This is exactly right. If it was garbage, people wouldn't buy it. Money just doesn't come that easily.
The same is true for movies as well. I've heard a ton of people claim everything put out in music and movies in the last X years is garbage and not worth buying. Every time I say 'No, I like some of it' someone picks some stupid stat off a website and says 'See, website x gave it 3% and they couldn't possibly be wrong.' They completely ignore the fact that it brought in millions of dollars its first weekend and more than covered the cost to create it. Unless I happen to go to a really amazingly good movie theatre and nobody else has this option, those millions of viewers could have walked out of that 'garbage' movie and got their money back. It was obviously good enough to pay theater prices for.
Anyhow, I'm glad to see that there's at least 1 other person out there with common sense and knows that consumers DO vote with their wallets.
BestBuy could have canceled the order for little or no reason at all. They -can- suddenly decide not to sell those products at that price and cancel the order.
Instead, they were VERY nice and gave $50 to each customer that they inconvenienced with this.
The customer was not 'responsible' for the mistake. The customers still had ample opportunity to cancel the order completely as it was still a pre-order and nothing had been shipped and very little time had passed.
Amazon did something completely different. They shipped a product to a person and THEN claimed the person owed them more money. Last I checked, it was illegal to ship something to someone for free and then charge them for it. It used to be a mail scam. (The difference there being that the customer didn't ask for it at all, though.) Amazon is clearly in the wrong every time they charge someone's card that didn't agree to it. BestBuy didn't do that.
For those who didn't notice, Acunetix replied on TFA and basically claimed his challenge would be unfair to the third-party websites. They offered to attempt to hack his own website instead and demanded that he post a notice saying he had vulnerabilities, if they find and exploit any.
While I admit this is an interesting idea, it does nothing to prove or disprove their 70% claim.
I have to agree with them that hacking websites is illegal and ethically wrong for them, though. Good call on their part.
The video isn't new. At the time, ALL games came on floppies. So again... What FUD?
I haven't seen the video in years, and I refuse to subject myself to it again, and there may very well be tons of FUD in it. The floppy bit is NOT the FUD.
A while back, I had a neighbor who was deaf. I helped him and his hearing wife with their computer a few times for free. (And not out of pity, because I didn't know he was deaf when his wife asked for the help.)
Anyhow, he also used a sidekick. Unfortunately, I know this because I found it in the parking lot, run over.
He was a nice guy, but a little too eager to communicate with other people. He came across as simple because of it, but I don't think he really was.
Well, there's a fine line between disagreeing with most of the people here and flamebait. So I occasionally hold my tongue just to see if it's possible. I almost always have 'excellent' karma, so I'm not real worried about that. Uselessly antagonizing the teeming hoards at Slashdot... Not usually worthwhile.
Yes, criminalizing people is absurd. There should be no laws and then nobody would have to get jailed for doing bad things. All those murderers, rapists, jay-walkers, and copyright infringers are all just people doing what comes natural. We shouldn't be persecuting them.
I was doing my best to refrain from saying anything that harsh.;) I'm not particularly enamored with the 'freedom' the GPL provides for third-party developers. I didn't see the need to get into that argument, though. Heh.
You lose karma because people believe you are wrong. FOSS is about choice and freedom, and license is one of those choices. You are essentially saying that they are stupid for believing in what they do.
I'm a huge fan of the BSD license. Nothing says freedom like lack of restrictions.
But lately, I've begun to see the draw of the GPL license. I've never had an issue with the LGPL, as it does what I think the GPL should: It makes certain that code improvements are returned to the community. The GPL tries to make additional code belong to the community, too, though.
So you cannot kill this 'license war' without killing the FOSS community, too. They're the same thing.
If it makes you feel better, you can think of them as GPL and BSD communities instead of a single FOSS community.
"GPL: the user won't loose the freedom to keep using the work made by the programmer."
Um, no. The work made by the programmer will be available to the user no matter whether the license is BSD or GPL, or many others. Once a version of some code is released open source, it will be there forever.
The difference between the GPL and BSD is that the GPL ensures that any improvements to the code will be given back to the community. This makes it more restrictive and businesses cannot add code to a GPL'd app that might give away their business secrets. (Unless they keep it in-house, blah blah blah.)
