This is not a hack, this is incompetence from the guys who sold that in the first place.

Are all Time Warner employees marketers or something?

At the same time, correct spelling becomes a distant notion for teens, and "IRC speak" prevalent.

And this is not unique to the US.

Dumb start, but...+1.

However, my concern is over Diablo 3, not WoW, which I don't (want to, for that matter) play.

I am a huge fan of d2x. I've been playing it for ages. But I found out, especially in the latest patches, that unless you had top notch equipment, which is very hard (TOO HARD) to come across in a legit way, you just couldn't beat hell difficulty in single player.

I HATE battle.net. I hated it because of cheaters (but the "diabolic" extension helped me kick them out, fortunately), I hated it because of Blizzard's stance over bnetd, but I hated it even more with the latest patches for the following reasons:

* some epic monsters only showed up online,
* some epic items only could be spawned online as well.

WHY?? Why did Blizzard do that (on all three hatreds)? Has Blizzard learned? That is, will D3 be as interesting "offline" (LANs included) as D1 and D2X (before patch 1.09) were?

I _have_ RTFS. Which is exactly why I asked the question in the first place. RTFQ.

I suppose that if Mr Ralsky has pleaded guilty, he had a good reason... To my non-lawyer eyes, it is because he would have faced a much bigger sanction if he were proved guilty in the end.

Does my reasoning stand, or not at all? In a more general way, are there any quantitative differences in penalties depending upon yours pleading (non) guilty?

Then you may want to "try out" this book:

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/07/1458232

"Incidentally", it was written by... Stéphane Faroult. I've read it a few times, and used its lessons (there are no other words for it, really) to prove by figures that the redesign of the data model that I suggested could improve the performance by a factor of 10.

Before reading that book, I knew that the data model was broke, but couldn't explain why. This book told me why. We use Oracle, but the lessons taught in this book apply to ANY (R)DBMS.

Vista's highly annoying level of UAC was actually designed in an annoying manner on purpose, to try to get users to complain to the developers.

However, "Publisher: Microsoft Corporation" means... yeah, it backfired. :P

I wouldn't see it that way. My understanding is that MS has acknowledged the fact that (100-epsilon)% of computers out there in the wild run as admin and tried to limit this behaviour. And also that most of them don't even have a password to begin with. Meh.

But they did it the wrong way, imho. Instead of forcing a regular, non priviledged user to be created and only ask for admin privileges for some operations (as Ubuntu does), they left things as is and flooded Joe User with warnings - so many warnings that most users either answer yes every time or, if they are skilled enough, shun them.

No wonder that Vista turns out to be as little secure as its predecessors were. Ubuntu should have taught them a lesson, but... No. Go figure. And that's without even mentioning the fact that 99+% of viruses/trojans are ineffective if you run as a normal user. This is all the more a pity that Windows (from NT on) _does_ have very fine-grained security mechanisms.

> Most people don't care what OS they have

That's the point, really.

Too many online services require that you have Windows (be it for Internet Explorer alone and its much maligned ActiveX) in order to operate. As long as this kind of mentality doesn't change among software _editors_, there's little chance that Linux on the desktop will be a viable option.

I have faith, however, that a mentality shift will eventually happen. And that's not about licenses only (I praise Nokia for LGPL'ing Qt, they made the Right Thing(tm)), it's also about programming habits: the vast majority of computers with Windows are run with admin privileges 100% of the time, and many (Windows) application programmers take this fact for granted (a vast majority of games won't run as a regular user!). This HAS to change. I believe this WILL change. Soon. For some definiton of "soon", of course.

Your reaction just proves my point. Read the article. I mean it.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/20/178259

Go read it. Seriously. The author has many good point, and this panel only highlights the points he makes.

The /. comments on this article are spot on, in the sense that most of them are knee-jerk reactions predicted all along the article. Sad.

Uhm.

This is the only language which allows you to shoot yourself in the foot very, very easily.

No, C is not restrictive. It requires a LOT of discipline, though.