Which copyright information would you have Trading Standards use? The copyright licence on the confiscated disks? Clearly not trustworthy.
The licence on mozilla.org? How does the trading standards officer know which licence applies? if any?
Even if they find the right licence, do they have to be a lawyer? Is it not more sensible to contact the copyright owner directly and ask them explicitly whether they approve of such behaviour?
Everything up to "you're breaking our anti-piracy ability" was perfectly acceptable. That remark was unfortunate, comical, and probably personally embarrassing to the poor individual that made it.
I don't know which muds you played, but every mud I played on gave almost every player the chance to become a coder.
People got to coder level without knowing how to code. They then learned.
Why do you think so much LPC was so badly written?
I've gone back and reviewed code I wrote on muds. It's atrocious. It totally sucks. It also taught me OO programming basics, and got me launched on my (currently reasonably successful) career.
I also learned a lot more than programming from muds. Certainly more than I'm learning from WoW. I'd say more, but we're due to hit MC in a couple of minutes..
Oh please. Use of the telegraph and amateur radio bands never permeated the general population to the extent that instant messaging and SMS have done today.
Even were that not the case, the issue isn't the use of such abbreviation on the appropriate channels, it's the increasing use of such abbreviation for other uses.
People who write 'loose' when they mean 'lose' are often changing the meaning of their sentence. People that write 'm8' when they mean 'my good friend' are losing credibility. These issues have a real impact on perception, on intelligibility, on even employability.
Maybe I'm just old and scared because I find it harder to write in 1337 speak than in real English - even when sending text messages on my mobile phone.
My "penmanship" is atrocious. I have difficulty reading my own writing at times.
Luckily I work in an environment where all communications are made using well formed characters corresponding to known standards and easily reproduced on paper or on more transient displays.
Someone that asks me to write an essay at an interview will be asked to provide me with a computer upon which to write it. I type faster than I can write, it's far more legible, it gives me greater editing powers (which, if I'm writing a manual for someone else, I will make use of) and it's exactly the tool I would use to perform similar tasks as part of my job.
Refuse to give me the computer and I'll walk out of your interview. I'm good enough that I can get a job with people that don't measure the inconsequential at interview; I'll also have more faith in them to understand the worth of my contribution to their company.
I did not specify that references had to be 'net based. Neither have I said I'd consider an Internet based reference to be sufficient to convince me (or otherwise). I'm happy to accept in advance your apology for misrepresenting me by saying otherwise.
Can you provide actual evidence that the detainees are all terrorists, or linked to terrorism? And can you further provide justification for the flagrant abuses of their civil liberties?
Obviously those infringements of civil liberties can be referenced through multiple US court representations, speeches and comments by American political figures and government and military staff, and numerous print media outlets, quite apart from the recently published United Nations paper that led to Koffi Annan calling for the camp to be closed.
Please, help me understand the law being used to hold these people - and explain why the US government is scared of the US Supreme Court getting involved (by scared I mean they've asked the court to dismiss a case relating to detention at Guantanamo).
All I can find out is that these people are "enemy combatants" and that this justifies treating them as something other than Prisoners of War.
I can accept that they may not be members of a nation state's standing army, and that they are thus not covered by Geneva Convention regulations on treatment of POWs.
I can not accept that this obviates their civil rights, that it is an excuse to hold them without fair trial. If they have broken a law, hold a fair and open trial; if that convicts them, apply appropriate justice.
Don't just hold them in perpetuity under a vague banner of "enemy combatant" and pretend this is morally, ethically or even legally acceptable.
Sorry, I need permission to express my displeasure about something?
>> Those people jailed at Guantanamo Bay are also there for their ties to terrorism
Bullshit. Utter tosh and nonsense. Please provide references. Please also explain how holding them there without trial, legal representation, the ability for individual private interviews with representatives from the UN, while interrogating them with abusive techniques is in any way justified even if they do have ties to terrorism.
Just what is terrorism anyway? I do recall considerable amounts of US support for those very people in Afghanistan when they were fighting against the Russians that are currently being targeted by American "anti terrorist" operations now.
