Re:Didn't see it mentioned in the review...
on
Under The Radar
·
· Score: 1
I as being sarcastic about anti-RedHat stuff; I am a big fan of Red Hat, truth be told.
Didn't see it mentioned in the review...
on
Under The Radar
·
· Score: 4
..but on the page after the "Wow what a great book" stuff, it mentions (on my copy anyway) that all royalties are being donated to the Free Software Foundation "to further its important work".
But remember, "Red Hat is just releasing this to make a buck".
Were any of the Founding Fathers alive today, they would be told - in sneering, patronizing tones - that they don't understand the issues, and that freedom isn't as simple as things like "inalienable human rights" and other things. The FBI is nothing more than a 'Secret Police' with a day-job of tracking down bank robbers. Our rights as Americans, the ones that people died to preserve, mean nothing to the average citizen. They scream for more security, whether they realize that it gives up rights - and don't understand the other issues (encryption, for instance) enough to care. You're safe in a police state, so long as you don't think.
Moderate this down if you must, but I am pissed. I'm voting Libertarian from now on.
Lotus Notes is obviously an obscure, rarely used piece of software, so why would they test it at all? Really. Its not like the alert said "Dave's Text Editor doesn't work on NT".
I disagree that its a dirty trick. I think, instead, its an example of their continued negligence. They advertise that they have the widest software availabilty (unlike that hippie OS) yet they don't bother to test things. The fact is, if you make the OS, then everyone's software has to work. Thats part of the OSS movement that I never hear talked about - the API is right there, you can be sure if something is going to work, because you can see whats happening!
Wow; wonder how many of them can make a spear or filet a monkey. Or will it be more like one big live-action Doom, where you just wander around and find everything you need lying on the floor. Will the monkeys operate the cameras? This has to be the dumbest thing I have seen in some time. I'm putting my money on the morbidly obese housefrau from Des Moines, or the surfer.
Here's what I do: 1)Subscribe to BUGTRAQ 2)Actually read it 3)check the errata page - which is not obscure, its only about 2 levels deep off the "support" link on the home page, and broken up by distro version from time to time 4)Download the updates - all of them - and burn them onto a CD, so that after I install, I reboot, log in, pop in the CD, and run a script that patches everything.
Keep in mind that in the grand scale of Linux skill, I am strictly a lightweight - but I can tell you, looking at my logs, people bounce off my boxes all the time _because I patch my stuff up_ and because I follow the simplest security stuff around (tcpwrappers and all that). Its not friggin rocket science.
Making a secure machine is the job of the admin. Its not the job of a piece of software. After all, isn't a software problem the root? Humans drive software, and always know better than what a machine tells them.
you can't make sysadmins, or people in general, do anything. Red Hat says "There is a hole in our product" via the industry-accepted channels (bugtraq, the web, etc) and then leaves it up to the individual to actually go and fix. This is different from a standard product recall (ie, "Levis issues a product recall for its 501 jeans. Your pants may explode under certain circumstances.) but the environment of computers is far different than, say, cars or clothes.
Your disclaimer should go without saying, IHMO. I have been thinking that way since i first got into Linux/Unix.
To all the people saying "just cope", are you reading the same page I was?
Any time, IMHO, something is exploited based on a known, corrected bug, then its the fault of the person driving, not the car (so to speak); if GM issues a recall, and you don't go get your car fixed and then the next day you get in a wreck and something bad happens as a result of the defect, ITS YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT (unless it happened on the way to the dealership, I guess) and not the fault of the car.
How would the page read, had the admin(s) kept it totally up to date and patched? And not used a non-open CGI?
Lets see a "crack this box" challenge run by Linux people, skilled admins.
Linux, like all things in the computer world, will eventually become obsolete or maybe just too much work to keep "up to date". Linus (er, Dr. Torvalds) even said in his "Open Sources" essay that (paraphrasing) someone else could come along and write something better which will take Linux's place. How long do you think before someone will have an offering that will obsolete (or at least prove a competitor to) Linux and the BSD's? It certainly won't be the offering of that company in Redmond..
I used to live in Richmond. We have a client who was very excited at getting a 56k dedicated dialup, apparently there isn't much to be had. Thank Ghod for Northern Virginia; it sucks in every way except for the fact you can get DSL or cable at the drop of a hat.
