This is the first time I've heard of people call Ventrilo seedy software.
Because at the time I was using a Mac.
The most retarded thing about the seedy Ventrillo is that it *can* work on Macs, they even have a Mac client, but only if the server is set up correctly-- and the default server settings are incompatible with Macs. It's pretty much the most retarded software for VOIP I've ever used.
Yes, it helps to have the equivalent of a VoIP party line going to coordinate things and chat.
No doubt; except that the software that they far and away used DIDN'T FUCKING WORK ON MY OS.
There are a couple of really useful add-ons that people often ask their teammates to use, and they can be a hassle, but I don't see why they themselves are such a deal-breaker.
I don't either, and yet many guilds would *require* them before you could enter the raid.
That's great for you, but since MS broke the law to kill them and eventually paid millions in the courts; we'll never know if what you refer to as Be's mistakes would have kept them form succeeding.
Microsoft's licensing would be completely irrelevant to Be's first complete failure, when they tried to sell the BeOS only on their custom hardware. It wasn't until after they failed at that that they even attempted to port BeOS to generic x86 (and PPC) hardware. They'd already failed at selling BeOS long before Microsoft was even slightly involved.
If you look into how organic food is grown, you'll soon realize that organic farms are no less "factory farms" than conventional ones. In addition, they use more land and more water for less yield. In addition, the organic fertilizers they use are just as damaging to the environment as conventional fertilizers.
Organic farms don't address *any* of the environmental concerns, they don't address *any* of the water-usage concerns, they don't address *any* of the animal rights concerns, they don't address *any* of the sustainability concerns, and they're significantly less efficient than conventional farming.
They get away with it, because they write cute blurbs on the labels, and because organic nutcases never bother to do the research to figure out what the organic label actually *means* in a practical sense. All they're doing is paying more for less-efficiently-grown foods, because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy.
I've never used OS/2, so I can't comment on it, but you're entirely right about Lotus Notes.
You're missing one factor, though: for some reason, Notes has hordes of die-hard defenders who love the product no matter what IBM does, and who get upset whenever IBM proposes any kind of under-the-hood improvements to it, because God forbid you have to go back and change a couple lines of code in your 20-year-old Notes application. Since those are the people who go to the conferences, those are the people IBM listens to.
(How do I know? Every time you post something to the tune of "Notes has a crappy UI", it's usually responded to by half a dozen Notes die-hards who instantly chime in with a series of increasingly bad justifications for having a crappy UI. Not just on Slashdot, but pretty much every tech board.)
Since Lotus Notes development is mired in the same sort of legacy crap you're talking about, these people would probably be better off switching to something like Access, Filemaker, or even Sharepoint for their applications. They could build a much better UI, but have an actual real DB backing it up, not that flat-file crap Notes uses. But since they love Notes so much, they'd never even give those products a fair shake. (Hell, at this point,.net programming is so damned easy you might as well just start with C#-- your DB scaffolding code is like maybe 15 mins of work.)
The Access frontend and VBA is one of the most powerful database tools I've ever used; if MS could link it to a backend that didn't suck (say...SQL Server)
Uh, you can already do that... or use any back-end that supports ODBC.
You're looking at it backwards. The RIAA is the agency they *did* deal with, it has no control over any territory other than the US. Canada has a different agency; Mexico, yet another; France, yet another; Brazil... etc etc.
If Zune allowed their streaming to work in Canada without applying to the Canadian version of the RIAA, they'd be in legal trouble. So they say "US only" on the package. Since they only dealt with the RIAA, you can only play the music in territory the RIAA is the enforcing agency for, i.e. the United States.
Oh, and BTW, some of us can't *afford* to live closer to our jobs. If you're the small minority in a tech job on the west coast, in a place with *sensible* real-estate prices, consider yourself extremely lucky. For the rest of it, it's a choice between renting your entire life, commuting an hour each way, or going bankrupt.
Well, I don't have any problem with some guilds doing 6:00 PM PST, the problem was *every guild on the server* (that I talked to, which I think is most of them) started the raid at the exact same time. Not a single one started at 7:00, or 5:00. It was ridiculous.
