So, the predicted doom and gloom of free virtual items given away by good, decent people assumes that no 3rd party directories will rise?
Doesn't seem very likely to me. If it's as popular as this news item suggests then I could see MANY 3rd party marketplaces popping up practically overnight. If no 3rd party marketplaces are created, then, as the saying goes, "nothing of value was lost."
If Duke Nukem puffs on a cigar to a backdrop of the US flag in a cutscene, I'd see either the content re-rendered with a different flag texture or just removed outright. The commercial response to censorship will be the cheapest and shortest workaround to get within the law, not a group-up redesign.
Good to know when the Government is cracking the encryption implemented by the public it's "cracking down on child pornography." When it's the public cracking encryption implemented by corporations it's a violation of the DMCA.
If you really miss the slot that modern video cards eat up, you could always get an extender. Too much money, IMHO, and some case assembly may be required, but, then, how much is it to you?
BTW, I don't remember the right wing issuing loud howls of protests when unfriendly reporters were banned from reporting being `embedded' with the military during the Bush years.
Here's my pet peeve: whenever someone talks along the lines of "the other side didn't complain when it was their guy being hailed as a hero" or "we didn't lampoon that guy on the other side".
People are hypocrites. Hypocrites ought to be exposed. But two wrongs don't make a right, either. If it's wrong to exclude certain popular media groups because of their bias, then it's wrong regardless. It's wrong for the Bush administration to exclude MSNBC. It's wrong for the Obama administration to exclude Fox News. If politicians were honorable men that held sacred the office they hold, they would bury the hatchet and do the RIGHT thing. We as the general public should hold them to doing the right thing.
Saying that Alice didn't complain when, in the past, Mallory instigated something against Bob in no way justifies the continued action but just swapping the names around.
If they were dumb enough to use a public, city-owned router for illegal activity, you really think they'd be smart enough to set a new address? Smart enough for that sidestep but not smart enough to encrypt the torrent traffic or use an anonymous proxy or any of the other dozens of common sense moves to avoid broadcasting what's being downloaded?
I'm sure all the other citizens they shared a network with appreciated the use of discretion to avoid minimal disruption of service.
If you think your only option is to re-install the OS, odds are you don't know how to fix the problem and do it in a timely fashion.
So, how do YOU deal with a corrupted registry, chains upon chains of hooked and rehooked system calls, apps without proper uninstallers, bad-neighbor applications that overwrite other apps' dlls, and rootkits? Are you really spending the time to one-at-a-time manually uninstall and replace bad associations with known-good ones?
To me, OS reinstall and repatch is more of a time saving device. Sure, I can spend hours on hours chasing dragons all over the place for hours on end to fix things and keep their precious desktop wallpaper and they could just click that Awesome Cute Videos bookmark and reinstall the same damn malware the very next day. I personally rather set an xml file and leave an unattended install on while catching a movie or otherwise getting on with my life.
I know if family ever got snippety with me about why I reinstall all the time, I'd probably throw the computer back right at them and wish them good luck.
Or even force the Senate to ratify it. Until it's ratified by the Senate, by 2/3 vote, a treaty has no legal standing in the United States. Thus, you only need to get 34 Senators to vote against ratification to prevent a treaty from coming into effect.
Don't count on MAFIAA to forget to pay off that many senators.
You're conflating difficulty and practicality. I'd love to work for an organization which has the foresight to understand the value of best practices such as that, but it is in my experience that no employer is willing to invest that kind of time when laying out cash for antivirus subscriptions will kill the same bird.
Except that it doesn't. One approach is proactive and a best practice, the other is reactive and doesn't stop regular applications with inadvertent security flaws. If someone can't convince the business it's worth the time to do it right, then the organization is broken. For example, a professional would stop an organization from running a CRM for 1000+ users in an Access database on a network share... and if they can't convey why it's a bad idea then they deserve to fail and lose it all when it happens.
The problem with that is they are shortsighted and don't take into consideration they spend a premium for Core 2 Duo systems and are wasting a lot of that processor time (and increased power costs) to work around Windows' inherent problems.
That's another strike against the "just deploy anti-virus." Security permissions are checked inside the OS whether you're an admin or not. That's actually a good one that directly relates to dollars saved that I have to keep in my checklist when some beancounter says it's not worth the effort to properly lock down the environment.
It's not the difficulty that blocks one from doing it; it's getting authorization to spend the time, and then dealing with the headache of people whining because they can't change their wallpaper, etc.
Security is always a balance of functionality versus safety. As they say, pay now or pay later.