Hypocrisy? Hell yes. I don't give a shit what the background of Lantos is, I don't care whether he votes against MFT status for China or not; the organisation he represents is very far from being the champion of freedom and democracy it would have to be for his questions to those companies to have any credence at all.
Maybe it's because the British government are rapidly passing ever more legislation that gravely alters the relationship between individuals and the state.
Later this week there's a bill in parliament to raise the time you can be held by the police without charge, without justification, without recourse to a lawyer, to 90 days.
Add that to "show me your ID" "I chose not to have one" and suddenly perfectly innocent people are behind bars for three months.
It will happen.
Reference the man that was arrested under anti-terror legislation for engaging in non-violent political debate. At a political conference.
Reference the heavy-handed police tactics at the pro-fox hunting protests - which included boarding busses nowhere near the city involved and telling the driver he had to turn around and was not allowed to stop for any reason - including toilet breaks.
Reference the existing shoot-to-kill policy in operation in London.
Maybe ID cards in themselves aren't such a big deal. Add everything together, and it all starts to look like non-violent civic protest is not going to be sufficient to protect the freedoms of this country.
To be fair, it's quite possible criminal proceedings are already under way on that matter.
To ensure a fair trial reporting restrictions are almost certainly going to be imposed on any such action until the end of the trial - at which point full disclosure will be possible.
Actually, at the time HL2 was released, a lot of people were saying "I'm happy to pay for the game, I'd love to buy it and play it - but I can't because of steam". The pirated version was more accessible than the commercial one, with the added bonus of being playable even when the steam servers were down.
I was so put off by the obnoxious steam mechanism that I still haven't played HL2. Had it been an installable CD or a downloaded executable that didn't call home, I probably would have bought it.
My normal mouse (and typing) style is to rest my wrist(s) flat on the desk and let my fingers do all the work.
The degree of work done by the rest is minimal - although there may be many movements, they're all very tiny.
I find I can use a mouse/keyboard for extended periods (10+ hours at a time, 20+ hours a day) without pain or discomfort, and my usual use patterns (nearer 4-10 hours a day) have never caused me problems.
This vertical mouse would require arm movement and is thus frankly very scary.
In role play games - which I believe includes MMORPGs - I like to roleplay cute sexy females that like girls.
If my cute sexy female is told she can't marry that other cute sexy female, at which point is it out of character for her to highlight the unwarranted persecution of cute sexy lesbians, and attempt to gain support among the other players for the position (ideally a 69 with the other cute lesbian).
I can't believe you've said roleplay is TOTALLY out-of-character.
I hit strat the other night with four guildmates. One was level 58 - we were there to help twink his alt.
We breezed through. No wipes. It really is a doddle there.
MC on the other hand, we've only ever killed 7 of the bosses. It's taking us a while to learn the strategies, and a while longer to teach them to some of our guildmates.
We're not a raiding guild. We're a bunch of casual players - hence only just getting to MC despite playing since Feb (in Europe). For people like that, MC _is_ hard.
Strat gives you more to do, keeps you more alert, and is thus far easier - you don't get bored, lose concentration. You don't need 40 people to not screw up. You don't need specialised equipment (full fire resist, or 420 defense, etc).
If Strat dropped epics equivalent to those in MC, our guild would be breezing through MC by now - because we can farm strat at will.
5 million clients is utterly misleading. No server is handling more than a few tens of thousands, if that - concurrently, far fewer. And they're usually affecting a few hundred other clients at any given moment in time (and again, at any moment in time, usually far fewer).
Also I'd hestitate to describe fully transactional websites with secure communications through to multiple back-end systems, including inventory, payment and fulfillment "static web content".
But that's ok. You defend them; I'll continue to keep multi-billion businesses afloat.
(incidentally, we do get 5m hits a day. on one of our websites. if you mean unique visitors, then yes, blizzard get more. although I suspect still fewer than we get across all 45 of our websites. but that's just multiple brands, they all connect through to the same back-end inventory system)
So 4 million people paying $30 each for the game doesn't pay for development?
Support staff on minimum wage are costing $8m/month?