This isn't new. Have you see The Aviator? A major plot point of the movie was Hughes fight to prevent Pan Am from being declared "the official national airline", and thus get exclusive rights to fly the best international routes.
Not saying it's right, of course, just pointing out that this is nothing new. "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it; those who do know history are doomed to watch those who don't repeat it."
You can't blame Microsoft for BeOS. That company made so many strategic mistakes, I wouldn't be able to even list them all.
Microsoft's best tactic is doing very little and letting their competitors fail through their own mistakes, that's how they've gained most of their market share.
Considering there's so many vocal organic food fans who have zero rational justification for their beliefs, you can't be surprised that you'd have to explain yourself when you sound like them. Especially with the "stuff tasted better when I was a kid" crap you added in there.
I'm now convinced that you have a valid point. But your original posting sounded too much like the organic nutcases, and not enough like a person with independent thought.
And you've scientifically proven that this is due to organic farming as opposed to, say, the freshness of the fruits in question?
Also, when you say stuff like "like they did when I was a kid!" you're just marking yourself as nostalgia-obsessed, as far as I'm concerned. Nostalgia kills rational thought.
It's a licensing requirement from the MPAA, not a technical requirement.
I swear-- you read Slashdot, right? Are you literally not aware of MPAA licensing requirements for music? Do you just skim all the hundreds of Slashdot stories discussing this?
They don't have a license to distribute music outside of the US, so they add this disclaimer-- says nothing about whether it actually works or not. (My guess is that it still works, but I could be wrong.)
Oh, it's confusing, because they put two bulletpoints in a single footnote.
I think they mean that to buy or stream music over wifi, you need to have a subscription. Which makes sense, because you need a subscription to buy or stream music whether or not there's wifi nearby. The other part of the footnote only refers to the HD video stuff.
My point is that you can't just think "Chiropractor = fraud" just like you can't say "M.D. = fraud".
Obviously, anybody who's a fraud is liable to be prosecuted (persecuted?). But the problem is that many people think *all* Chiropractors are frauds, which is clearly wrong.
If they go back to attunement quests, PLEASE, PLEASE add a way in the UI to see whether you're attuned to a particular dungeon or not. That was my biggest gripe.
Back when the game was level 60, I quit playing for awhile, forgot everything I knew, then came back. I'd get invited to a group to do one of the dungeons that required attunement, but there was *no way* of telling whether you had the attunement without forming a raid and trying to enter the instance.
Terrible user experience; I literally had to leave at least two groups after we were all formed up and ready to go because my character wasn't attuned. I felt like an ass to the rest of the group, but what's the alternative? There was no way to look it fucking up!
The problem is that you reach a point in the game where it switches from:
"Just play a couple hours on weekends, or whenever you feel like"
To:
"You MUST be on and at the instance at exactly 5:45 PM PST you MUST remain on for 4 hours MINIMUM, then be free the next day at exactly 5:45 PM PST in case we don't finish the instance today. You MUST research all the bosses before entering the instance. You MUST be using one of the 2 acceptable specs for your class online, or you will have to respec, grinding gold to afford it. You MUST carry a minimum amount of healing potions, meaning you have to grind gold to buy them. You MUST install seedy chat software, and WOW add-ins, you can't participate with the default program."
There's no transition. The end-game raiding content is a complete 360 from the rest of the game, and it's an extremely jarring change that people don't expect.
Up until MAX_LEVEL, you're in a world where almost everything can be done on your own schedule, in your own way. (By yourself, if you like, and with whatever character spec you want.) You have no reason to expect that this would change when you hit MAX_LEVEL, unless you've experienced it in other games.
So you end up with games in the first category either getting slowly sucked into the second category bit-by-bit, or simply giving up and leaving the game.
Now the smartest thing WOW ever did was add end-game content *other* than raids, for example, battlegrounds and arena. The dumbest thing WOW ever did was then modify battlegrounds and arena so that only hard-core players could be successful at them, making them just as useless as raiding to the casual player.