I'm surprised the same content providers that Microsoft is assuring that the platform is "pretty safe" aren't coming back and asking why the peripherals are so expensive and making projections to how many more people would be buying XBox Live content if they didn't blow all their cash on peripherals and didn't have to worry about the exploitative cost of buying space upgrades.
It's not a proposed law yet. It's a pile of paper that may someday become a proposed law. When it becomes a proposed law it'll be up there on Thomas with everything else.
With all the crying about the health care reform bill text, they want to minimize the text of the law's exposure to the public. It'll be proposed and voted on a late night Friday, whisked quickly through the other chamber, rubber stamped through the Prez, and, poof, instant gestapo, paid for by the taxpayers whose necks they'll have their knees against.
Or maybe have done all that before buying them... what the hell kind of mickey-mouse outfit would buy another company without examining their operations?
The kind of mickey-mouse outfit that's desperate for market share, particularly if that outfit isn't exactly late to the party (*cough* Windows CE / Mobile *cough*) and hasn't managed to capture a significant portion of it.
Your problem isn't the game, it's that you want to be 'in the top players'.
Most people don't care about that.
That you do, is nobody's fault but your own.
I don't know about Travian, but, most "free" games I've played have content that's not available except for the Top Players. Well, sure, it's available but the second you enter the dungeon or get to the boss or whatever, you're squished pretty soundly. That's because these top tier events are balanced for those at the top, who get there using in-game paid help. To me, that's just as good as locking people out for non-payment.
It's the right of the game developer to do that, of course. But they shouldn't really be billing it as a "free" game if you can't fully play it without paying. They should be honest and admit that if you're not prepared to pay, you're not going to play it all.
If I wanted to play a game where chance of winning is directly related to the money I spend, I'd play Magic again. At least WotC doesn't pretend it's a free game.
I've never had an issue with an Acer laptop except of my own doing.
I had someone bring me an Acer netbook where they hosed the whole hard drive. Didn't come with recovery disks and the recovery partition was dead, so, I ordered the recovery disks (on their tab). Turns out the disks they sent don't even work, but you don't known until after you spend the 3 hours copying all this stuff to the hard drive. (you'd think it was doing it bit-by-bit.)
They've taken quite a fall downhill, IMHO, after getting into bed with the likes of Gateway and eMachines.
Anyway, of course the science is going to be an absurd prop in star trek. That said, star trek did often take even bigger liberties with reality than most other shows. I occasionally watched episodes of various star trek series until I saw on Voyager an episode where a virus takes up Klingon growth hormones and suddenly the things are the size of flies flying around, infecting all species with stingers. That oddly was a line too far.
My contention is that, since Star Trek is in The Future (tm), if it got the science 100% right, then we too would already be in The Future (tm).
Seriously, WTF is 'adapt like a human would'? There's only so many things an AI can do, and even less ways to change those things to vary the difficulty.
How about:
C) Pull squad back to a better reinforced position instead of letting them all get killed or D) Destroy the inherent value of the target they are winning (kill the hostage, destroy the plans, evac the target, airstrike the area to cinders) or E) Stop throwing meat popsicles at the firefight and reinforce with machines or snipers or shelling
"There's only so many things an AI can do," so that's why GP said this is hard to implement.
It should make things easier, though, to figure that in a game the PLAYER is also limited. If the mission is to push through lines of impossible forces, the game mechanic might not support a stealth strategy and the player could theoretically not follow orders and just goof around in green areas and the game simply wouldn't progress.
. . . a huge failure of the industry. . . . very difficult/impossible to replace part[s] . . . Cases are still almost universally cramped . . . Replacing "front-panel" components . . . "build once, never enter again" pieces of shit.
Sounds to me like you might need to pay a little more money for your case. I've whiteboxed maybe 20 computers for myself and others and have run into POS cases maybe twice. There's a lot of garbage cases, ones that will make you bleed like crazy, ones that can barely take getting looked at. The $75 - $100 range is filled with some roomy, well designed cases. I don't like the "Fast & Furious" looks of the modern cases, but the ergonomics has certainly improved over the last 20 years.
My most recent case is fantastic. 20 years ago to replace an accessory card I had to unscrew 12 screws on the outer case U panel, gets some Band-Aids to stop the bleeding, unscrew the bracket and hope I don't drop the screw into that unreachable spot on the motherboard, swap the cards, and reverse. Today I pull a handle on the side and the size folds down, I flip a plastic holder that's holding the shield, swap the cards, and snap both back into place.
Replacing drives is similarly less knuckle-scratching. I've got a small plastic block of pins with a dial I can do a quarter turn on and slide the drive out from the front. Back then I needed to put something under the drive in the case to hold it up (or so some Spiderman-esque poses) so it doesn't drop with an expensive thud when I unscrew the sides of it.
