Personally, I'm kind of worried about it, myself... His accuracy is a little too uncanny. If he lampoons me, it'll mean I was devastatingly stupid about something.
Okay, I tried scanning it instead of reading it... And if you are trying to read it -FAST-, it's better than the regular text. Since I've been an avid reader for decades, I have no idea how this would work for someone who only reads when they have to, instead of for pleasure.
My complaint about the formatting isn't losing something, but rather that my head tries to make the formatting mean something while I'm reading. Most formatting is indeed 'what fits', but one side is almost always a block in those cases. When both sides have odd formatting, my head wants it to mean something.
That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly. (It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.) Then I have to force my eye back to the beginning of the sentence and try to ignore the different colors. Then, because there's a break between that sentence and the next, I have to do the same thing all over again.
And what's the difference if my eyes are pulling words from the previous and next sentence or the pieces of the current one? It's still giving me information that I don't need -right now- in the sentence.
And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as special formatting usually -means- something.
Training myself to read this, which is only used online and only if licensed by this company, would be a hassle. And used very little.
I completely agree. Switching someone to Linux and trying to make their Windows apps run in Linux is a losing proposition. Even at the best, Wine has an extra layer involved and will (at the very least) slow things down some. If all they do it use Windows apps in Linux, they're going to very quickly notice that everything ran better in Windows, and want to switch back.
If, instead, they are shown native applications, they will be much happier, especially with the apps that work better than commercial apps for windows, such as K3B. (Alcohol was my favorite ISO burner and Nero was my favorite CD creator, until K3B. It easily beats both of them.)
I have never once heard anyone quote that commercial. That hasn't stopped most of my co-workers from wanting one. Around here at least, the popularity has very, very little to do with the tv commercials. (I was going to say 'ad campaign' but their word-of-mouth campaign is what is really selling the boxes.)
Absolutely 100% sure. It used to be that a bad sector would cause a LONG delay in copying a CD. So they put a ton of them. Of course, software devs just fixed the delay. It's also been used just like the floppy protections... If there wasn't a bad sector where it was supposed to be, the protection kicked in.
I beta'd AC1 and it was fun for like a month or 2, and then I just couldn't get into it. I found AC2 to be a lot more enjoyable, and lasted around 6 months in that, and came back for a month later.
Of course, during beta, there wasn't any monthly events, and I didn't beta AC2, but played retail... That may make all the difference.
My main objection to AC1 was the spell system... The more people that knew the spell, the weaker it was. (I think they eventually changed that once everyone ignored their warnings and posted all the spell ingredients online.)
You say that, but does any MMO give you as much content per year (for the subscription price) as GW does with the expansions? AC2 might have come close... I haven't played WoW long enough to tell, but from what I see, there's just about no monthly content at all. DragonRealms (MUD, not MMO) never came close, though they do have quite a few GM-run events. Myst Online: Uru Live claims major content quarterly... So far, the new content sucks. It's far worse than the original game.
Well, that depends on how you look at it. They will be providing the extra content for a monthly fee, instead of selling expansions, no? So It's the same thing GW is doing, but just collecting the money a little differently.
If someone could be bothered to do monthly content right, I'd be happy. So far, it's mostly been pretty lame. Asheron's Call 2 had a system where they actually had plot each month, and all the new quests related to that plot... It was neat, but I always completed the new stuff in a couple days and was bored for the rest of the month.
Of course, I haven't managed to define 'do it right' either, because if I had, I'd have sold the idea to someone that could make it work.;)
That's a good thought, actually... A nice, calm, this-is-why letter wouldn't do any harm at all. Especially to nVidia since I've spent thousands of dollars on their products in the last few years... They should miss me.
Oh man, this is gonna be a bad karma day for me...
Take a car for example. There's the guy that designed the car, and there's the hundreds or thousands who put it together. Which one would you say 'created' it? Most people would choose the designer.
It's probably just that people are lazy and it's easier to say 'the creator of' than 'one of the 2 creators of', though. I wasn't able to find out what the roles of each person were, just that they worked on it together.
