Depending on the game, once you have a functional engine, modding it like that really isn't all that hard, although cracking it in the first place might be a little difficult. I'd definitely like to see the media reaction to the 'Antichrist Mod,' and compare public reaction of that to Hot Coffee. (I know Hot Coffee isn't technically a mod, but most of the idjits out there don't.)
There are a couple factors I took into account when I switched from T-Mobile to Cingular:
-Coverage: I used to live in Hawaii, and T-Mobile was the only carrier that actually had towers in my valley. Despite other carriers having towers only a mile or two away, a nice big mountain kills cellphones good. There are less impediments to cell coverage in the LA basin, where I live now.
-Price: I was switching plans anyways, and Cingular had the best price for what I wanted.
-Mobile-to-Mobile: I was putting my brother on my plan, and since most cell companies offer free unlimited calls within the network, I had him interview his friends as to their networks.
-Rollover: The extra minutes might never get used and expire after a year, but that's way better than having them all poof at the end of the month.
However, Cingular customer service is, um, less than good. As in terrible. It takes hours to get anything done over the support line, and sometimes after those hours thing gets done at all. For some reason, my phone cannot connect to the internet. I can send and receive text messages, but not picture messages, and I can't go visit those nifty cellphone websites or anything. My phone is perfectly capable of it, and my brother's identical phone does it all just fine, so since they can't figure it out they just bump me from department to department for hours. I even took it into a brick-and-morter Cingular Store and exchanged the phone, but that didn't help. It's broken and they have no damn clue how to fix it. Although that may be a mixed blessing- now I'm not tempted to pay their exorbitant per-KB charges.
Microsoft made the offer to do this (though that could very well be wrong), and probably did so simply to try setting a precedent that works against Apple.
But this is going to backfire! When Universal tries to push this deal on Apple, and Apple refuses, they'll say "But Microsoft did this! Why won't you?"
The answer to that is, of course, "Because Microsoft did it." At least nowadays, any precedent set by M$ probably isn't a good one.
Apple needs to tell Universal to go to hell. As for the Zune, nobody wants it. Kids who get it for Christmas will return it and get an iPod.
This is probably what will happen. Steve (Jobs) has held up admirably against the pressures of the RIAA, and will likely continue to do so. And when Steve (the other one) sees the numbers of returned Zunes reported by retailers a few days after christmas, chairs will probably be thrown.
I agree completely. It's kind of weird to thing of one company so completely dominating a market to be a good thing, but Apple hasn't abused us consumers the way we have come to expect of monopolies (or near-monopoly, in this case.)
Despite the lack of real competition, Apple has come out with new, improved models every year or so, expanded their product line to include cheaper models, and appeased the RIAA with a DRM on purchased songs that is not nearly as offensive as it could have been. All of the songs that I ripped from CDs, cassettes, and even vinyl, are in MP3 and DRM-free, and thus work on my iPod without any issues at all. The Zune, on the other hand, imposes a DRM on any file that gets loaded onto it. It could be an MP3 voice recording of a lecture that I gave, and thus solely MY intellectual property, and the Zune would still put an oppressive DRM on it for me.
On the other hand, the DRM on the songs that I downloaded from the iTunes store has never given me any issues. I didn't even realize they were DRMed until the guy at the Apple Store had me me deauthorize my computer before they would send it to the repair depot to replace the logic board. There's nothing more the RIAA would like more than an overly protective DRM force a consumer to buy a song twice... more money for them. But the Apple guys went out of their way to make sure that I had my music backed up elsewhere and my computer deauthorized so that I wouldn't have to pay for the songs a second time.
Seeing someone else use a bot while you do the actual work is merely an irritant. The actual problem is what happens to the server economy once bot use and gold farming become commonplace.
What should happen is that a player finds a random semi-decent loot and puts it up on the Auction House for something vaguely resembling its actual value. However, if people are using farming bots while they sleep and have thousands of gold to through around, the players can put up the items for several times their value, and they will still sell quickly. The buyers who use bots don't care about price since they have more money than they need anyways. The players who DON'T use bots because they like, I dunno, playing the game themselves or something, now can no longer afford to buy regular, mediocre pieces of loot. They are forced to get farming bots themselves, buy gold online, or do without.
It's called mudflation, and it IS a problem on many servers.
What it comes down to is, should Blizzard allow their players to be forced into using 3rd party programs or buy gold from 3rd party dealers, or outlaw this practice? They have chosen the latter.
In addition to the accounts the customers canceled due to the irritating presence of farmbots like this, there's also the lost revenue from the thousands of accounts Blizzard shut down for using this program.