WOW had, for awhile, this crazy thing with the arena/battlegrounds where it would alternate between being for casual and hardcore players. They'd do a patch which made it so only hardcore players could get the rewards for those parts of the game (i.e. make it so buy arena armor required *maintaining* a minimum rating), then change it back around so that casual players could gradually earn arena armor by building up points over time, then change it back around again so that the arena points expired after time, etc etc.
Considering that, at this time, all the raids in the game were freakin' huge (20 players minimum), and were only run by casual-unfriendly guilds who wouldn't let you raid if you weren't 1337 enough, the arena/battlegrounds system was the *only* way for casual players to advance beyond a certain point.
When Blizzard made those hardcore-only as well, I finally just gave up and quit. Although given their flip-flopping, I'm sure it's been changed to be casual friendly yet again.
* The funny thing about the end-game raids being controlled by hardcore guilds is that every single guild always ran the raid at 6:00 PST sharp. I actually got invited to a couple runs I couldn't do, because you had to show up 15 minutes before 6:00... I'm barely starting dinner by then.
Every. Single. Guild. I talked to: 6:00. "Can we start at 7:00, I'm not ready by 6:00?" "What are you, an alien mutant from Venus!!"
I have a hunch that only east-coast players and west-coast jobless losers raid.
Oh, come on, the Wii has nothing to do with popularizing casual games. If anything, I'd credit Yahoo Games, MSN Gaming Zone, and PopCap. Those are the companies that really embraced the casual market online.
If you want to credit the Wii for popularizing motion sensing controllers, sure that's fine. But casual games were on consoles long before the Wii came around-- to give a couple of obvious examples, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Tetris, and Dr. Mario were all on the original NES. Even the Xbox 360 HD (the "most hardcore" system) came packed with Hexic HD, an excellent example of an original casual game.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the first time I've heard of people call Ventrilo seedy software.
Because at the time I was using a Mac.
The most retarded thing about the seedy Ventrillo is that it *can* work on Macs, they even have a Mac client, but only if the server is set up correctly-- and the default server settings are incompatible with Macs. It's pretty much the most retarded software for VOIP I've ever used.
Yes, it helps to have the equivalent of a VoIP party line going to coordinate things and chat.
No doubt; except that the software that they far and away used DIDN'T FUCKING WORK ON MY OS.
There are a couple of really useful add-ons that people often ask their teammates to use, and they can be a hassle, but I don't see why they themselves are such a deal-breaker.
I don't either, and yet many guilds would *require* them before you could enter the raid.
That's great for you, but since MS broke the law to kill them and eventually paid millions in the courts; we'll never know if what you refer to as Be's mistakes would have kept them form succeeding.
Microsoft's licensing would be completely irrelevant to Be's first complete failure, when they tried to sell the BeOS only on their custom hardware. It wasn't until after they failed at that that they even attempted to port BeOS to generic x86 (and PPC) hardware. They'd already failed at selling BeOS long before Microsoft was even slightly involved.
If you look into how organic food is grown, you'll soon realize that organic farms are no less "factory farms" than conventional ones. In addition, they use more land and more water for less yield. In addition, the organic fertilizers they use are just as damaging to the environment as conventional fertilizers.
Organic farms don't address *any* of the environmental concerns, they don't address *any* of the water-usage concerns, they don't address *any* of the animal rights concerns, they don't address *any* of the sustainability concerns, and they're significantly less efficient than conventional farming.
They get away with it, because they write cute blurbs on the labels, and because organic nutcases never bother to do the research to figure out what the organic label actually *means* in a practical sense. All they're doing is paying more for less-efficiently-grown foods, because it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy.
I've never used OS/2, so I can't comment on it, but you're entirely right about Lotus Notes.
You're missing one factor, though: for some reason, Notes has hordes of die-hard defenders who love the product no matter what IBM does, and who get upset whenever IBM proposes any kind of under-the-hood improvements to it, because God forbid you have to go back and change a couple lines of code in your 20-year-old Notes application. Since those are the people who go to the conferences, those are the people IBM listens to.
(How do I know? Every time you post something to the tune of "Notes has a crappy UI", it's usually responded to by half a dozen Notes die-hards who instantly chime in with a series of increasingly bad justifications for having a crappy UI. Not just on Slashdot, but pretty much every tech board.)