Not 100% related, but I ordered a 965-based motherboard because Intel has open source drivers for the X3000. This is going to be my Linux-only system. I have previously been an nVidia person, and my current 7900 works well for Wine/etc, but I heard that Beryl works -very- well on a Mac Mini, which has an Intel chipset.
Maybe my purchase (and post here) will help nVidia and ATI realize that they -are- losing customers by not open sourcing their drivers.
I'll even go so far as to say that the first of the 2 that open source their drivers will have an definite advantage in a year's time, assuming the other doesn't do the same within that year. It's not just about customers at that point, but about geeks making your drivers better. Obsessively.
It may even happen that neither goes OSS and Intel manages to get a serious foothold on the GPU market.
You've been modded troll, and I'm about to get the same treatment.
Do you really think it matters? Letting them tell the public that their vote doesn't matter only changes how they say things, not what they actually do. At this point, only people who the parties WANT to be in the running will be in the running. That only leaves us with a very few people that we can actually vote for, all of which are selected by the same people.
It's a farce and has been for years. This move is just bringing it more into the open. Maybe if they get their way, and votes are made pointless, people will get fed up and revolt until the system is fixed.
I could be wrong, but I think it's because car-lovers aren't geeky enough. They'd rather be out tuning/racing/driving than writing about it. This isn't unique to car enthusiasts, though. Even geeks would rather be doing than writing about it. The difference is that geeks enjoy the technical workings of a wiki where the car-phile would not. It's also a buzzword in the geek world now.
As for how many blind alleys... Co-workers often say things like 'Let him find it, he can find anything.' I'm really really good at using Google. I usually come up with useful information right away, and when I don't, that info would most likely NOT have been in a Wiki or FAQ anyhow. Destroying those archives with apparently useless information would be a huge hamper to me. (It only appears useless until you realize you need it. The most trivial-seeming information can sometimes make all the difference.)
I've looked up issues online that had answers posted 6 years before. At the time, the person was just responding to someone's request for help. He wasn't writing a FAQ or WIKI. It would likely NOT have been tagged, and would have been a LOT harder to find that answer.
But it doesn't really matter because computers DO forget, just not like we do. As proof: I want it to remember the source code to that mesh converter I wrote years ago in VB6. I lost the source years ago and at this point, I don't even have a copy of the compiled program.
It would be relatively trivial to rewrite, but it was a pain to figure out some of the things they did and how, and there's not really a need for it anymore. I just want it. But my computer, and every other computer, doesn't remember the source. Very few remember the compiled program, including my web host who apparently deleted all ZIP files out of spite, or something. (It's a ZIP! Must be illegal!)
It's my fault that the files are gone, I admit, but my point is only that computers DO forget. And just like human memory, it's not always the things that we WANT them to forget.
Or, knowing all that, you could have some fun. Let them see the receipt and then demand to talk to the manager about how you were harassed. If the manager is unimpressed, go through the whole routine about your rights. If the manager is not impressed, or at least very very sorry for the inconvenience and trampling of your rights, that is not a store you want to shop at. Find a different one. (You can add another step in the middle if the manager also manages to anger you... Call corporate.)
The only thing more powerful than talking to the store manager/corporate is taking your money elsewhere.
For those that think corporate doesn't care: You might be surprised. At Christmas, when the Wii's came out, I managed to find a shipment that had JUST come in. The manager (someone I used to work with, at a different chain) basically called me a scam artist for wanting buy 3. (Sell on ebay, blah blah.) I wasn't, I genuinely wanted 3 for me and friends and family. I called my mother and sister and had them drive almost an hour to get there. There was only 1 left, and the clerk LIED to her and sold it to a friend of his that walked in after she did.
So she spent about an hour tearing a strip off the manager, who didn't care a hoot.
She called corporate. That manager called and apologized and promised to hold 2 more Wiis from the next 2 shipments. And he actually did, and the employees at the store were suddenly VERY VERY nice to my entire family.
So corporate isn't always just a bunch of suits. Their money often rides on how people think of the individual stores, and they'll protect their image.
I have, of course, done the same with corporations that don't give a hoot, either.
Actually, I tend to leave my programming environment open for weeks, regardless of operating system. It's not 'annoying' if you would do it anyhow. It's quite a bit less annoying that way because you can just sit down and work, without the 30 second wait for everything to load back up.