I'm much happier with the state of the case industry than I used to be. Although I miss my turbo button.:)
My favorite part of Reset not clearing variables is in X-Men. The game actually required you to press RESET on the console in order to finish it. Talk about exploiting a quirk and turning it into a unique game enhancement. With console operating systems and system-land and user-land distinctions, those days are gone, man.
The real issue is that there hasn't been a good SONIC game for over a decade. And by that it isn't allegiance to the character but the playstyle: large 2D maps with many many routes that are more fun to play when going fast but proportionately more perilous.
Let's face it, transitioning a classic non-RPG game to 3D requires supporting game mechanics to change dramatically. Compare games that jumped between 2D and 3D: Ninja Gaiden, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Prince of Persia. All of them keep familiar elements to continue to feel like part of the franchise (which I'd argue is a bad and constraining thing) but ultimately require more subdued game play due to complexity. If you deny that they require a different way to think about games, look at Lemmings 3D, Blaster Master Blasting Again, or every Sonic game after Sonic 3D Blast, inclusively. It's more than just adding a Z axis.
Sonic to date has been about playing to furry fantasies and adding characters taking a cue from Sanrio's Hello Kitty to give it some faux richness and complexity and moving to 3D just to compete in the screenshot arena when the game is not ready for it and really is just about going fast and smashing up creative mechanical bosses.
So, despite the Birthday Paradox, they can still identify 87% of Americans? For some reason I'm under the impression that there are a lot more zip codes with more than 366 people (heck, even 1000 to call upon 3 or 4 duplicates that should cover gender differences) than there are zip codes under that amount.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the predicted doom and gloom of free virtual items given away by good, decent people assumes that no 3rd party directories will rise?
Doesn't seem very likely to me. If it's as popular as this news item suggests then I could see MANY 3rd party marketplaces popping up practically overnight. If no 3rd party marketplaces are created, then, as the saying goes, "nothing of value was lost."
But developing a game that pushes Socialist values and limits various gameplay could essentially RUIN your sales in every country BUT China.
#ifdef REGION_CHINA
gameRules.PVP = false;
gameRules.GroupRules.Max += 5;
#endif
If Duke Nukem puffs on a cigar to a backdrop of the US flag in a cutscene, I'd see either the content re-rendered with a different flag texture or just removed outright. The commercial response to censorship will be the cheapest and shortest workaround to get within the law, not a group-up redesign.
And that's different with respect to other countries, how?
Other countries have at least some amount freedom of speech.
Good to know when the Government is cracking the encryption implemented by the public it's "cracking down on child pornography." When it's the public cracking encryption implemented by corporations it's a violation of the DMCA.
If you really miss the slot that modern video cards eat up, you could always get an extender. Too much money, IMHO, and some case assembly may be required, but, then, how much is it to you?
BTW, I don't remember the right wing issuing loud howls of protests when unfriendly reporters were banned from reporting being `embedded' with the military during the Bush years.
Here's my pet peeve: whenever someone talks along the lines of "the other side didn't complain when it was their guy being hailed as a hero" or "we didn't lampoon that guy on the other side".
People are hypocrites. Hypocrites ought to be exposed. But two wrongs don't make a right, either. If it's wrong to exclude certain popular media groups because of their bias, then it's wrong regardless. It's wrong for the Bush administration to exclude MSNBC. It's wrong for the Obama administration to exclude Fox News. If politicians were honorable men that held sacred the office they hold, they would bury the hatchet and do the RIGHT thing. We as the general public should hold them to doing the right thing.
Saying that Alice didn't complain when, in the past, Mallory instigated something against Bob in no way justifies the continued action but just swapping the names around.
If they were dumb enough to use a public, city-owned router for illegal activity, you really think they'd be smart enough to set a new address? Smart enough for that sidestep but not smart enough to encrypt the torrent traffic or use an anonymous proxy or any of the other dozens of common sense moves to avoid broadcasting what's being downloaded?
I'm sure all the other citizens they shared a network with appreciated the use of discretion to avoid minimal disruption of service.
Sure pulling the plug is easier, but, really, how hard would it have been to just stop routing packets to that MAC address?
If you think your only option is to re-install the OS, odds are you don't know how to fix the problem and do it in a timely fashion.
So, how do YOU deal with a corrupted registry, chains upon chains of hooked and rehooked system calls, apps without proper uninstallers, bad-neighbor applications that overwrite other apps' dlls, and rootkits? Are you really spending the time to one-at-a-time manually uninstall and replace bad associations with known-good ones?