Maybe I am atypical. When someone hacked my box, I was lucky enough to be there and yank the power cord out of the router before they managed to do anything but add a user and start downloading a trojan-ed bash. I didn't go crying to the newsgroups, I looked at the syslog output and found out what the hole was, patched everything up, and restored everything. I triple-checked my Tripwire logs to make sure that nothing was disturbed, grabbed the backup tapes and archive CDROMs I burn every 3 months, and spent several hours without it being online. I rigorously checked, rechecked, and patched, and then put it back up. They started banging away not 30 minutes later, and have been banging on every hole that comes through BUGTRAQ and everywhere else. Now I stop all work to patch a hole (rather than doing it after hours, even if I have to tell everyone to stop what they are doing - and yes, they still complain, but i don't listen). These things may seem like a lot of trouble but then again, so was the last time I patched an NT box - which broke lots of software, I might add. Merely un-checking a box won't make you secure to anything but that attack, BTW. If you run a web server, or use ICQ, or any other host of problems, not to mention DoS attacks which aren't patched in Windows, you are open. Kindly give me your IP address and I will demonstrate. Not to mention that Linux is a "one stop shop" for network services and NT is basically shipped without too many useful services IMHO. As to why not crack the NT box, well think about it: if I logged thousands of hours living and breathing Linux, and dozens with NT, I am going to get into the Linux box. Bottom line. If I am a car thief that likes Corvettes, I am not going to steal the Mustang unless there is nothing else around to steal. And as far as helping MS: I think its a lame argument, personally. But given that they don't go to any lengths to replicate a real-world environment (NT is the most superior OS ever in Marketing Land!). Why go through all the effort to try when everything that works in the real world won't work at all? Then they proudly display their logs, show the failed attacks, and say "Look, no one could get in!".
All my spam comes from Korea or Poland, or earthlink. I have never been spammed by a Mindspring account, unless you count my Dad, who sends me unsolicited emails all the time...
OK, time for me to play total finance newbie: Could someone explain in a reasonably simple fashion, exactly how a company can operate at a loss? What the mechaincs of "We're a great company, we keep losing money!" are? The company I work for (10 people) can't operate at a loss. If there is a higher payables than receiveables, we have to dip into the savings account. If we get paid late, then we can't cash our paychecks until we are paid by our clients. And its not like we are doing small business, but I think in the eyes of the business world we live hand to mouth..
The most interesting thing is the fact that for every "failure" of Linux, these guys can't point to a solid fact of NT success. OK, they can point to benchmarks, which no one in their right mind believes anyway. They point to the marketing success of NT, but they never really trot anyone out who can say anything truly positive.
I also agree with him that talking negatively about Linux draws the ire of the community, and rightly so. People who trounce it never seem to bother to back up what they say with facts, or never seem to try to want to listen to the communtiy about what the problem is. There was a talkback where some jag-off claims that his Linux box is more unstable than NT, with 30-minute uptimes. Yet he offers nothing more than "Red Hat 6 with GNOME". He doesn't list attempted fixes, hardware (other than "basic hardware") and so on. OK, your machine is crashing: what have you done to it? Why don't any of mine crash, ever? Why don't any of my friends crash, ever? Why does our largest client want to pay us loads of money to port some things to Linux, because their biggest concern is stability? Yet you say it crashes every 15 minutes. Sounds like astroturfing to me.
We have Linuxcare now, and smaller companies doing support. What we need now is to have someone start LinuxFacts.com (or some other such name) and do things like benchmarking, stability testing, and basically serve as an "one stop open-source marketing shop". Put out a positive message thats rooted in fact, not slick ads and copy designed to get people to click on banner ads. Show these fools that only facts matter, and that its time for these old old dogs to learn new tricks.
We too have been using Sybase. I wanted to go OSS but with half the company having just finished long-term on-site hitches at a Sybase shop, it was a no contest.
I have been most interested in if anyone else out there is using it. I am working on porting some MySQL stuff to work with Sybase, and vice versa. In short, would anyone care? Would I get 2 hits, or should I brace my server against the/. effect?
Its interesting to me that IBM, at the peak of the Microsoft Era, was considered corporate, stodgy, stuck-up, and backward. Now, they are moving very, very fast, reacting to the industry. They are innovating, even. Perhaps all the "old blood" cashed out and the new kids are running the show; any insights as to why IBM is suddenly seeming hip?