Since Lotus Notes development is mired in the same sort of legacy crap you're talking about, these people would probably be better off switching to something like Access, Filemaker, or even Sharepoint for their applications. They could build a much better UI, but have an actual real DB backing it up, not that flat-file crap Notes uses. But since they love Notes so much, they'd never even give those products a fair shake. (Hell, at this point, .net programming is so damned easy you might as well just start with C#-- your DB scaffolding code is like maybe 15 mins of work.)
The Access frontend and VBA is one of the most powerful database tools I've ever used; if MS could link it to a backend that didn't suck (say...SQL Server)
Uh, you can already do that... or use any back-end that supports ODBC.
Or are you being sarcastic and I'm whooshing?
Also, carnies have small hands and smell like cabbage.
You're looking at it backwards. The RIAA is the agency they *did* deal with, it has no control over any territory other than the US. Canada has a different agency; Mexico, yet another; France, yet another; Brazil... etc etc.
If Zune allowed their streaming to work in Canada without applying to the Canadian version of the RIAA, they'd be in legal trouble. So they say "US only" on the package. Since they only dealt with the RIAA, you can only play the music in territory the RIAA is the enforcing agency for, i.e. the United States.
Oh, and BTW, some of us can't *afford* to live closer to our jobs. If you're the small minority in a tech job on the west coast, in a place with *sensible* real-estate prices, consider yourself extremely lucky. For the rest of it, it's a choice between renting your entire life, commuting an hour each way, or going bankrupt.
Well, I don't have any problem with some guilds doing 6:00 PM PST, the problem was *every guild on the server* (that I talked to, which I think is most of them) started the raid at the exact same time. Not a single one started at 7:00, or 5:00. It was ridiculous.
This isn't new. Have you see The Aviator? A major plot point of the movie was Hughes fight to prevent Pan Am from being declared "the official national airline", and thus get exclusive rights to fly the best international routes.
Not saying it's right, of course, just pointing out that this is nothing new. "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it; those who do know history are doomed to watch those who don't repeat it."
You can't blame Microsoft for BeOS. That company made so many strategic mistakes, I wouldn't be able to even list them all.
Microsoft's best tactic is doing very little and letting their competitors fail through their own mistakes, that's how they've gained most of their market share.
It's too bad IBM only got a clue about usability when it was too late.
I think users of Lotus Notes would claim that IBM *still* doesn't have a clue about usability. (Given, it's improving each version.)
Hedley Lamarr: Qualifications?
Applicant: Rape, murder, arson, and rape.
Hedley Lamarr: You said rape twice.
Applicant: I like rape.
Of course, whenever a study makes a finding opposite to your beliefs, it must have been funded by (pinky in mouth) EVIIIL corporations.
On the other hand, when studies affirm your beliefs, they were obviously funded by Jesus Christ himself, and are holy, uncorrupted, beings.
Considering there's so many vocal organic food fans who have zero rational justification for their beliefs, you can't be surprised that you'd have to explain yourself when you sound like them. Especially with the "stuff tasted better when I was a kid" crap you added in there.
I'm now convinced that you have a valid point. But your original posting sounded too much like the organic nutcases, and not enough like a person with independent thought.
Anyway, sorry.
Is that monologue from Terminator?
Great joke, but it's nagging at me, I swear I know what it's from but I can't place it.
And you've scientifically proven that this is due to organic farming as opposed to, say, the freshness of the fruits in question?
Also, when you say stuff like "like they did when I was a kid!" you're just marking yourself as nostalgia-obsessed, as far as I'm concerned. Nostalgia kills rational thought.
Nobody lies DOWN. People lie UP.
It's a licensing requirement from the MPAA, not a technical requirement.
I swear-- you read Slashdot, right? Are you literally not aware of MPAA licensing requirements for music? Do you just skim all the hundreds of Slashdot stories discussing this?
They don't have a license to distribute music outside of the US, so they add this disclaimer-- says nothing about whether it actually works or not. (My guess is that it still works, but I could be wrong.)
Oh, it's confusing, because they put two bulletpoints in a single footnote.
