classes, you'll get a nice assignment like "write a program that, utilizing the O(n log n) sorting algorithms discussed in class, accomplishes X, Y, and Z for Q points." In real life, you'll get "We're the FBI. We install wiretaps and occaisionally fight crime. Can you computerize that?" and end up with a sytem that requires 13 steps to save a file.
Louisiana has running water? I thought they got their municipal internet out of a well...
First, your salesman was an idiot. My gaming rig runs Vista (I want DirectX 10 without hacks!), and I only have 2 GB of memory.
Even games like Crysis are hard-pressed to use more than 2; 4 is just a waste of money unless you're doing video editing.
Vista runs just fine on less, too. I ran Beta 2 and RC1 on my old machine - 3.4GHz Pentium 4, 1 GB of RAM, and a nVidia GeForce 6800. Aero ran smoothly, my Office 2007 beta ran smoothly, and I could even play some games! (The beta was rather unstable on my machine.)
But... how couldn't your step-dad, who's only using a web browser, figure out Vista? The big "E" (or fox picture, for the discriminating luddite) are in the same spot. It's not like the 2D desktop has changed much since Windows 95.
Other than DirectX 10, there are a lot of quirks in Vista that I absolutely love. In XP, manually typing in a path into a "Save As" dialog will obliterate the original filename. (I.e., overwriting longfilename.torrent with e:\data\.torrents will obliterate the original longfilename.torrent. If you want to keep the original filename, you have to copy-paste it, or click everywhere to navigate instead of typing in the path by hand.) In Vista, the original filename will appear again after typing in a save path. There's also a little search filter in Explorer and in Save dialogs, and stacks are nifty. (Right click -> stack by -> type will put all of the PDFs in a directory and subdirectories into one "stack" icon.)
But... other people may not care, and the hardware requirements are definitely higher if you want the shiny. But, the start menu's round, and right-click desktop -> personalize brings up a slightly different menu. It's not like, say, switching to Linux, where all of your buttons are really different.
I'd say that's quite a right wing definition- I'd put it more as: Left: Looking after society from the bottom up. Right: Looking after society from the top down.
And I'd say that's more of a left-wing definition.
You think Republicans (generally, the "right") care only about the rich? ("Looking after society from the top down?") Last time I checked, there was much more of a middle-class than the uber-rich-light-cigars-with-$100-bills-burgeois-cosmopolitan-monopoly-man-Mister-Moneybags class. (Although I assume both parties simply pandor to get votes.)
You think Democrats (generally, the "left") care only about the poor? Or care at all? Last time I checked, it was men like George Soros who gave them money to run. The lower classes are terrible targets for campaign fundraising - will food stamps cover your $100 a plate fundraiser? In this way, Democrats fit the Republican stereotype, too - both parties love the "rich" during election years.
Now, if we ignore political parties and talk strictly about competing philosphies, then I'd say the parent poster is more accurate.
The modern left evolved from the "progressive" movement. They were the first mainstream American movement to view government as a tool for social change. They focused on rooting out corruption and fixing societal problems.
The rightists (right-wingers? Are we birds?) look for private sector solutions. Their solution to government corruption is to get rid of the government. Is this good in every case? Or most cases? I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. (Full disclosure: I fall right of center.)
But, neither ideology preaches "rich first" or "poor first," although each will have different solutions to issues like "poverty" and "wealth distribution."
Generally, I:
I argue that they have my $.99, so I should get to listen to what I paid for. Better than just skipping to #2, I think, though it's a legal gray area.
Reading the article, it sounds like all he did was hack the ALchemy driver so you wouldn't have to pay for it:
Well, I did manage to patch the latest version of ALchemy X-Fi to run on any card, without even removing Safecast, but I'm done with that.The driver hacker didn't write a DirectSound emulation program - he just hacked up Creative's drivers so they would:
He didn't hack together an ALchemy replacement; he just hacked it up so that it would run better on Vista, and so you wouldn't have to pay for it. It's more like writing a "no-CD hack" for a game, rather than writing your own game.
Developers weren't "outdone" by a hobbyist - they were the ones that wrote the XP code, and then disabled it in the Vista drivers. This hobbyist is just removing those checks, which it seems could get Creative in trouble.
You're referring to Vista's lack of (now "legacy") DirectSound support.
Creative created an "ALchemy" program to emulate DirectSound in Vista at considerable expense and manpower.
They ported it to their older cards, but want $10 for the Alchemy program. Now, free drivers are great and all, but rewriting a part of XP lacking in Vista is a bit more than a driver update.
Besides, I haven't had any problems with "bugged drivers." Unless if you use their "auto-updater" program. Don't use it; find your drivers manually. Otherwise, you will have drivers bugged to hell.
I'm guessing if you were "really well heeled" you probably wouldn't be as interested in stealing satellite.
Either that, or you're really bored...
I agree, but the suing weapon manufacturers analogy is a little flawed. Weapons, though generally disliked, have legitimate purposes. Everyone knows about hunting and home defense.