I say they only slightly overreacted. It was a report of a possible bomb in a very public location. Several very public locations. There was no record of what the devices were, and they should not have been there. Their cartoony look could have been an attempt to get someone to play with them to guarantee a kill. They reacted decisively to neutralize any possible threat.
Your linked example talks about a few pipe bombs in an aquaduct that had been drained so that they could look for submerged items. There will be no people there. They reacted correctly in that situation as well.
If you treat cartoony objects as toys and dismiss bomb reports about them, you are guaranteeing that someone will use that disguise for real bombs. You can't simply shrug it off.
Do I think the CEO should have resigned? No. It was stupid and careless, but nobody was hurt (except that $2mil loss) and there was a ton of publicity.
DragonRealms, a MUD, has this type of system. The 'effect on gameplay' is a bit weak, but it does prevent you from holding something with a hand that isn't there, etc. Damage and healing is all per-bodypart, as well as having internal and external damage.
Does it add enjoyment? I'd say yes. It's probably one of the reasons that it is so popular. (It's a lot more interesting when different armor actually has an effect, and aiming at body parts matters as well.)
Im probably going to get modded flamebait for this, but oh well...
Ive always seen Perplex City as being MTG for nerds instead of gamers. You spend a ton of money on cards and spend a ton of time making a ton of plans. The next year, they release the new sets and all the time and money youve put in is nearly useless.
Id like to know how much money the winner had put into this game. $50? $500? $5000? How about all the other players that didnt win? Sure, they had some fun playing it, but the massive amounts of money they put into it...
I just dont have enough money to play games like this. I love brain teasers, and the game really really interested me... But theres no way I could afford it.
Oddly enough, I DO use apostrophes. Ive been working on a greasemonkey script to use TinyMCE on Slashdot... Apparently its got a few issues still. (Yes, I put an apostophe there.)
Because they require it. If your email client doesnt support that, itd be a major pain.
My company was used to IMAP, where the server kept the folders seperate. Being forced to move to pop, and then the webmail tags not being able to be used to categorize mail... Well, there was grumbling.
That statement was pulled out of their asses. The Google Apps page has always said it would be free for beta, and then after beta, new signups will be charged. I know, because the company I work for has made the switch. We were looking for new email hosting at the time anyhow, and that came up as a recommendation. After weighing the alternatives, and treating GMail as if it was costing the same as the others (so as not to give it unfair advantage in our minds, as it has to be GOOD for our company) we still chose GMail.
There has been a few snags. No IMAP, POP3 implementation sucks, SMTP and POP3 both require use of secure ports, no folders (tags instead, useless to a pop3 client), and some (minor, temporary) hassles now and then with adding email lists, names to email lists, new accounts, and setting forwards.
If I had my vote again, I might choose to have the company pay for a managed email solution... But were on it, and weve worked out most of the kinks. And I love GMails interface. Ive given up on Thunderbird and just use the web interface now.
Are you kidding? Oblivion was one of the best games of the year! I bought it for the PC, played it about 40-50 hours. I beat the mage and fighter guilds and the main storyline.
After getting a 360, I decided to buy it for that, too, and play all the guilds. I played about 60 hours this time, and beat all the guilds and main storyline. I also bought the KotN expansion, and have another few hours fun from that.
Any game that I spend over 100 hours on is beyond good, its amazing. I usually get bored with a game at the 20 hour mark for an above-average game. For an average game, its more like 10-15 hours. Even most great games, I get bored at 40 or 50 hours.
I think a lot of people say RPG and think Final Fantasy 3. This is obviously not the same kind of RPG as that, and anyone who wants it to be will be disappointed.
I dont remember if it was you, but I definitely read someones reply on one of the iPhone stories kvetching that they didnt put the keypad at the top of the screen, and I believe they stated they hoped someone made a mod. It was obvious that the person had not -just- thought of the idea, but had wanted it for years.
According to other posts (and pictures) theres already been at least 1 phone made in this configuration. Its not a new idea.
Im glad theres prior art to stop this idiotic patent, but I kind of wish it had gotten denied for being obvious, instead of prior art.
I think patents should be given for ideas that actually take time and investment to prove out. "Ill reorder the knobs" is not something that should be patentable. "Ill create a new interface from scratch" is debatable. "Ill create a new technology/process that will do X" is definitely a patent.