Obviously it was Blizzard's choice to stop taking money from the second group, but they're just adhering to their own policy, and it's this guy's fault that they're being forced to do that.
It's rather counterintuitive, but my Political Science teacher tells me that last minute (3-4 days before an election) news really doesn't affect elections as much as you think it would. Maybe the news doesn't have time to spread to voters, or it doesn't really sink in in time.
At my university, it doesn't. So much as a byte of bittorrent traffic and your dorm connection gets shut off for a week. Worse, your dorm connection is tied to your student ID, so once you're cut off you can't use the wireless access provided in the library either. So much for downloading WoW patches.
I've been using it with Safari for several weeks now and haven't run into any problems at all. I don't even notice the slowdown that is referred to in large threads, and my machine isn't all that powerful.
It actually works great with Camino as well, one of the lesser-known browsers of the mac world
As for IE development, IE is a pain in the ass to web developers. I don't blame the/. code monkeys for saving it for last.
I figure when Apple starts actually selling Leopard, the retail employees will get the training they need to sell/support it. Until then, they don't need it.
The situation in high schools today is exactly as the parent describes- my little brother had a prepaid 150 minutes/year phone provided by my parents for emergencies, and all of his friends had RAZRs or some other fancy phone, which they could actually use to call one another. He's been borrowing their phones for that purpose for the past year, to the point of having some friends lend him their phones over the weekend.
I ended up taking pity on him and adding him into my service with an upgrade to a family plan, and now he pays half of the bill by recycling soda cans and mowing lawns. He even pays extra for a text messaging package on his phone, which I don't have on mine. He gets to keep in contact with all of his friends and is quite happy with it. The best part for him is that 80% or so of his friends have the same provider, so free Mobile-to-Mobile means he'll never dig that deeply into the shared minutes. He racked up 7 hours of talk time last month and used about 16 of our anytime minutes. Making the kid pay for the phone themselves- overage charges and all- makes them suddenly more responsible with cellphone use.
If you're getting an emergency "where are you" phone for your elementary school kids, the Firefly is it; it only receives or sends calls from people already in the phone book, and the Mommy and Daddy buttons make it especially effective for young children. Even so, it would have to be instilled in the kid that these phones aren't so you can call Mommy during her big meeting because you wanted to show off your pretty plastic thingie to your friends at preschool.
You do however want to restrict that moron at the DMV from checking out the American Idol blogs.
That kind of thing is what that moron's manager should be doing, we don't need federal legislation to deal with people goofing off at work. That also isn't the stated purpose of this bill.
This whole thing is to protect children from online predators, which is bullshit. How do you protect your kids from scary people on the internet? The same way you protect them from scary people in real life. When I was 12 or so and discovered the internet, my mother sat me down and explained how to avoid the dangers of the internet the same way she told me not to get into cars with strangers and not to open the door when it was the Jehovah's Witness people who lived down the street. Being told to never meet in real life a person I met online in and getting a lesson on using Block and Ignore features was just another part of that to me.
Of course, I was blessed with parents who knew, and still know, more about computers than I do. There are many parents out there who need their kids help to turn on their computers, so I guess my situation isn't all that commonplace.
Dolphin's signature whistles remain constant throughout their whole lives; normally their whistle is based on their mother's whistle. They use both their own whistles and other dolphin's whistles, for self identification and for getting the attention of others. This article suggests they even use the whistles in 3rd person, although I haven't found reference to that in my own research.
There's evidence that dolphins ARE actually self-aware; this is easily proven by putting a mirror in front of them. If they attack the mirror or run away from it, they think it's another animal. If they stare at it, and then turn about and inspect parts of their bodies not normally visible to them, they're aware that the thing in the mirror is them.
/term paper on dolphin communication due 12 noon tomorrow
Blizzard's servers buckle under the strain of just keeping the game running; I imagine if they actually had to provide direct downloads to all however many million subscribers, then several serverfarms across the country would spontaneously explode on patch days.
Bittorrent was really the perfect solution, although in the beginning some users complained that they shouldn't have to give their upload bandwidth to others. The Blizzard Downloader also does something different from normal torrents; my university network is capable of blocking normal (illegal) bittorrent traffic while allowing blizzard traffic to go through.
The important part isn't that the Mac is represented by a guy, it's that the guy gets this hot japanese chick in the Networking commercial. The message here is not that a Mac is girly, it's that a guy who uses a Mac can get a girl. That's advertising for you.
Mocking the president is not too special. Mocking the president in front of his face, the media, and all of his armed guards takes major balls.