God's influence seems to be shrinking, but his PR campaign sucks. Look at his "main man" here on earth- a senile, drooling virgin in a funny hat. As an author, he hasn't produced anything in thousands of years (and his last hit was ghostwritten). No burning bushes anymore. He's just not.... hip.
Bacteria don't have a soul, neither do dogs, cats, or anything else. Just us - and that theory assumes, of course, that we aren't evolved from apes. The implication of this project, that lower forms of life can be "custom made" and that if you can do a bacteria then frogs and whales aren't too far away, is frightening for other than religious reasons. Given the tremendous amount of data about our own bodies that we just don't understand - specifics about thought and memory, why some people like Hee Haw - I think the idea of going and making "life" is a dangerous one if approached as a "wow this is neat" project. The introduction of things into the environment that weren't crafted by Nature frightens me. Suppose you make its antibodies so hardy, it starts killing everything? Any number of sci-fi holocaust stories spring to mind.
.. in "Practical Unix and Internet Security" (the Safe Book, IIRC) that use of the Mac is preferred, though he was referring not to OS X (since it didn't exist yet) but the regular MacOS. His theory is that the single-user system is tighter without a root account, and you can tighten things down without ever having to worry about someone getting root. Not sure I can totally buy it. Its in the index somewhere, I forgot the page reference and I'm not sure where my copy is right his second...
Its getting to the point where I need to operate in both "News For Nerds" AND "Cheesy Portal" mode. I was really excited by Slashboxes but now there are so many I want the regular page looks... well... odd if I include them all. I think once the massive M2 frenzy is settled you guys should really ponder some improvements to the Slashboxes. I for one think they are a *great* feature and bear as much of a think-through as anything else. Kudos, all.
What's wrong with everquest, eh? The short answer is, I think its lame. The longer answer is... Well, lets see. Graphics: I am somewhat unimpressed. Its Doom with high-res textures, herky-jerky animations, and no real level design. After playing Half Life, I can't stomach a FPS design without a similar attention to detail in graphics and level design. Gameplay: My roommate consistently parties, follows someone to a monster spawn point, hits his auto-attack button, and LEAVES to make dinner or watch TV. He comes back and he's gotten a level. That is the single stupidest gameplay I have ever heard of. Its like playing Mario Brothers and winning cause you think about it a lot. Combat is BORING. I remember the scene in Half Life when I first fought the soldiers; I was screaming, everyone was clustered around behind me, when I survived and managed to fight my way out, we were all sweating and out of breath. THATS what combat should be. Economy: Stupid. I remember at 15 thinking, "Wow, where do all these gold pieces come from?" and having that gamers cognitive dissonance that somehow, the AD&D writers were somewhat daft. Bugs: Its no UO but... for instance, my roommate played for MONTHS before his rogue could do things like make poison. Maybe I should file that under "incomplete" and not "buggy". Just-Plain-Stupid: My roommate (again) played his rogue faithfully so one day he could make poison. When it was made available, it turned out that you had to be a fscking POTTER and go through 20 steps to make frigging jars for poison. THATS JUST DUMB. Imagine the worlds most dangerous rogue sitting hunched over a potters wheel. Thats illogical and inconsistent. "I am the most feared assassin in all of Norrath. Can I interest you in a nice vase, or an ashtray? I am just learning." C'mon, think it through a little. Experience System: More convoluted that/. moderation. Also, dumb. You can't run with high level people? My roommate (are you tired of hearing about him yet) went to NY w/ his GF and the rest of my friends who play spent the weekend sequestered in their rooms playing. When he got back, they had levelled too much and he couldn't play with them and he still can't. If I can't play a game with my mates there is no fscking point (see remarks about StarCraft). I understand the rationale but the devil's in the details. Also, the entire friggin game is the most mundane "push the button get the food pellet" reward system. Thats the most annoying thing. Its just fight - xp - fight - xp - level - repeat. I have yet to see anyone bothered by faction standing, or any politics, or any interpersonal relationship or conflict. There is no discovery, its all available from a hint book. There is no story, you merely fight (adjective) snakes for a few days then (adjective) caimans then (adjective) skeletons or whatever. Anyone remember the old BBD door-game Mouser? Same thing, just better graphics.