If that Lutheran grandmother also just happens to look like the terrorist whose retina she matched, yes. Theyll pull her aside. The retina scans wont exist in a vacuum. There will be a name and picture of at least the face, and probably a text description to go along with it.
If it truly does have that accuracy, and combined with other data, its a lot easier to know if the person really is a terrorist or not. The Lutheran grandmother isnt going to look like a male Arab. Or a female one. Or even a young white female terrorist. (Thought they may pull her on the last to check for a disguise, but will quickly realize it isnt.)
Besides, if they get a match, I would think the policy would be detain and get another picture of the eye, and check again. The chance of 2 false successes is even lower.
I notice they dont mention anything about false failures, though. With just about any match technology, if you raise the standards high enough, you get very, very few false matches... But you also miss many matches that you should have gotten. They dont give us the numbers for that. Maybe it only ever actually gets 1 success in a 100.
Theres too many ways to skew the numbers on this. I think we can pretty safely assume its vaporware until its got some real data behind it.
It saddens me, but I suspect this will cause me to lose my serious gamer badge. Im getting old enough to lose it anyhow, but I expected to have a choice in the matter.
I dont want Vista. I liked Dos. I liked Win3.1. I liked Win98/Me. I like XP. I dont want all the extra crap in Vista. Until someone finds a way to slim it down and have a barebones Vista, with no DRM and no unnecessary cruft, I dont want it.
What I really want is for games to run on Kubuntu. With the exception of games, it does everything I want. (Yes, I know about Wine. I dont like to have to fiddle with every game. I want them to just work.)
He didnt say it was targetted at girls, he said it is for girls. Theres a huge difference.
When your the head of a multi-billion $ company, you learn to watch your words. Risking alienation of every Viva Pinata player is not a wise thing. Most people have very, very sensitive egos. If Gates makes them think that kind of game is for girls then hes killing his profits on further games of the type.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly right. If it was garbage, people wouldn't buy it. Money just doesn't come that easily.
The same is true for movies as well. I've heard a ton of people claim everything put out in music and movies in the last X years is garbage and not worth buying. Every time I say 'No, I like some of it' someone picks some stupid stat off a website and says 'See, website x gave it 3% and they couldn't possibly be wrong.' They completely ignore the fact that it brought in millions of dollars its first weekend and more than covered the cost to create it. Unless I happen to go to a really amazingly good movie theatre and nobody else has this option, those millions of viewers could have walked out of that 'garbage' movie and got their money back. It was obviously good enough to pay theater prices for.
Anyhow, I'm glad to see that there's at least 1 other person out there with common sense and knows that consumers DO vote with their wallets.
BestBuy could have canceled the order for little or no reason at all. They -can- suddenly decide not to sell those products at that price and cancel the order.
Instead, they were VERY nice and gave $50 to each customer that they inconvenienced with this.
The customer was not 'responsible' for the mistake. The customers still had ample opportunity to cancel the order completely as it was still a pre-order and nothing had been shipped and very little time had passed.
Amazon did something completely different. They shipped a product to a person and THEN claimed the person owed them more money. Last I checked, it was illegal to ship something to someone for free and then charge them for it. It used to be a mail scam. (The difference there being that the customer didn't ask for it at all, though.) Amazon is clearly in the wrong every time they charge someone's card that didn't agree to it. BestBuy didn't do that.
For those who didn't notice, Acunetix replied on TFA and basically claimed his challenge would be unfair to the third-party websites. They offered to attempt to hack his own website instead and demanded that he post a notice saying he had vulnerabilities, if they find and exploit any.
While I admit this is an interesting idea, it does nothing to prove or disprove their 70% claim.
I have to agree with them that hacking websites is illegal and ethically wrong for them, though. Good call on their part.
The video isn't new. At the time, ALL games came on floppies. So again... What FUD?
I haven't seen the video in years, and I refuse to subject myself to it again, and there may very well be tons of FUD in it. The floppy bit is NOT the FUD.
A while back, I had a neighbor who was deaf. I helped him and his hearing wife with their computer a few times for free. (And not out of pity, because I didn't know he was deaf when his wife asked for the help.)
Anyhow, he also used a sidekick. Unfortunately, I know this because I found it in the parking lot, run over.