If I were ever to meet him myself, I would probably be confirmed in my opinion of him as an idiot, but I think his armed guards would keep my smart mouth in line.
Passwords are like toothbrushes; change them every three months and don't share them with your friends.
With that said, I'd like to argue the point made by the article about periodic changing of passwords. He gave the (not so) hypothetical situation of a password being typed in a login box where someone might see it. This actually happened in my high school, and then we had the admin password to every computer in the lab. And had that access until the last of us graduated. While periodic password changing won't protect you from a serious hacker, it will save you lots of grief from more petty mischief, especially if the person who has your password is clever enough to not let you know that he has it.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on the game, once you have a functional engine, modding it like that really isn't all that hard, although cracking it in the first place might be a little difficult. I'd definitely like to see the media reaction to the 'Antichrist Mod,' and compare public reaction of that to Hot Coffee. (I know Hot Coffee isn't technically a mod, but most of the idjits out there don't.)
There are a couple factors I took into account when I switched from T-Mobile to Cingular:
-Coverage: I used to live in Hawaii, and T-Mobile was the only carrier that actually had towers in my valley. Despite other carriers having towers only a mile or two away, a nice big mountain kills cellphones good. There are less impediments to cell coverage in the LA basin, where I live now.
-Price: I was switching plans anyways, and Cingular had the best price for what I wanted.
-Mobile-to-Mobile: I was putting my brother on my plan, and since most cell companies offer free unlimited calls within the network, I had him interview his friends as to their networks.
-Rollover: The extra minutes might never get used and expire after a year, but that's way better than having them all poof at the end of the month.
However, Cingular customer service is, um, less than good. As in terrible. It takes hours to get anything done over the support line, and sometimes after those hours thing gets done at all. For some reason, my phone cannot connect to the internet. I can send and receive text messages, but not picture messages, and I can't go visit those nifty cellphone websites or anything. My phone is perfectly capable of it, and my brother's identical phone does it all just fine, so since they can't figure it out they just bump me from department to department for hours. I even took it into a brick-and-morter Cingular Store and exchanged the phone, but that didn't help. It's broken and they have no damn clue how to fix it. Although that may be a mixed blessing- now I'm not tempted to pay their exorbitant per-KB charges.
But this is going to backfire! When Universal tries to push this deal on Apple, and Apple refuses, they'll say "But Microsoft did this! Why won't you?"
The answer to that is, of course, "Because Microsoft did it." At least nowadays, any precedent set by M$ probably isn't a good one.
This is probably what will happen. Steve (Jobs) has held up admirably against the pressures of the RIAA, and will likely continue to do so. And when Steve (the other one) sees the numbers of returned Zunes reported by retailers a few days after christmas, chairs will probably be thrown.
I agree completely. It's kind of weird to thing of one company so completely dominating a market to be a good thing, but Apple hasn't abused us consumers the way we have come to expect of monopolies (or near-monopoly, in this case.)
Despite the lack of real competition, Apple has come out with new, improved models every year or so, expanded their product line to include cheaper models, and appeased the RIAA with a DRM on purchased songs that is not nearly as offensive as it could have been. All of the songs that I ripped from CDs, cassettes, and even vinyl, are in MP3 and DRM-free, and thus work on my iPod without any issues at all. The Zune, on the other hand, imposes a DRM on any file that gets loaded onto it. It could be an MP3 voice recording of a lecture that I gave, and thus solely MY intellectual property, and the Zune would still put an oppressive DRM on it for me.
On the other hand, the DRM on the songs that I downloaded from the iTunes store has never given me any issues. I didn't even realize they were DRMed until the guy at the Apple Store had me me deauthorize my computer before they would send it to the repair depot to replace the logic board. There's nothing more the RIAA would like more than an overly protective DRM force a consumer to buy a song twice... more money for them. But the Apple guys went out of their way to make sure that I had my music backed up elsewhere and my computer deauthorized so that I wouldn't have to pay for the songs a second time.
What should happen is that a player finds a random semi-decent loot and puts it up on the Auction House for something vaguely resembling its actual value. However, if people are using farming bots while they sleep and have thousands of gold to through around, the players can put up the items for several times their value, and they will still sell quickly. The buyers who use bots don't care about price since they have more money than they need anyways. The players who DON'T use bots because they like, I dunno, playing the game themselves or something, now can no longer afford to buy regular, mediocre pieces of loot. They are forced to get farming bots themselves, buy gold online, or do without.
It's called mudflation, and it IS a problem on many servers.