They should IMHO upgrade the BattleNet servers. The prime reason everyone at my house stopped playing StarCraft was not that it got old, but BattleNet became unusable. Lag, downed servers, lag, lag, downed servers, problems that Blizzard didn't seem able to fix. Now that everyone is addicted to Everquest (ack, what an awful game) I am sure that its better but if I can't play with my mates then its not that fun for me...
Too bad we can't cross-post, though the other story is about movies and stuff.
I think that the moderation is crucial. First, its not done by some sort of "advisory board" or by the owners of/. but by the people. This means that sometimes it will break (people being somewhat imperfect). Its better than doing nothing, though.
The trolls will never go away. There are people who are small-minded and shallow and will post inane, stupid or worthless comments strictly to see people fight or to try to cause "chaos". These are the same people who put a bunch of fighting-fish into a tank just to watch them kill each other. "kaos rulz" and all that crap.
I say, give the worst offender a chance to write in an email where her or she tries to justify their position on trolling. Then let *that* get moderated. If it turns out that they have some deep, complex social reason for all this, well, hey. Let 'em back in. The other result - the community giving them the collective finger - is to lose posting priviledges forever. Maybe its just a random thought - but its certainly not intended as a troll.
You are right; both films are both excellent and everything that happens in them, even when so extreme, is in no way gratuitous. Saving Private Ryan shows something my grandfather and some of my fathers friends told me a hundred times: just what happens to a human body when impacted by fast-moving metal. It breaks, it bleeds, and it comes apart. Likewise with Schindler's List, though I have no personal experience with the Holocaust or its survivors (though I have read some accounts). Its there to entertain and at the same time, not cut any corners.
On the same token, though, you could take American Pie as an example of a well-done "sex comedy". I never thought it was gratuitous, that they were just showing things for the sake of getting some beav on screen to get more ticket sales. It was a funny movie, dammit! And in a certain light *realistic*. So many high-school movies have people just LEAPING into bed with no problem; high-school kids perform like porn stars. I liked the fact that everyone was far from perfect in terms of sexual prowess. Yet this movie was attacked. Sure, its not a cinematic masterpiece like SPR and SL but its a well-written, well executed movie. But it talks about sex and therefore is evil.
The last free act of a democracy is to vote in a dictatorship. Here we go, cast your votes!
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I as being sarcastic about anti-RedHat stuff; I am a big fan of Red Hat, truth be told.
..but on the page after the "Wow what a great book" stuff, it mentions (on my copy anyway) that all royalties are being donated to the Free Software Foundation "to further its important work".
But remember, "Red Hat is just releasing this to make a buck".
Were any of the Founding Fathers alive today, they would be told - in sneering, patronizing tones - that they don't understand the issues, and that freedom isn't as simple as things like "inalienable human rights" and other things. The FBI is nothing more than a 'Secret Police' with a day-job of tracking down bank robbers. Our rights as Americans, the ones that people died to preserve, mean nothing to the average citizen. They scream for more security, whether they realize that it gives up rights - and don't understand the other issues (encryption, for instance) enough to care. You're safe in a police state, so long as you don't think.
Moderate this down if you must, but I am pissed. I'm voting Libertarian from now on.
Lotus Notes is obviously an obscure, rarely used piece of software, so why would they test it at all? Really. Its not like the alert said "Dave's Text Editor doesn't work on NT".
I disagree that its a dirty trick. I think, instead, its an example of their continued negligence. They advertise that they have the widest software availabilty (unlike that hippie OS) yet they don't bother to test things. The fact is, if you make the OS, then everyone's software has to work. Thats part of the OSS movement that I never hear talked about - the API is right there, you can be sure if something is going to work, because you can see whats happening!
Wow; wonder how many of them can make a spear or filet a monkey. Or will it be more like one big live-action Doom, where you just wander around and find everything you need lying on the floor. Will the monkeys operate the cameras? This has to be the dumbest thing I have seen in some time. I'm putting my money on the morbidly obese housefrau from Des Moines, or the surfer.
Here's what I do:
1)Subscribe to BUGTRAQ
2)Actually read it
3)check the errata page - which is not obscure, its only about 2 levels deep off the "support" link on the home page, and broken up by distro version from time to time
4)Download the updates - all of them - and burn them onto a CD, so that after I install, I reboot, log in, pop in the CD, and run a script that patches everything.