He was a nice guy, but a little too eager to communicate with other people. He came across as simple because of it, but I don't think he really was.
Well, there's a fine line between disagreeing with most of the people here and flamebait. So I occasionally hold my tongue just to see if it's possible. I almost always have 'excellent' karma, so I'm not real worried about that. Uselessly antagonizing the teeming hoards at Slashdot... Not usually worthwhile.
Yes, criminalizing people is absurd. There should be no laws and then nobody would have to get jailed for doing bad things. All those murderers, rapists, jay-walkers, and copyright infringers are all just people doing what comes natural. We shouldn't be persecuting them.
Maybe I'm just confused, but doesn't '0-day' mean the exploit was found the day the code in question was released?
I generally don't follow Solaris, and 11 might have just come out, but I seriously doubt 10 and 11 both came out at the same time.
I was doing my best to refrain from saying anything that harsh. ;) I'm not particularly enamored with the 'freedom' the GPL provides for third-party developers. I didn't see the need to get into that argument, though. Heh.
You lose karma because people believe you are wrong. FOSS is about choice and freedom, and license is one of those choices. You are essentially saying that they are stupid for believing in what they do.
I'm a huge fan of the BSD license. Nothing says freedom like lack of restrictions.
But lately, I've begun to see the draw of the GPL license. I've never had an issue with the LGPL, as it does what I think the GPL should: It makes certain that code improvements are returned to the community. The GPL tries to make additional code belong to the community, too, though.
So you cannot kill this 'license war' without killing the FOSS community, too. They're the same thing.
If it makes you feel better, you can think of them as GPL and BSD communities instead of a single FOSS community.
"GPL: the user won't loose the freedom to keep using the work made by the programmer."
Um, no. The work made by the programmer will be available to the user no matter whether the license is BSD or GPL, or many others. Once a version of some code is released open source, it will be there forever.
The difference between the GPL and BSD is that the GPL ensures that any improvements to the code will be given back to the community. This makes it more restrictive and businesses cannot add code to a GPL'd app that might give away their business secrets. (Unless they keep it in-house, blah blah blah.)
I say they only slightly overreacted. It was a report of a possible bomb in a very public location. Several very public locations. There was no record of what the devices were, and they should not have been there. Their cartoony look could have been an attempt to get someone to play with them to guarantee a kill. They reacted decisively to neutralize any possible threat.
Your linked example talks about a few pipe bombs in an aquaduct that had been drained so that they could look for submerged items. There will be no people there. They reacted correctly in that situation as well.
If you treat cartoony objects as toys and dismiss bomb reports about them, you are guaranteeing that someone will use that disguise for real bombs. You can't simply shrug it off.
Do I think the CEO should have resigned? No. It was stupid and careless, but nobody was hurt (except that $2mil loss) and there was a ton of publicity.
Does it add enjoyment? I'd say yes. It's probably one of the reasons that it is so popular. (It's a lot more interesting when different armor actually has an effect, and aiming at body parts matters as well.)
Im probably going to get modded flamebait for this, but oh well...
Ive always seen Perplex City as being MTG for nerds instead of gamers. You spend a ton of money on cards and spend a ton of time making a ton of plans. The next year, they release the new sets and all the time and money youve put in is nearly useless.
Id like to know how much money the winner had put into this game. $50? $500? $5000? How about all the other players that didnt win? Sure, they had some fun playing it, but the massive amounts of money they put into it...
I just dont have enough money to play games like this. I love brain teasers, and the game really really interested me... But theres no way I could afford it.
That has got to be the best response to this so far. Too bad Ive no mod points to give.
Well theres not a choice for +1 Literary Reference or +1 Nostalgia, so ... You kind of just have to go with it.
It definitely made me want to read that book again. -sigh- Have to go find it now.
Oddly enough, I DO use apostrophes. Ive been working on a greasemonkey script to use TinyMCE on Slashdot... Apparently its got a few issues still. (Yes, I put an apostophe there.)
Because they require it. If your email client doesnt support that, itd be a major pain.
My company was used to IMAP, where the server kept the folders seperate. Being forced to move to pop, and then the webmail tags not being able to be used to categorize mail... Well, there was grumbling.