So it's a matter of perspective. I will agree that if I had to keep most other programs open to avoid the UAC, it'd be annoying.
(I don't have Vista yet... I'm waiting for that first killer game that makes it a necessity. May it be long in coming.)
Very true. I meant evolution as 'change in living species' rather than the theory that we all evolved through natural selection. It kind of saddens me that we have caused that word to have specific connotations that it shouldn't really have.
Evolution through Intelligent Design and Evolution through Natural Selection are both theories and neither has been proven or disproven. It's especially hard since if God only made 1 small change right at the very beginning, it makes the whole thing ID and is nearly impossible to prove or disprove.
This is hardly the first game where you 'play God', but I think it's probably the most complicated so far, and will probably be quite a bit more controversial than Black & White once the extremists find out.
If you always assume they are lying, no games would look appealing before launch. 'They say MMO X is going to have free-roam. They always lie, so it won't have that.'
Why do you assume they are lying about the evolution aspect of this game? They put out videos like a year ago that showed how you can choose where the body parts go, how many there are, what they are, etc, and the computer will calculate how the animal moves.
I'm a little fuzzy on why it's taking so long, though, since there's no 'plot' and no actors, no artists, etc... They videos they've shown have demonstrated all the different portions of the game... Polish time is great, but 2 years worth? I don't buy that.
I know this is meant to be a joke, but this could very well the most insightful thing posted so far.
This 'think tank' IS there to take the brunt of the abuse, so that the corporations behind it can slip in and do what they want while everyone is attacking the tank. In this case, what they want is probably to absorb more open source ideas while maintaining their 'closed source is better' stance. 'Embrace and Extend' and all that.
Or they could be planning a subversive blow later to show how their exposure to Open Source was 'bad' and a bunch of other FUD.
Okay, I'm kidding about 'run Linux'. I really want to know: How do you make it work on Linux? I thought at first it was because Java wasn't set up for my browser (Firefox 2) and it wasn't. So I got that running and verified it works on the newest Java 6u1.
But JavaFX tries to download and asks me what I want to run it with. Running it with Firefox just asks me again what I want to do. It's supposed to work inside the browser, right? Because if they are trying to replace flash with something that doesn't run in a webpage, that's idiotic.
Devil's Advocate for a moment here... Inflation exists, and MMOs will eventually raise prices per month. If when that happens, WoW is the only one that can afford to keep their prices the same (thanks to stealing customers' bandwidth) would you still hate it? The solution for that is not something that would happen overnight, and would have to be prepared in advance... Just as Blizzard has done. Once it starts saving you money, does that make them a hero after all?
Personally, I would prefer to pay the extra and have Blizz supply the speed to download patches quickly, so I can play when I want, instead of waiting. (I've only been playing for a week or 2, but I've experienced quick and slow patches on other games, and know which I prefer. Downloading the free client from Blizz would have taken 2-3 days of my 10 day free trial. I used alternate methods to prevent that.) I know there are plenty of people that think WoW costs too much as it is, though, and would not be willing to pay more for a delay that happens to infrequently.
Participation... Call it Web2.0, but that IS the future. That's what people want. Competition, cooperation... It doesn't really matter, so long as it's multi-person. You see it everyone from contests online to pointless forum/irc chatter to video games.
Buying servers/bandwidth... If I'm distributing my content for free, why SHOULD I have to pay for the bandwidth? Why shouldn't the people that want my hard work for free be willing to chip in a little, especially when it doesn't really cost them anything? (I fully agree about Warcraft's patch system tho... Horrid idea. Way too slow.)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'm kind of worried about it, myself... His accuracy is a little too uncanny. If he lampoons me, it'll mean I was devastatingly stupid about something.
I don't like being stupid.
Okay, I tried scanning it instead of reading it... And if you are trying to read it -FAST-, it's better than the regular text. Since I've been an avid reader for decades, I have no idea how this would work for someone who only reads when they have to, instead of for pleasure.
My complaint about the formatting isn't losing something, but rather that my head tries to make the formatting mean something while I'm reading. Most formatting is indeed 'what fits', but one side is almost always a block in those cases. When both sides have odd formatting, my head wants it to mean something.