To me, OS reinstall and repatch is more of a time saving device. Sure, I can spend hours on hours chasing dragons all over the place for hours on end to fix things and keep their precious desktop wallpaper and they could just click that Awesome Cute Videos bookmark and reinstall the same damn malware the very next day. I personally rather set an xml file and leave an unattended install on while catching a movie or otherwise getting on with my life.
I know if family ever got snippety with me about why I reinstall all the time, I'd probably throw the computer back right at them and wish them good luck.
Or even force the Senate to ratify it. Until it's ratified by the Senate, by 2/3 vote, a treaty has no legal standing in the United States. Thus, you only need to get 34 Senators to vote against ratification to prevent a treaty from coming into effect.
Don't count on MAFIAA to forget to pay off that many senators.
You're conflating difficulty and practicality. I'd love to work for an organization which has the foresight to understand the value of best practices such as that, but it is in my experience that no employer is willing to invest that kind of time when laying out cash for antivirus subscriptions will kill the same bird.
Except that it doesn't. One approach is proactive and a best practice, the other is reactive and doesn't stop regular applications with inadvertent security flaws. If someone can't convince the business it's worth the time to do it right, then the organization is broken. For example, a professional would stop an organization from running a CRM for 1000+ users in an Access database on a network share... and if they can't convey why it's a bad idea then they deserve to fail and lose it all when it happens.
The problem with that is they are shortsighted and don't take into consideration they spend a premium for Core 2 Duo systems and are wasting a lot of that processor time (and increased power costs) to work around Windows' inherent problems.
That's another strike against the "just deploy anti-virus." Security permissions are checked inside the OS whether you're an admin or not. That's actually a good one that directly relates to dollars saved that I have to keep in my checklist when some beancounter says it's not worth the effort to properly lock down the environment.
It's not the difficulty that blocks one from doing it; it's getting authorization to spend the time, and then dealing with the headache of people whining because they can't change their wallpaper, etc.
Security is always a balance of functionality versus safety. As they say, pay now or pay later.
I don't think knocking out 3rd party MU's is to protect the profits of 1st party peripheral business -- i think it's to protect xbox live.
While I agree with your post overall, Microsoft could prove to it's customers that it isn't about the money by selling memory devices that aren't 5x the price of flash memory with twice the capacity and hard drives that aren't over 2.5x the price of equivalent computer drives. Note that the cheapies ALREADY have markup built in, and, hell, those companies are making money. It's not like Microsoft will eat a loss on each sale by simply being competitive.
I'm surprised the same content providers that Microsoft is assuring that the platform is "pretty safe" aren't coming back and asking why the peripherals are so expensive and making projections to how many more people would be buying XBox Live content if they didn't blow all their cash on peripherals and didn't have to worry about the exploitative cost of buying space upgrades.
"Monopoly" or "Market Share", the DMCA doesn't make distinctions about either before branding circumvention a criminal act.
It's not a proposed law yet. It's a pile of paper that may someday become a proposed law. When it becomes a proposed law it'll be up there on Thomas with everything else.
With all the crying about the health care reform bill text, they want to minimize the text of the law's exposure to the public. It'll be proposed and voted on a late night Friday, whisked quickly through the other chamber, rubber stamped through the Prez, and, poof, instant gestapo, paid for by the taxpayers whose necks they'll have their knees against.
Or maybe have done all that before buying them... what the hell kind of mickey-mouse outfit would buy another company without examining their operations?
The kind of mickey-mouse outfit that's desperate for market share, particularly if that outfit isn't exactly late to the party (*cough* Windows CE / Mobile *cough*) and hasn't managed to capture a significant portion of it.
Your problem isn't the game, it's that you want to be 'in the top players'.
Most people don't care about that.
That you do, is nobody's fault but your own.
I don't know about Travian, but, most "free" games I've played have content that's not available except for the Top Players. Well, sure, it's available but the second you enter the dungeon or get to the boss or whatever, you're squished pretty soundly. That's because these top tier events are balanced for those at the top, who get there using in-game paid help. To me, that's just as good as locking people out for non-payment.
It's the right of the game developer to do that, of course. But they shouldn't really be billing it as a "free" game if you can't fully play it without paying. They should be honest and admit that if you're not prepared to pay, you're not going to play it all.
If I wanted to play a game where chance of winning is directly related to the money I spend, I'd play Magic again. At least WotC doesn't pretend it's a free game.
I've never had an issue with an Acer laptop except of my own doing.