Keep in mind that in the grand scale of Linux skill, I am strictly a lightweight - but I can tell you, looking at my logs, people bounce off my boxes all the time _because I patch my stuff up_ and because I follow the simplest security stuff around (tcpwrappers and all that). Its not friggin rocket science.
Making a secure machine is the job of the admin. Its not the job of a piece of software. After all, isn't a software problem the root? Humans drive software, and always know better than what a machine tells them.
sure there is always someone better but I don't think a month-old exploit counts as "better".
you can't make sysadmins, or people in general, do anything. Red Hat says "There is a hole in our product" via the industry-accepted channels (bugtraq, the web, etc) and then leaves it up to the individual to actually go and fix. This is different from a standard product recall (ie, "Levis issues a product recall for its 501 jeans. Your pants may explode under certain circumstances.) but the environment of computers is far different than, say, cars or clothes.
Your disclaimer should go without saying, IHMO. I have been thinking that way since i first got into Linux/Unix.
To all the people saying "just cope", are you reading the same page I was?
Any time, IMHO, something is exploited based on a known, corrected bug, then its the fault of the person driving, not the car (so to speak); if GM issues a recall, and you don't go get your car fixed and then the next day you get in a wreck and something bad happens as a result of the defect, ITS YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT (unless it happened on the way to the dealership, I guess) and not the fault of the car.
How would the page read, had the admin(s) kept it totally up to date and patched? And not used a non-open CGI?
Lets see a "crack this box" challenge run by Linux people, skilled admins.
Linux, like all things in the computer world, will eventually become obsolete or maybe just too much work to keep "up to date". Linus (er, Dr. Torvalds) even said in his "Open Sources" essay that (paraphrasing) someone else could come along and write something better which will take Linux's place. How long do you think before someone will have an offering that will obsolete (or at least prove a competitor to) Linux and the BSD's? It certainly won't be the offering of that company in Redmond..
I used to live in Richmond. We have a client who was very excited at getting a 56k dedicated dialup, apparently there isn't much to be had. Thank Ghod for Northern Virginia; it sucks in every way except for the fact you can get DSL or cable at the drop of a hat.
Maybe I am atypical. When someone hacked my box, I was lucky enough to be there and yank the power cord out of the router before they managed to do anything but add a user and start downloading a trojan-ed bash. I didn't go crying to the newsgroups, I looked at the syslog output and found out what the hole was, patched everything up, and restored everything. I triple-checked my Tripwire logs to make sure that nothing was disturbed, grabbed the backup tapes and archive CDROMs I burn every 3 months, and spent several hours without it being online. I rigorously checked, rechecked, and patched, and then put it back up. They started banging away not 30 minutes later, and have been banging on every hole that comes through BUGTRAQ and everywhere else. Now I stop all work to patch a hole (rather than doing it after hours, even if I have to tell everyone to stop what they are doing - and yes, they still complain, but i don't listen). These things may seem like a lot of trouble but then again, so was the last time I patched an NT box - which broke lots of software, I might add. Merely un-checking a box won't make you secure to anything but that attack, BTW. If you run a web server, or use ICQ, or any other host of problems, not to mention DoS attacks which aren't patched in Windows, you are open. Kindly give me your IP address and I will demonstrate. Not to mention that Linux is a "one stop shop" for network services and NT is basically shipped without too many useful services IMHO. As to why not crack the NT box, well think about it: if I logged thousands of hours living and breathing Linux, and dozens with NT, I am going to get into the Linux box. Bottom line. If I am a car thief that likes Corvettes, I am not going to steal the Mustang unless there is nothing else around to steal. And as far as helping MS: I think its a lame argument, personally. But given that they don't go to any lengths to replicate a real-world environment (NT is the most superior OS ever in Marketing Land!). Why go through all the effort to try when everything that works in the real world won't work at all? Then they proudly display their logs, show the failed attacks, and say "Look, no one could get in!".
All my spam comes from Korea or Poland, or earthlink. I have never been spammed by a Mindspring account, unless you count my Dad, who sends me unsolicited emails all the time...
OK, time for me to play total finance newbie: Could someone explain in a reasonably simple fashion, exactly how a company can operate at a loss? What the mechaincs of "We're a great company, we keep losing money!" are? The company I work for (10 people) can't operate at a loss. If there is a higher payables than receiveables, we have to dip into the savings account. If we get paid late, then we can't cash our paychecks until we are paid by our clients. And its not like we are doing small business, but I think in the eyes of the business world we live hand to mouth..