That's supposed to be LESS confusing? My eye jumps to the colored words first, which appear to be picked almost randomly. (It looks like they are actually the verbs of the sentences.) Then I have to force my eye back to the beginning of the sentence and try to ignore the different colors. Then, because there's a break between that sentence and the next, I have to do the same thing all over again.
And what's the difference if my eyes are pulling words from the previous and next sentence or the pieces of the current one? It's still giving me information that I don't need -right now- in the sentence.
And the additional poem-like formatting is also confusing, as special formatting usually -means- something.
Training myself to read this, which is only used online and only if licensed by this company, would be a hassle. And used very little.
I completely agree. Switching someone to Linux and trying to make their Windows apps run in Linux is a losing proposition. Even at the best, Wine has an extra layer involved and will (at the very least) slow things down some. If all they do it use Windows apps in Linux, they're going to very quickly notice that everything ran better in Windows, and want to switch back.
If, instead, they are shown native applications, they will be much happier, especially with the apps that work better than commercial apps for windows, such as K3B. (Alcohol was my favorite ISO burner and Nero was my favorite CD creator, until K3B. It easily beats both of them.)
I have never once heard anyone quote that commercial. That hasn't stopped most of my co-workers from wanting one. Around here at least, the popularity has very, very little to do with the tv commercials. (I was going to say 'ad campaign' but their word-of-mouth campaign is what is really selling the boxes.)
Absolutely 100% sure. It used to be that a bad sector would cause a LONG delay in copying a CD. So they put a ton of them. Of course, software devs just fixed the delay. It's also been used just like the floppy protections... If there wasn't a bad sector where it was supposed to be, the protection kicked in.
b ad%20sectors
If you still don't believe me, believe Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=cd%20protection%20
Jeeez. They might as well say 'Well, there's only 6 valid passwords you can choose. Steve, you get password 1...'
Requiring a password to be complex enough is 1 thing, but make too many requirements and it's way too easy to brute force, as you were saying.
I question the rules though... if it can't contain repeating characters, why the need for the rules for consecutive and 'more than 3 times'?
I beta'd AC1 and it was fun for like a month or 2, and then I just couldn't get into it. I found AC2 to be a lot more enjoyable, and lasted around 6 months in that, and came back for a month later.
Of course, during beta, there wasn't any monthly events, and I didn't beta AC2, but played retail... That may make all the difference.
My main objection to AC1 was the spell system... The more people that knew the spell, the weaker it was. (I think they eventually changed that once everyone ignored their warnings and posted all the spell ingredients online.)
You say that, but does any MMO give you as much content per year (for the subscription price) as GW does with the expansions? AC2 might have come close... I haven't played WoW long enough to tell, but from what I see, there's just about no monthly content at all. DragonRealms (MUD, not MMO) never came close, though they do have quite a few GM-run events. Myst Online: Uru Live claims major content quarterly... So far, the new content sucks. It's far worse than the original game.
So why would I expect this to be any different?
Well, that depends on how you look at it. They will be providing the extra content for a monthly fee, instead of selling expansions, no? So It's the same thing GW is doing, but just collecting the money a little differently.
;)
If someone could be bothered to do monthly content right, I'd be happy. So far, it's mostly been pretty lame. Asheron's Call 2 had a system where they actually had plot each month, and all the new quests related to that plot... It was neat, but I always completed the new stuff in a couple days and was bored for the rest of the month.
Of course, I haven't managed to define 'do it right' either, because if I had, I'd have sold the idea to someone that could make it work.
"No one ships defective media on purpose"
Yes they do. Check a little further into CD protection schemes. That's exactly what they do.
Instead of the words in the manual, they now have the software check online to see if it's valid.
Software DRM has changed considerably over the last 20 years, but it still exists.
That's a good thought, actually... A nice, calm, this-is-why letter wouldn't do any harm at all. Especially to nVidia since I've spent thousands of dollars on their products in the last few years... They should miss me.
Oh man, this is gonna be a bad karma day for me...