Blizzard are raking in cash. The subscriptions in the US alone cover the US infrastructure and game development - bear in mind they didn't expect this many players, they budgeted to cover the dev costs with far less income.
This means that (e.g.) all the European revenue goes on marketing, support and infrastructure. That means a LOT of money available for infrastructure.
(I'm sure they pass a significant sum on to the Blizzard balance sheet in the US too, but that's just internal accounting)
The good game designer focusses on good gameplay. When a server is down, I'm not sure too many people are enjoying the gameplay. Draw your own conclusions.
If I was hosting a website that I'd expect to receive around a million hits in a very short amount of time I'd make a low bandwidth statically generated version that was automatically switched to at times of peak usage. Since each region of the world has different home websites it's unlikely to ever even reach a million.
This isn't exactly hard. It's also something Blizzard haven't done.
A server goes down. 3000 people hit a website. Oh no, not 3000 people! Sorry, remind me how many people are on Slashdot right now?
As for handling the load on the servers.. database servers using SAN based storage are (relatively, by enterprise standards) cheap these days and scale up tremendously well. The login server (which validates users then passes them on to other servers) is something that can be easily clustered - it doesn't even need to track sessions.
Having the game servers crash when too many people are in one place is laughable. Other MMORPGs cope with this situation.
Talking about how many players WoW has compared with other games is irrelevant. Scaling with more players should be a matter of adding more servers. You have heard of horizontal scaleability haven't you?
Heck, there are some things Blizzard are doing right. In Europe they have multiple data centres - this helps spread bandwidth use. They use different servers for different areas of the game. They use different servers for handling player authentication for logon. They tend not to lose player state (e.g. you don't lose an item because the server crashed).
This doesn't excuse their inability to scale better, and to handle what are pretty predictable loads.
I work for blue chip companies setting up websites that are the busiest in their respective industries, including full connection through to back-end systems.
When the systems die at peak trading, it's 10s of millions in revenue lost. An hour.
My current company provides video downloads off our main sites. We service several hundred retail outlets. We offer very complex product search capabilities, and obviously we permit those products to be purchased. We're dealing with exceedingly large bandwidth, CPU and memory use. We have IBM mainframes, more Sun kit than you could fit in your house and more Wintel boxes than I'd like.
All of this is being provided for less than Blizzard's monthly subscription revenues. Far less. In fact, 3-4 months of WoW subscription revenue in Europe alone would cover the IT costs of our entire business.
So for Blizzard to be unable to handle the loads involved is frankly astonishing. Their systems architecture clearly isn't adequate. Their bandwidth isn't reliable. Heck, they can't even keep their website up and running at peak times - quite a simple website, at that.
This is despite being live for well over a year now. They know how much bandwidth each user needs. They know how many users they have. They know what the capacity on each server is. They already have logon queues at times of peak load, to control the numbers of logged in players.
I have no sympathy for Blizzard on this matter, because they've had plenty of time to get this sorted, and consistently fail to deal with it. This isn't rocket science, you don't need to steal Google's employees to find a solution, just get someone competent in and fund the necessary infrastructure.
So you're suggesting I update the wikipedia page on this chap to state "We're sorry but we're not able to give you the surname of this individual due to legal actions taken" and link the words "legal actions taken" to a wikipedia page describing the legal wrangles, including the fact it was initiated by Mr & Mrs Floricic due to the inclusion of their son's surname on his Tron wikipedia page?
Try playing in Europe. My guild has members from around 18 different countries.
We don't use ventrillo (or teamspeak) precisely because of the language difficulties.
Oddly enough, we also have no problem taking on the end-game content. Ah well.
Of course, there is some xenophobia - wtf is blizzard hosting our server in France for? Can't keep the server up, can't keep the link up, can't keep the website up..
Slashdot Mirror
Which copyright information would you have Trading Standards use? The copyright licence on the confiscated disks? Clearly not trustworthy.
The licence on mozilla.org? How does the trading standards officer know which licence applies? if any?
Even if they find the right licence, do they have to be a lawyer? Is it not more sensible to contact the copyright owner directly and ask them explicitly whether they approve of such behaviour?