That statement was pulled out of their asses. The Google Apps page has always said it would be free for beta, and then after beta, new signups will be charged. I know, because the company I work for has made the switch. We were looking for new email hosting at the time anyhow, and that came up as a recommendation. After weighing the alternatives, and treating GMail as if it was costing the same as the others (so as not to give it unfair advantage in our minds, as it has to be GOOD for our company) we still chose GMail.
There has been a few snags. No IMAP, POP3 implementation sucks, SMTP and POP3 both require use of secure ports, no folders (tags instead, useless to a pop3 client), and some (minor, temporary) hassles now and then with adding email lists, names to email lists, new accounts, and setting forwards.
If I had my vote again, I might choose to have the company pay for a managed email solution... But were on it, and weve worked out most of the kinks. And I love GMails interface. Ive given up on Thunderbird and just use the web interface now.
Are you kidding? Oblivion was one of the best games of the year! I bought it for the PC, played it about 40-50 hours. I beat the mage and fighter guilds and the main storyline.
After getting a 360, I decided to buy it for that, too, and play all the guilds. I played about 60 hours this time, and beat all the guilds and main storyline. I also bought the KotN expansion, and have another few hours fun from that.
Any game that I spend over 100 hours on is beyond good, its amazing. I usually get bored with a game at the 20 hour mark for an above-average game. For an average game, its more like 10-15 hours. Even most great games, I get bored at 40 or 50 hours.
I think a lot of people say RPG and think Final Fantasy 3. This is obviously not the same kind of RPG as that, and anyone who wants it to be will be disappointed.
I dont remember if it was you, but I definitely read someones reply on one of the iPhone stories kvetching that they didnt put the keypad at the top of the screen, and I believe they stated they hoped someone made a mod. It was obvious that the person had not -just- thought of the idea, but had wanted it for years.
According to other posts (and pictures) theres already been at least 1 phone made in this configuration. Its not a new idea.
Im glad theres prior art to stop this idiotic patent, but I kind of wish it had gotten denied for being obvious, instead of prior art.
I think patents should be given for ideas that actually take time and investment to prove out. "Ill reorder the knobs" is not something that should be patentable. "Ill create a new interface from scratch" is debatable. "Ill create a new technology/process that will do X" is definitely a patent.
Thatd make too much sense, though. -sigh-
If that Lutheran grandmother also just happens to look like the terrorist whose retina she matched, yes. Theyll pull her aside. The retina scans wont exist in a vacuum. There will be a name and picture of at least the face, and probably a text description to go along with it.
If it truly does have that accuracy, and combined with other data, its a lot easier to know if the person really is a terrorist or not. The Lutheran grandmother isnt going to look like a male Arab. Or a female one. Or even a young white female terrorist. (Thought they may pull her on the last to check for a disguise, but will quickly realize it isnt.)
Besides, if they get a match, I would think the policy would be detain and get another picture of the eye, and check again. The chance of 2 false successes is even lower.
I notice they dont mention anything about false failures, though. With just about any match technology, if you raise the standards high enough, you get very, very few false matches... But you also miss many matches that you should have gotten. They dont give us the numbers for that. Maybe it only ever actually gets 1 success in a 100.
Theres too many ways to skew the numbers on this. I think we can pretty safely assume its vaporware until its got some real data behind it.
It saddens me, but I suspect this will cause me to lose my serious gamer badge. Im getting old enough to lose it anyhow, but I expected to have a choice in the matter.
I dont want Vista. I liked Dos. I liked Win3.1. I liked Win98/Me. I like XP. I dont want all the extra crap in Vista. Until someone finds a way to slim it down and have a barebones Vista, with no DRM and no unnecessary cruft, I dont want it.
What I really want is for games to run on Kubuntu. With the exception of games, it does everything I want. (Yes, I know about Wine. I dont like to have to fiddle with every game. I want them to just work.)
2 things:
- He didnt say it was targetted at girls, he said it is for girls. Theres a huge difference.
- When your the head of a multi-billion $ company, you learn to watch your words. Risking alienation of every Viva Pinata player is not a wise thing. Most people have very, very sensitive egos. If Gates makes them think that kind of game is for girls then hes killing his profits on further games of the type.
I expect better of him.The other poster is correct, the HTML spec says the q tag will 'render with delimiting quotation marks'. You might as well just type them.
Or... You could use Slashdot's quote tag. It cleverly tells you about it below the submit button on every reply page.