Take a car for example. There's the guy that designed the car, and there's the hundreds or thousands who put it together. Which one would you say 'created' it? Most people would choose the designer.
It's probably just that people are lazy and it's easier to say 'the creator of' than 'one of the 2 creators of', though. I wasn't able to find out what the roles of each person were, just that they worked on it together.
Not 100% related, but I ordered a 965-based motherboard because Intel has open source drivers for the X3000. This is going to be my Linux-only system. I have previously been an nVidia person, and my current 7900 works well for Wine/etc, but I heard that Beryl works -very- well on a Mac Mini, which has an Intel chipset.
Maybe my purchase (and post here) will help nVidia and ATI realize that they -are- losing customers by not open sourcing their drivers.
I'll even go so far as to say that the first of the 2 that open source their drivers will have an definite advantage in a year's time, assuming the other doesn't do the same within that year. It's not just about customers at that point, but about geeks making your drivers better. Obsessively.
It may even happen that neither goes OSS and Intel manages to get a serious foothold on the GPU market.
You've been modded troll, and I'm about to get the same treatment.
Do you really think it matters? Letting them tell the public that their vote doesn't matter only changes how they say things, not what they actually do. At this point, only people who the parties WANT to be in the running will be in the running. That only leaves us with a very few people that we can actually vote for, all of which are selected by the same people.
It's a farce and has been for years. This move is just bringing it more into the open. Maybe if they get their way, and votes are made pointless, people will get fed up and revolt until the system is fixed.
More likely it'll be business as always, though.
I could be wrong, but I think it's because car-lovers aren't geeky enough. They'd rather be out tuning/racing/driving than writing about it. This isn't unique to car enthusiasts, though. Even geeks would rather be doing than writing about it. The difference is that geeks enjoy the technical workings of a wiki where the car-phile would not. It's also a buzzword in the geek world now.
As for how many blind alleys... Co-workers often say things like 'Let him find it, he can find anything.' I'm really really good at using Google. I usually come up with useful information right away, and when I don't, that info would most likely NOT have been in a Wiki or FAQ anyhow. Destroying those archives with apparently useless information would be a huge hamper to me. (It only appears useless until you realize you need it. The most trivial-seeming information can sometimes make all the difference.)
How do you know the difference at the time?
I've looked up issues online that had answers posted 6 years before. At the time, the person was just responding to someone's request for help. He wasn't writing a FAQ or WIKI. It would likely NOT have been tagged, and would have been a LOT harder to find that answer.
But it doesn't really matter because computers DO forget, just not like we do. As proof: I want it to remember the source code to that mesh converter I wrote years ago in VB6. I lost the source years ago and at this point, I don't even have a copy of the compiled program.
It would be relatively trivial to rewrite, but it was a pain to figure out some of the things they did and how, and there's not really a need for it anymore. I just want it. But my computer, and every other computer, doesn't remember the source. Very few remember the compiled program, including my web host who apparently deleted all ZIP files out of spite, or something. (It's a ZIP! Must be illegal!)
It's my fault that the files are gone, I admit, but my point is only that computers DO forget. And just like human memory, it's not always the things that we WANT them to forget.
Or, knowing all that, you could have some fun. Let them see the receipt and then demand to talk to the manager about how you were harassed. If the manager is unimpressed, go through the whole routine about your rights. If the manager is not impressed, or at least very very sorry for the inconvenience and trampling of your rights, that is not a store you want to shop at. Find a different one. (You can add another step in the middle if the manager also manages to anger you... Call corporate.)
The only thing more powerful than talking to the store manager/corporate is taking your money elsewhere.
For those that think corporate doesn't care: You might be surprised. At Christmas, when the Wii's came out, I managed to find a shipment that had JUST come in. The manager (someone I used to work with, at a different chain) basically called me a scam artist for wanting buy 3. (Sell on ebay, blah blah.) I wasn't, I genuinely wanted 3 for me and friends and family. I called my mother and sister and had them drive almost an hour to get there. There was only 1 left, and the clerk LIED to her and sold it to a friend of his that walked in after she did.
So she spent about an hour tearing a strip off the manager, who didn't care a hoot.