Everything up to "you're breaking our anti-piracy ability" was perfectly acceptable. That remark was unfortunate, comical, and probably personally embarrassing to the poor individual that made it.
I don't know which muds you played, but every mud I played on gave almost every player the chance to become a coder.
People got to coder level without knowing how to code. They then learned.
Why do you think so much LPC was so badly written?
I've gone back and reviewed code I wrote on muds. It's atrocious. It totally sucks. It also taught me OO programming basics, and got me launched on my (currently reasonably successful) career.
I also learned a lot more than programming from muds. Certainly more than I'm learning from WoW. I'd say more, but we're due to hit MC in a couple of minutes..
Ok, you're demoted.
Oh please. Use of the telegraph and amateur radio bands never permeated the general population to the extent that instant messaging and SMS have done today.
Even were that not the case, the issue isn't the use of such abbreviation on the appropriate channels, it's the increasing use of such abbreviation for other uses.
People who write 'loose' when they mean 'lose' are often changing the meaning of their sentence. People that write 'm8' when they mean 'my good friend' are losing credibility. These issues have a real impact on perception, on intelligibility, on even employability.
Maybe I'm just old and scared because I find it harder to write in 1337 speak than in real English - even when sending text messages on my mobile phone.
My "penmanship" is atrocious. I have difficulty reading my own writing at times.
Luckily I work in an environment where all communications are made using well formed characters corresponding to known standards and easily reproduced on paper or on more transient displays.
Someone that asks me to write an essay at an interview will be asked to provide me with a computer upon which to write it. I type faster than I can write, it's far more legible, it gives me greater editing powers (which, if I'm writing a manual for someone else, I will make use of) and it's exactly the tool I would use to perform similar tasks as part of my job.
Refuse to give me the computer and I'll walk out of your interview. I'm good enough that I can get a job with people that don't measure the inconsequential at interview; I'll also have more faith in them to understand the worth of my contribution to their company.
I am decrying the lack of transparency and review. I am highlighting the injustice of the situation.
I'm glad you appear to be agreeing.
I did not specify that references had to be 'net based. Neither have I said I'd consider an Internet based reference to be sufficient to convince me (or otherwise). I'm happy to accept in advance your apology for misrepresenting me by saying otherwise.
Can you provide actual evidence that the detainees are all terrorists, or linked to terrorism? And can you further provide justification for the flagrant abuses of their civil liberties?
Obviously those infringements of civil liberties can be referenced through multiple US court representations, speeches and comments by American political figures and government and military staff, and numerous print media outlets, quite apart from the recently published United Nations paper that led to Koffi Annan calling for the camp to be closed.
Please, help me understand the law being used to hold these people - and explain why the US government is scared of the US Supreme Court getting involved (by scared I mean they've asked the court to dismiss a case relating to detention at Guantanamo).
All I can find out is that these people are "enemy combatants" and that this justifies treating them as something other than Prisoners of War.
I can accept that they may not be members of a nation state's standing army, and that they are thus not covered by Geneva Convention regulations on treatment of POWs.
I can not accept that this obviates their civil rights, that it is an excuse to hold them without fair trial. If they have broken a law, hold a fair and open trial; if that convicts them, apply appropriate justice.
Don't just hold them in perpetuity under a vague banner of "enemy combatant" and pretend this is morally, ethically or even legally acceptable.
>> demonstrating without a warrant
Sorry, I need permission to express my displeasure about something?
>> Those people jailed at Guantanamo Bay are also there for their ties to terrorism
Bullshit. Utter tosh and nonsense. Please provide references. Please also explain how holding them there without trial, legal representation, the ability for individual private interviews with representatives from the UN, while interrogating them with abusive techniques is in any way justified even if they do have ties to terrorism.
Just what is terrorism anyway? I do recall considerable amounts of US support for those very people in Afghanistan when they were fighting against the Russians that are currently being targeted by American "anti terrorist" operations now.
Hypocrisy? Hell yes. I don't give a shit what the background of Lantos is, I don't care whether he votes against MFT status for China or not; the organisation he represents is very far from being the champion of freedom and democracy it would have to be for his questions to those companies to have any credence at all.
Shame? I hope to hell he feels it.