What it comes down to is, should Blizzard allow their players to be forced into using 3rd party programs or buy gold from 3rd party dealers, or outlaw this practice? They have chosen the latter.
Obviously it was Blizzard's choice to stop taking money from the second group, but they're just adhering to their own policy, and it's this guy's fault that they're being forced to do that.
Or maybe my teacher is just smoking something.
What about that code that I wrote 5 years ago? I wrote it but I don't have a clue what I was thinking. o.O Moral of the story: Comment your code.
At my university, it doesn't. So much as a byte of bittorrent traffic and your dorm connection gets shut off for a week. Worse, your dorm connection is tied to your student ID, so once you're cut off you can't use the wireless access provided in the library either. So much for downloading WoW patches.
It actually works great with Camino as well, one of the lesser-known browsers of the mac world
As for IE development, IE is a pain in the ass to web developers. I don't blame the /. code monkeys for saving it for last.
I figure when Apple starts actually selling Leopard, the retail employees will get the training they need to sell/support it. Until then, they don't need it.
I ended up taking pity on him and adding him into my service with an upgrade to a family plan, and now he pays half of the bill by recycling soda cans and mowing lawns. He even pays extra for a text messaging package on his phone, which I don't have on mine. He gets to keep in contact with all of his friends and is quite happy with it. The best part for him is that 80% or so of his friends have the same provider, so free Mobile-to-Mobile means he'll never dig that deeply into the shared minutes. He racked up 7 hours of talk time last month and used about 16 of our anytime minutes. Making the kid pay for the phone themselves- overage charges and all- makes them suddenly more responsible with cellphone use.
If you're getting an emergency "where are you" phone for your elementary school kids, the Firefly is it; it only receives or sends calls from people already in the phone book, and the Mommy and Daddy buttons make it especially effective for young children. Even so, it would have to be instilled in the kid that these phones aren't so you can call Mommy during her big meeting because you wanted to show off your pretty plastic thingie to your friends at preschool.
"last week" might be more accurate.
That kind of thing is what that moron's manager should be doing, we don't need federal legislation to deal with people goofing off at work. That also isn't the stated purpose of this bill.
This whole thing is to protect children from online predators, which is bullshit. How do you protect your kids from scary people on the internet? The same way you protect them from scary people in real life. When I was 12 or so and discovered the internet, my mother sat me down and explained how to avoid the dangers of the internet the same way she told me not to get into cars with strangers and not to open the door when it was the Jehovah's Witness people who lived down the street. Being told to never meet in real life a person I met online in and getting a lesson on using Block and Ignore features was just another part of that to me.
Of course, I was blessed with parents who knew, and still know, more about computers than I do. There are many parents out there who need their kids help to turn on their computers, so I guess my situation isn't all that commonplace.
Just thought it was interesting.
Here's a tip: try making them with your mouth.
There's evidence that dolphins ARE actually self-aware; this is easily proven by putting a mirror in front of them. If they attack the mirror or run away from it, they think it's another animal. If they stare at it, and then turn about and inspect parts of their bodies not normally visible to them, they're aware that the thing in the mirror is them.
Pandaran WERE the original idea. China objected to seeing a national icon murdered in a video game.
Blizzard's servers buckle under the strain of just keeping the game running; I imagine if they actually had to provide direct downloads to all however many million subscribers, then several serverfarms across the country would spontaneously explode on patch days. Bittorrent was really the perfect solution, although in the beginning some users complained that they shouldn't have to give their upload bandwidth to others. The Blizzard Downloader also does something different from normal torrents; my university network is capable of blocking normal (illegal) bittorrent traffic while allowing blizzard traffic to go through.
I'm torn between celebrating this slap in the face to Microsoft and morning the loss of another promising MMO title to the evil that is SoE.
The important part isn't that the Mac is represented by a guy, it's that the guy gets this hot japanese chick in the Networking commercial. The message here is not that a Mac is girly, it's that a guy who uses a Mac can get a girl. That's advertising for you.
If I were ever to meet him myself, I would probably be confirmed in my opinion of him as an idiot, but I think his armed guards would keep my smart mouth in line.
Passwords are like toothbrushes; change them every three months and don't share them with your friends.
With that said, I'd like to argue the point made by the article about periodic changing of passwords. He gave the (not so) hypothetical situation of a password being typed in a login box where someone might see it. This actually happened in my high school, and then we had the admin password to every computer in the lab. And had that access until the last of us graduated. While periodic password changing won't protect you from a serious hacker, it will save you lots of grief from more petty mischief, especially if the person who has your password is clever enough to not let you know that he has it.