There isn't such a "legitimate" purpose for a cheat program.
Removed from context, a line from their homepage is really funny:
Alpine can be learned by exploration and the use of context-sensitive help
No they don't. Earplugs in general cause the pressure in your inner ear to equalize with the cabin pressure more slowly, building up/releasing less pressure. If it happens slowly, you won't notice as much.
Why your ears don't pop if you live at a hojillion feet, but they do if you fly up that high.
I wonder if they'll try and force him to give up his source during discovery. That might very well be the angle they're looking at in this whole thing.
That's realling interesting! Two outcomes if they manage to do that:
Win-win if that's allowed during discovery.
You miss the point - operating systems are made and designed to run and execute programs. APIs are evidence of this mind-numbingly obvious point.
Games, however, are not designed to be cheated. Sports analogy time: WoW is major-league baseball, this guy is selling steroids, and you're saying people should be able to put whatever they want into their bodies.
Loads the game twice. One clean copy to defeat Warden, one botted copy to cheat with.
You bought one copy; you were running two. Technically, that's pretty infringing.
And, no, I'm not going to be okay with a guy having "financial success" with ruining a game people pay to play. It's like selling clubs to children on playgrounds so the club-wielders have better access to playground equipment.
Wrong! Operating systems release special "Application Programming Interfaces" just for that purpose. The correct anology would be "then they'd have to sue everyone who wrote a LUA script."
The better analogy is "it's like people 'cheating' at Windows Activation and getting something for nothing." (Still a stretch and doesn't involve cars, but still better.)
Great - but I have no problems with them trying to break the part of society that cheats for money. Especially if it's just a game, for crying out loud.
But, a hack that works by copying the entire game wholesale, sounds like a copyright violation to me.
Most of these quests can be avoided now if you want - the easy ones are, well, easy XP. The hard ones you really no longer need to do - before, zones were desinged where you had to finish almost every quest to be a reasonable leve for the next zone. Now that you get more XP and need less, you only have to do some or most.
Then, there are other zones. At levels 25-35, I could quest in Duskwood, Stranglethorn Vale, Menethil Harbor, Thousand Needles, or Arathi Basin. There are a lot of "kill x" ones - but you don't have to do them.
As for splitting up the loot, this is only partially true. The two of you can kill boars faster, so you get livers faster. And, if your friend finishes first, you can still pick up the quest item (if it spawned at your comical 2.5% rate) from the corpses he loots. WoW knows he no longer needs them, so will let you take them instead.
And... the "not enough boars" problem is generally fixed in patches. I've been leveling a few level 30 characters (friend discovers game, plays for a while, so I make a new level 1 to quest with him. Then another friend wants someone to quest with, so I make another level 1...) and all the spawn rates that used to be painful have been fixed. (Besides, there's a lot fewer lowbies now, so there's less competition than there was!)
And... complicated quest chains are solved by going to thottbot.com. Time saver for ridiculousness.
Link
I've had to do this before. My friend successfully installed and activated XP, but over the years upgraded his computer piece by piece. Motherboard, CPU, video card, sound card, etc.
Microsoft notes your hardware when you activate. If it changes significantly, it thinks it's on a new computer. So, you call a human and ask politely. 9 times out of 10 (another friend works in a repair show downtown) they'll reactivate your XP, no questions asked. Friend got his XP working again.
But, your problem was you "thrashed the installation." So, I assume you formatted your drive, reinstalled XP, and it wouldn't activate?
If that's the case, try installing your drivers before activating. Without any drivers, Windows thinks you have different hardware than you do with drivers. Different computer = no activation.
I had the same problem. I upgraded the RAM. Then I upgraded the video card. Then I added a sound card. There's a fudge factor, but these three components was enough to make my XP machine do another activation check. I just had to say "Okie-dokie, reactivate" and it worked.
Try installing your drivers again and reactivating. Otherwise, there's a phone number, and a nice human operator will fix your install.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference between J Random Shaman farming motes for 10 hours straight and J Random Botter botting for 10 hours. They're both paying.
You're right; it's "a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks."
EXCEPT that this program makes it easier - botting for 10 hours requires no effort, farming for 10 hours is effing tedious.
So... there'll be a lot more J Random Shamen if this becomes terribly popular. Before, only a small percentage had the patience to farm for 10 hours; the overly zealous (and generally griefing) players are few. BUT, after the program, everyone can do it.
Just another example of a company aiming its litigation at the wrong target.
Or... the right target. They could cut off every individual botting user... and they've tried that. But, these users are impossible to find because of this one individual millionaire who managed to make his program (currently) undetectable.
So... they could sue every individual user. But, we run into the "finding them" problem again.
So... they could sue the one person making it all possible, and profiting handsomely for it. This is the logical target - go for the one person responsible rather than lots of individuals - but also, apparently, the most difficult. Going for WoW Glider's maker solves the problem; going for his customers doesn't. So, you can't fault them for trying.