I had someone bring me an Acer netbook where they hosed the whole hard drive. Didn't come with recovery disks and the recovery partition was dead, so, I ordered the recovery disks (on their tab). Turns out the disks they sent don't even work, but you don't known until after you spend the 3 hours copying all this stuff to the hard drive. (you'd think it was doing it bit-by-bit.)
They've taken quite a fall downhill, IMHO, after getting into bed with the likes of Gateway and eMachines.
Anyway, of course the science is going to be an absurd prop in star trek. That said, star trek did often take even bigger liberties with reality than most other shows. I occasionally watched episodes of various star trek series until I saw on Voyager an episode where a virus takes up Klingon growth hormones and suddenly the things are the size of flies flying around, infecting all species with stingers. That oddly was a line too far.
My contention is that, since Star Trek is in The Future (tm), if it got the science 100% right, then we too would already be in The Future (tm).
Heck, even the RIAA allows you to listen to all tracks on a CD you bought.
We're working on that.
-Love, RIAA
Seriously, WTF is 'adapt like a human would'? There's only so many things an AI can do, and even less ways to change those things to vary the difficulty.
How about:
C) Pull squad back to a better reinforced position instead of letting them all get killed
or
D) Destroy the inherent value of the target they are winning (kill the hostage, destroy the plans, evac the target, airstrike the area to cinders)
or
E) Stop throwing meat popsicles at the firefight and reinforce with machines or snipers or shelling
"There's only so many things an AI can do," so that's why GP said this is hard to implement.
It should make things easier, though, to figure that in a game the PLAYER is also limited. If the mission is to push through lines of impossible forces, the game mechanic might not support a stealth strategy and the player could theoretically not follow orders and just goof around in green areas and the game simply wouldn't progress.
It's Oracle, so, the appropriate statement for determining the value of a first post would be:
select * from dual;
Pay special attention to the field name.
. . . a huge failure of the industry. . . . very difficult/impossible to replace part[s] . . . Cases are still almost universally cramped . . . Replacing "front-panel" components . . . "build once, never enter again" pieces of shit.
Sounds to me like you might need to pay a little more money for your case. I've whiteboxed maybe 20 computers for myself and others and have run into POS cases maybe twice. There's a lot of garbage cases, ones that will make you bleed like crazy, ones that can barely take getting looked at. The $75 - $100 range is filled with some roomy, well designed cases. I don't like the "Fast & Furious" looks of the modern cases, but the ergonomics has certainly improved over the last 20 years.
My most recent case is fantastic. 20 years ago to replace an accessory card I had to unscrew 12 screws on the outer case U panel, gets some Band-Aids to stop the bleeding, unscrew the bracket and hope I don't drop the screw into that unreachable spot on the motherboard, swap the cards, and reverse. Today I pull a handle on the side and the size folds down, I flip a plastic holder that's holding the shield, swap the cards, and snap both back into place.
Replacing drives is similarly less knuckle-scratching. I've got a small plastic block of pins with a dial I can do a quarter turn on and slide the drive out from the front. Back then I needed to put something under the drive in the case to hold it up (or so some Spiderman-esque poses) so it doesn't drop with an expensive thud when I unscrew the sides of it.
I'm much happier with the state of the case industry than I used to be. Although I miss my turbo button. :)
My favorite part of Reset not clearing variables is in X-Men. The game actually required you to press RESET on the console in order to finish it. Talk about exploiting a quirk and turning it into a unique game enhancement. With console operating systems and system-land and user-land distinctions, those days are gone, man.
The real issue is that there hasn't been a good SONIC game for over a decade. And by that it isn't allegiance to the character but the playstyle: large 2D maps with many many routes that are more fun to play when going fast but proportionately more perilous.
Let's face it, transitioning a classic non-RPG game to 3D requires supporting game mechanics to change dramatically. Compare games that jumped between 2D and 3D: Ninja Gaiden, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Prince of Persia. All of them keep familiar elements to continue to feel like part of the franchise (which I'd argue is a bad and constraining thing) but ultimately require more subdued game play due to complexity. If you deny that they require a different way to think about games, look at Lemmings 3D, Blaster Master Blasting Again, or every Sonic game after Sonic 3D Blast, inclusively. It's more than just adding a Z axis.
Sonic to date has been about playing to furry fantasies and adding characters taking a cue from Sanrio's Hello Kitty to give it some faux richness and complexity and moving to 3D just to compete in the screenshot arena when the game is not ready for it and really is just about going fast and smashing up creative mechanical bosses.
So, despite the Birthday Paradox, they can still identify 87% of Americans? For some reason I'm under the impression that there are a lot more zip codes with more than 366 people (heck, even 1000 to call upon 3 or 4 duplicates that should cover gender differences) than there are zip codes under that amount.