I think they mean that to buy or stream music over wifi, you need to have a subscription. Which makes sense, because you need a subscription to buy or stream music whether or not there's wifi nearby. The other part of the footnote only refers to the HD video stuff.
My point is that you can't just think "Chiropractor = fraud" just like you can't say "M.D. = fraud".
Obviously, anybody who's a fraud is liable to be prosecuted (persecuted?). But the problem is that many people think *all* Chiropractors are frauds, which is clearly wrong.
If they go back to attunement quests, PLEASE, PLEASE add a way in the UI to see whether you're attuned to a particular dungeon or not. That was my biggest gripe.
Back when the game was level 60, I quit playing for awhile, forgot everything I knew, then came back. I'd get invited to a group to do one of the dungeons that required attunement, but there was *no way* of telling whether you had the attunement without forming a raid and trying to enter the instance.
Terrible user experience; I literally had to leave at least two groups after we were all formed up and ready to go because my character wasn't attuned. I felt like an ass to the rest of the group, but what's the alternative? There was no way to look it fucking up!
The problem is that you reach a point in the game where it switches from:
"Just play a couple hours on weekends, or whenever you feel like"
To:
"You MUST be on and at the instance at exactly 5:45 PM PST you MUST remain on for 4 hours MINIMUM, then be free the next day at exactly 5:45 PM PST in case we don't finish the instance today. You MUST research all the bosses before entering the instance. You MUST be using one of the 2 acceptable specs for your class online, or you will have to respec, grinding gold to afford it. You MUST carry a minimum amount of healing potions, meaning you have to grind gold to buy them. You MUST install seedy chat software, and WOW add-ins, you can't participate with the default program."
There's no transition. The end-game raiding content is a complete 360 from the rest of the game, and it's an extremely jarring change that people don't expect.
Up until MAX_LEVEL, you're in a world where almost everything can be done on your own schedule, in your own way. (By yourself, if you like, and with whatever character spec you want.) You have no reason to expect that this would change when you hit MAX_LEVEL, unless you've experienced it in other games.
So you end up with games in the first category either getting slowly sucked into the second category bit-by-bit, or simply giving up and leaving the game.
Now the smartest thing WOW ever did was add end-game content *other* than raids, for example, battlegrounds and arena. The dumbest thing WOW ever did was then modify battlegrounds and arena so that only hard-core players could be successful at them, making them just as useless as raiding to the casual player.
Ditto.
WOW had, for awhile, this crazy thing with the arena/battlegrounds where it would alternate between being for casual and hardcore players. They'd do a patch which made it so only hardcore players could get the rewards for those parts of the game (i.e. make it so buy arena armor required *maintaining* a minimum rating), then change it back around so that casual players could gradually earn arena armor by building up points over time, then change it back around again so that the arena points expired after time, etc etc.
Considering that, at this time, all the raids in the game were freakin' huge (20 players minimum), and were only run by casual-unfriendly guilds who wouldn't let you raid if you weren't 1337 enough, the arena/battlegrounds system was the *only* way for casual players to advance beyond a certain point.
When Blizzard made those hardcore-only as well, I finally just gave up and quit. Although given their flip-flopping, I'm sure it's been changed to be casual friendly yet again.
* The funny thing about the end-game raids being controlled by hardcore guilds is that every single guild always ran the raid at 6:00 PST sharp. I actually got invited to a couple runs I couldn't do, because you had to show up 15 minutes before 6:00... I'm barely starting dinner by then.
Every. Single. Guild. I talked to: 6:00. "Can we start at 7:00, I'm not ready by 6:00?" "What are you, an alien mutant from Venus!!"
I have a hunch that only east-coast players and west-coast jobless losers raid.
Oh, come on, the Wii has nothing to do with popularizing casual games. If anything, I'd credit Yahoo Games, MSN Gaming Zone, and PopCap. Those are the companies that really embraced the casual market online.
If you want to credit the Wii for popularizing motion sensing controllers, sure that's fine. But casual games were on consoles long before the Wii came around-- to give a couple of obvious examples, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Tetris, and Dr. Mario were all on the original NES. Even the Xbox 360 HD (the "most hardcore" system) came packed with Hexic HD, an excellent example of an original casual game.