Maybe it's because the British government are rapidly passing ever more legislation that gravely alters the relationship between individuals and the state.
Later this week there's a bill in parliament to raise the time you can be held by the police without charge, without justification, without recourse to a lawyer, to 90 days.
Add that to "show me your ID" "I chose not to have one" and suddenly perfectly innocent people are behind bars for three months.
It will happen.
Reference the man that was arrested under anti-terror legislation for engaging in non-violent political debate. At a political conference.
Reference the heavy-handed police tactics at the pro-fox hunting protests - which included boarding busses nowhere near the city involved and telling the driver he had to turn around and was not allowed to stop for any reason - including toilet breaks.
Reference the existing shoot-to-kill policy in operation in London.
Maybe ID cards in themselves aren't such a big deal. Add everything together, and it all starts to look like non-violent civic protest is not going to be sufficient to protect the freedoms of this country.
To be fair, it's quite possible criminal proceedings are already under way on that matter.
To ensure a fair trial reporting restrictions are almost certainly going to be imposed on any such action until the end of the trial - at which point full disclosure will be possible.
>> Microsoft users are almost without exception a bunch of shameless pirates.
Microsoft's profits rather disagree with you. As do those of companies releasing PC games.
Actually, at the time HL2 was released, a lot of people were saying "I'm happy to pay for the game, I'd love to buy it and play it - but I can't because of steam". The pirated version was more accessible than the commercial one, with the added bonus of being playable even when the steam servers were down.
I was so put off by the obnoxious steam mechanism that I still haven't played HL2. Had it been an installable CD or a downloaded executable that didn't call home, I probably would have bought it.
My normal mouse (and typing) style is to rest my wrist(s) flat on the desk and let my fingers do all the work.
The degree of work done by the rest is minimal - although there may be many movements, they're all very tiny.
I find I can use a mouse/keyboard for extended periods (10+ hours at a time, 20+ hours a day) without pain or discomfort, and my usual use patterns (nearer 4-10 hours a day) have never caused me problems.
This vertical mouse would require arm movement and is thus frankly very scary.
Totally out of character? WTF?
I'm a fat ugly guy that likes girls.
In role play games - which I believe includes MMORPGs - I like to roleplay cute sexy females that like girls.
If my cute sexy female is told she can't marry that other cute sexy female, at which point is it out of character for her to highlight the unwarranted persecution of cute sexy lesbians, and attempt to gain support among the other players for the position (ideally a 69 with the other cute lesbian).
I can't believe you've said roleplay is TOTALLY out-of-character.
I'd like to thank you in advance for getting my hunter banned from WoW.
Now, where can I find a level 60 pig..
What? You haven't roleplayed a cute feminine lesbian that still flirts with the male characters on an online game?
Damn, you're missing out..
Now that's a nice reply.
Points taken on board. Thank you.
I hit strat the other night with four guildmates. One was level 58 - we were there to help twink his alt.
We breezed through. No wipes. It really is a doddle there.
MC on the other hand, we've only ever killed 7 of the bosses. It's taking us a while to learn the strategies, and a while longer to teach them to some of our guildmates.
We're not a raiding guild. We're a bunch of casual players - hence only just getting to MC despite playing since Feb (in Europe). For people like that, MC _is_ hard.
Strat gives you more to do, keeps you more alert, and is thus far easier - you don't get bored, lose concentration. You don't need 40 people to not screw up. You don't need specialised equipment (full fire resist, or 420 defense, etc).
If Strat dropped epics equivalent to those in MC, our guild would be breezing through MC by now - because we can farm strat at will.
5 million clients is utterly misleading. No server is handling more than a few tens of thousands, if that - concurrently, far fewer. And they're usually affecting a few hundred other clients at any given moment in time (and again, at any moment in time, usually far fewer).
Also I'd hestitate to describe fully transactional websites with secure communications through to multiple back-end systems, including inventory, payment and fulfillment "static web content".
But that's ok. You defend them; I'll continue to keep multi-billion businesses afloat.