She called corporate. That manager called and apologized and promised to hold 2 more Wiis from the next 2 shipments. And he actually did, and the employees at the store were suddenly VERY VERY nice to my entire family.
So corporate isn't always just a bunch of suits. Their money often rides on how people think of the individual stores, and they'll protect their image.
I have, of course, done the same with corporations that don't give a hoot, either.
Actually, I tend to leave my programming environment open for weeks, regardless of operating system. It's not 'annoying' if you would do it anyhow. It's quite a bit less annoying that way because you can just sit down and work, without the 30 second wait for everything to load back up.
So it's a matter of perspective. I will agree that if I had to keep most other programs open to avoid the UAC, it'd be annoying.
(I don't have Vista yet... I'm waiting for that first killer game that makes it a necessity. May it be long in coming.)
Very true. I meant evolution as 'change in living species' rather than the theory that we all evolved through natural selection. It kind of saddens me that we have caused that word to have specific connotations that it shouldn't really have.
Evolution through Intelligent Design and Evolution through Natural Selection are both theories and neither has been proven or disproven. It's especially hard since if God only made 1 small change right at the very beginning, it makes the whole thing ID and is nearly impossible to prove or disprove.
This is hardly the first game where you 'play God', but I think it's probably the most complicated so far, and will probably be quite a bit more controversial than Black & White once the extremists find out.
If you always assume they are lying, no games would look appealing before launch. 'They say MMO X is going to have free-roam. They always lie, so it won't have that.'
Why do you assume they are lying about the evolution aspect of this game? They put out videos like a year ago that showed how you can choose where the body parts go, how many there are, what they are, etc, and the computer will calculate how the animal moves.
I'm a little fuzzy on why it's taking so long, though, since there's no 'plot' and no actors, no artists, etc... They videos they've shown have demonstrated all the different portions of the game... Polish time is great, but 2 years worth? I don't buy that.
I know this is meant to be a joke, but this could very well the most insightful thing posted so far.
This 'think tank' IS there to take the brunt of the abuse, so that the corporations behind it can slip in and do what they want while everyone is attacking the tank. In this case, what they want is probably to absorb more open source ideas while maintaining their 'closed source is better' stance. 'Embrace and Extend' and all that.
Or they could be planning a subversive blow later to show how their exposure to Open Source was 'bad' and a bunch of other FUD.
Okay, I'm kidding about 'run Linux'. I really want to know: How do you make it work on Linux? I thought at first it was because Java wasn't set up for my browser (Firefox 2) and it wasn't. So I got that running and verified it works on the newest Java 6u1.
But JavaFX tries to download and asks me what I want to run it with. Running it with Firefox just asks me again what I want to do. It's supposed to work inside the browser, right? Because if they are trying to replace flash with something that doesn't run in a webpage, that's idiotic.
Devil's Advocate for a moment here... Inflation exists, and MMOs will eventually raise prices per month. If when that happens, WoW is the only one that can afford to keep their prices the same (thanks to stealing customers' bandwidth) would you still hate it? The solution for that is not something that would happen overnight, and would have to be prepared in advance... Just as Blizzard has done. Once it starts saving you money, does that make them a hero after all?
Personally, I would prefer to pay the extra and have Blizz supply the speed to download patches quickly, so I can play when I want, instead of waiting. (I've only been playing for a week or 2, but I've experienced quick and slow patches on other games, and know which I prefer. Downloading the free client from Blizz would have taken 2-3 days of my 10 day free trial. I used alternate methods to prevent that.) I know there are plenty of people that think WoW costs too much as it is, though, and would not be willing to pay more for a delay that happens to infrequently.
I agree on Wikis. Overused.
Participation... Call it Web2.0, but that IS the future. That's what people want. Competition, cooperation... It doesn't really matter, so long as it's multi-person. You see it everyone from contests online to pointless forum/irc chatter to video games.
Buying servers/bandwidth... If I'm distributing my content for free, why SHOULD I have to pay for the bandwidth? Why shouldn't the people that want my hard work for free be willing to chip in a little, especially when it doesn't really cost them anything? (I fully agree about Warcraft's patch system tho... Horrid idea. Way too slow.)
Don't even get me started on the 'Blogosphere.'