The most interesting thing is the fact that for every "failure" of Linux, these guys can't point to a solid fact of NT success. OK, they can point to benchmarks, which no one in their right mind believes anyway. They point to the marketing success of NT, but they never really trot anyone out who can say anything truly positive.
I also agree with him that talking negatively about Linux draws the ire of the community, and rightly so. People who trounce it never seem to bother to back up what they say with facts, or never seem to try to want to listen to the communtiy about what the problem is. There was a talkback where some jag-off claims that his Linux box is more unstable than NT, with 30-minute uptimes. Yet he offers nothing more than "Red Hat 6 with GNOME". He doesn't list attempted fixes, hardware (other than "basic hardware") and so on. OK, your machine is crashing: what have you done to it? Why don't any of mine crash, ever? Why don't any of my friends crash, ever? Why does our largest client want to pay us loads of money to port some things to Linux, because their biggest concern is stability? Yet you say it crashes every 15 minutes. Sounds like astroturfing to me.
We have Linuxcare now, and smaller companies doing support. What we need now is to have someone start LinuxFacts.com (or some other such name) and do things like benchmarking, stability testing, and basically serve as an "one stop open-source marketing shop". Put out a positive message thats rooted in fact, not slick ads and copy designed to get people to click on banner ads. Show these fools that only facts matter, and that its time for these old old dogs to learn new tricks.
We too have been using Sybase. I wanted to go OSS but with half the company having just finished long-term on-site hitches at a Sybase shop, it was a no contest.
/. effect?
I have been most interested in if anyone else out there is using it. I am working on porting some MySQL stuff to work with Sybase, and vice versa. In short, would anyone care? Would I get 2 hits, or should I brace my server against the
Its interesting to me that IBM, at the peak of the Microsoft Era, was considered corporate, stodgy, stuck-up, and backward. Now, they are moving very, very fast, reacting to the industry. They are innovating, even. Perhaps all the "old blood" cashed out and the new kids are running the show; any insights as to why IBM is suddenly seeming hip?
God's influence seems to be shrinking, but his PR campaign sucks. Look at his "main man" here on earth- a senile, drooling virgin in a funny hat. As an author, he hasn't produced anything in thousands of years (and his last hit was ghostwritten). No burning bushes anymore. He's just not.... hip.
Bacteria don't have a soul, neither do dogs, cats, or anything else. Just us - and that theory assumes, of course, that we aren't evolved from apes. The implication of this project, that lower forms of life can be "custom made" and that if you can do a bacteria then frogs and whales aren't too far away, is frightening for other than religious reasons. Given the tremendous amount of data about our own bodies that we just don't understand - specifics about thought and memory, why some people like Hee Haw - I think the idea of going and making "life" is a dangerous one if approached as a "wow this is neat" project. The introduction of things into the environment that weren't crafted by Nature frightens me. Suppose you make its antibodies so hardy, it starts killing everything? Any number of sci-fi holocaust stories spring to mind.
.. in "Practical Unix and Internet Security" (the Safe Book, IIRC) that use of the Mac is preferred, though he was referring not to OS X (since it didn't exist yet) but the regular MacOS. His theory is that the single-user system is tighter without a root account, and you can tighten things down without ever having to worry about someone getting root. Not sure I can totally buy it. Its in the index somewhere, I forgot the page reference and I'm not sure where my copy is right his second...
Its getting to the point where I need to operate in both "News For Nerds" AND "Cheesy Portal" mode. I was really excited by Slashboxes but now there are so many I want the regular page looks... well... odd if I include them all. I think once the massive M2 frenzy is settled you guys should really ponder some improvements to the Slashboxes. I for one think they are a *great* feature and bear as much of a think-through as anything else. Kudos, all.
What's wrong with everquest, eh? The short answer is, I think its lame. /. moderation. Also, dumb. You can't run with high level people? My roommate (are you tired of hearing about him yet) went to NY w/ his GF and the rest of my friends who play spent the weekend sequestered in their rooms playing. When he got back, they had levelled too much and he couldn't play with them and he still can't. If I can't play a game with my mates there is no fscking point (see remarks about StarCraft). I understand the rationale but the devil's in the details. Also, the entire friggin game is the most mundane "push the button get the food pellet" reward system. Thats the most annoying thing. Its just fight - xp - fight - xp - level - repeat. I have yet to see anyone bothered by faction standing, or any politics, or any interpersonal relationship or conflict. There is no discovery, its all available from a hint book. There is no story, you merely fight (adjective) snakes for a few days then (adjective) caimans then (adjective) skeletons or whatever. Anyone remember the old BBD door-game Mouser? Same thing, just better graphics.