(incidentally, we do get 5m hits a day. on one of our websites. if you mean unique visitors, then yes, blizzard get more. although I suspect still fewer than we get across all 45 of our websites. but that's just multiple brands, they all connect through to the same back-end inventory system)
So 4 million people paying $30 each for the game doesn't pay for development?
Support staff on minimum wage are costing $8m/month?
Blizzard are raking in cash. The subscriptions in the US alone cover the US infrastructure and game development - bear in mind they didn't expect this many players, they budgeted to cover the dev costs with far less income.
This means that (e.g.) all the European revenue goes on marketing, support and infrastructure. That means a LOT of money available for infrastructure.
(I'm sure they pass a significant sum on to the Blizzard balance sheet in the US too, but that's just internal accounting)
The good game designer focusses on good gameplay. When a server is down, I'm not sure too many people are enjoying the gameplay. Draw your own conclusions.
If I was hosting a website that I'd expect to receive around a million hits in a very short amount of time I'd make a low bandwidth statically generated version that was automatically switched to at times of peak usage. Since each region of the world has different home websites it's unlikely to ever even reach a million.
This isn't exactly hard. It's also something Blizzard haven't done.
A server goes down. 3000 people hit a website. Oh no, not 3000 people! Sorry, remind me how many people are on Slashdot right now?
As for handling the load on the servers.. database servers using SAN based storage are (relatively, by enterprise standards) cheap these days and scale up tremendously well. The login server (which validates users then passes them on to other servers) is something that can be easily clustered - it doesn't even need to track sessions.
Having the game servers crash when too many people are in one place is laughable. Other MMORPGs cope with this situation.
Talking about how many players WoW has compared with other games is irrelevant. Scaling with more players should be a matter of adding more servers. You have heard of horizontal scaleability haven't you?
Heck, there are some things Blizzard are doing right. In Europe they have multiple data centres - this helps spread bandwidth use. They use different servers for different areas of the game. They use different servers for handling player authentication for logon. They tend not to lose player state (e.g. you don't lose an item because the server crashed).
This doesn't excuse their inability to scale better, and to handle what are pretty predictable loads.
You clearly haven't been tracking the european forums. Blizzard's hosting in Europe is very subpar, and has been since go-live.
I work for blue chip companies setting up websites that are the busiest in their respective industries, including full connection through to back-end systems.
When the systems die at peak trading, it's 10s of millions in revenue lost. An hour.
My current company provides video downloads off our main sites. We service several hundred retail outlets. We offer very complex product search capabilities, and obviously we permit those products to be purchased. We're dealing with exceedingly large bandwidth, CPU and memory use. We have IBM mainframes, more Sun kit than you could fit in your house and more Wintel boxes than I'd like.
All of this is being provided for less than Blizzard's monthly subscription revenues. Far less. In fact, 3-4 months of WoW subscription revenue in Europe alone would cover the IT costs of our entire business.
So for Blizzard to be unable to handle the loads involved is frankly astonishing. Their systems architecture clearly isn't adequate. Their bandwidth isn't reliable. Heck, they can't even keep their website up and running at peak times - quite a simple website, at that.
This is despite being live for well over a year now. They know how much bandwidth each user needs. They know how many users they have. They know what the capacity on each server is. They already have logon queues at times of peak load, to control the numbers of logged in players.
I have no sympathy for Blizzard on this matter, because they've had plenty of time to get this sorted, and consistently fail to deal with it. This isn't rocket science, you don't need to steal Google's employees to find a solution, just get someone competent in and fund the necessary infrastructure.
So you're suggesting I update the wikipedia page on this chap to state "We're sorry but we're not able to give you the surname of this individual due to legal actions taken" and link the words "legal actions taken" to a wikipedia page describing the legal wrangles, including the fact it was initiated by Mr & Mrs Floricic due to the inclusion of their son's surname on his Tron wikipedia page?
I like it
Try playing in Europe. My guild has members from around 18 different countries.
We don't use ventrillo (or teamspeak) precisely because of the language difficulties.
Oddly enough, we also have no problem taking on the end-game content. Ah well.
Of course, there is some xenophobia - wtf is blizzard hosting our server in France for? Can't keep the server up, can't keep the link up, can't keep the website up..