The longer answer is... Well, lets see. Graphics: I am somewhat unimpressed. Its Doom with high-res textures, herky-jerky animations, and no real level design. After playing Half Life, I can't stomach a FPS design without a similar attention to detail in graphics and level design. Gameplay: My roommate consistently parties, follows someone to a monster spawn point, hits his auto-attack button, and LEAVES to make dinner or watch TV. He comes back and he's gotten a level. That is the single stupidest gameplay I have ever heard of. Its like playing Mario Brothers and winning cause you think about it a lot. Combat is BORING. I remember the scene in Half Life when I first fought the soldiers; I was screaming, everyone was clustered around behind me, when I survived and managed to fight my way out, we were all sweating and out of breath. THATS what combat should be. Economy: Stupid. I remember at 15 thinking, "Wow, where do all these gold pieces come from?" and having that gamers cognitive dissonance that somehow, the AD&D writers were somewhat daft. Bugs: Its no UO but... for instance, my roommate played for MONTHS before his rogue could do things like make poison. Maybe I should file that under "incomplete" and not "buggy". Just-Plain-Stupid: My roommate (again) played his rogue faithfully so one day he could make poison. When it was made available, it turned out that you had to be a fscking POTTER and go through 20 steps to make frigging jars for poison. THATS JUST DUMB. Imagine the worlds most dangerous rogue sitting hunched over a potters wheel. Thats illogical and inconsistent. "I am the most feared assassin in all of Norrath. Can I interest you in a nice vase, or an ashtray? I am just learning." C'mon, think it through a little. Experience System: More convoluted that
They should IMHO upgrade the BattleNet servers. The prime reason everyone at my house stopped playing StarCraft was not that it got old, but BattleNet became unusable. Lag, downed servers, lag, lag, downed servers, problems that Blizzard didn't seem able to fix. Now that everyone is addicted to Everquest (ack, what an awful game) I am sure that its better but if I can't play with my mates then its not that fun for me...
Too bad we can't cross-post, though the other story is about movies and stuff.
/. but by the people. This means that sometimes it will break (people being somewhat imperfect). Its better than doing nothing, though.
I think that the moderation is crucial. First, its not done by some sort of "advisory board" or by the owners of
The trolls will never go away. There are people who are small-minded and shallow and will post inane, stupid or worthless comments strictly to see people fight or to try to cause "chaos". These are the same people who put a bunch of fighting-fish into a tank just to watch them kill each other. "kaos rulz" and all that crap.
I say, give the worst offender a chance to write in an email where her or she tries to justify their position on trolling. Then let *that* get moderated. If it turns out that they have some deep, complex social reason for all this, well, hey. Let 'em back in. The other result - the community giving them the collective finger - is to lose posting priviledges forever. Maybe its just a random thought - but its certainly not intended as a troll.
You are right; both films are both excellent and everything that happens in them, even when so extreme, is in no way gratuitous. Saving Private Ryan shows something my grandfather and some of my fathers friends told me a hundred times: just what happens to a human body when impacted by fast-moving metal. It breaks, it bleeds, and it comes apart. Likewise with Schindler's List, though I have no personal experience with the Holocaust or its survivors (though I have read some accounts). Its there to entertain and at the same time, not cut any corners.
On the same token, though, you could take American Pie as an example of a well-done "sex comedy". I never thought it was gratuitous, that they were just showing things for the sake of getting some beav on screen to get more ticket sales. It was a funny movie, dammit! And in a certain light *realistic*. So many high-school movies have people just LEAPING into bed with no problem; high-school kids perform like porn stars. I liked the fact that everyone was far from perfect in terms of sexual prowess. Yet this movie was attacked. Sure, its not a cinematic masterpiece like SPR and SL but its a well-written, well executed movie. But it talks about sex and therefore is evil.
The last free act of a democracy is to vote in a dictatorship. Here we go, cast your votes!