bigthboy

While I see your point on the "What kind of serial killer are you." Things like a Bush countdown clock is a way of expressing your discontent with the current president/administration. And in the scope of things I'm not limiting it to just these sorts of things. I'm talking about general ways of putting expressive ideas and symbols on your page.

I'm not going to argue that in many senses cheats ruin the game for the greater good... I'm saying there's a better way to handle it than suing your customers. Simple bans would work.

My post also is looking at a correlating problem in terms of "non-official" servers if you will. WoWGlider while in itself ruined the game experience when you were a player vs a player who used it. However, its ultimately ridiculous that someone who through their own might and knowledge can write a program that doesn't directly modify the actual content of the game, rather just controls outside variables to get it to behave differently than expected at a user's consent, and Blizzard can claim copyright and sue for millions.

The correct way to handle it would be removing players who are found to be using the product from the game and/or finding a way to make your program resistant to such outside influences.

Theoretically, the company shouldn't even be liable for "damages" since they didn't trick players into doing it, they didn't force them to do so, players went on their own and did it, knowing the consequences. The program itself had no direct effect on the protected files themselves, only indirect.

Haha, that's pretty funny and creative. As long as nobody died, I think that guy should get a "get out of jail free card"!

Coming from the background I have, I've seen the hammer of Blizzard before. Working on some of the projects I've had I've came to have a deep running disrespect and disgust of Blizzard and its owner Vivendi.

Blizzard has used its hammer numerous times on many people. Some small, some big... specifically calling to mind Blizzard vs. BNETD. What's unfortunate is that Blizzard is actually winning these arguments and its leaving us with precedence that EULA > The US Constitutions.... If anyone would take the time to read the EULA for World of Warcraft you'll find that some of the claims in it are completely outragous. More or less, if you do something that Blizzard doesn't like, you're liable to have to pay Blizzard for it.

I'm the kind of person who likes to have fun and use my imagination when I play games. I'll agree that I think it can ruin the game experience when players exploit to benefit themselves, but suing them for it just isn't right. It is the fact that not only did I risk getting my account banned but doing things like WoWGlider and writing programs that gave you advantage could also risk major lawsuits that I left WoW in the first place with the ambition of designing my own game where I could have fun with the game world and not have to worry about getting sued. I'm proud to say I made it decently far (though never got close to completion).

Personally, I view Blizzard as more ambitious than the RIAA at pursuing copyright infringements, and most of the infrignements Blizzard pursues aren't infringements at all. A lot of what Blizzard goes after are competitors who make money off Blizzard's product while not reproducing or redistributing their product. I just can't coprehend how Blizzard ever has justification to claim copyrights when a person or team, using their own knowledge and skills, writes their own programs from the ground up to alter the game's performance while not directly modifying any part of the game. In the terms of cheating, its justifiable to ban users breaking the policy, in terms of "3rd party servers" its justification to fix your own holes and make it harder to do.

At this rate, Blizzard's next EULA will say you can't install or play any other video game on the machine that WoW is installed or you'll have to pay three months subscription on the spot.

I am suddenly hit with this image of some mechanic who has a smoking addiction and just got done fixing a car which had a leaking gas tank come in, sit down, light up, and get on a Mac Pro which reaks for some unknown reason... =O

With me, I'm more of a business person than a coding person (though I do code)... So when I'm not explicitly working on the various aspects of my venture I am usually reading blogs and various business publications. I do read books every now and then, more often I read reference manuals =P.

Somehow this doesn't make me feel any less like Apple is a controlling monopolistic beast. Their release about it seems somewhat condescending.

The point in this article about Expression vs. Sharing is a key point that I've always thought to be true. Facebook, in my opinion, works to shut out people's expressions. In a way, Facebook, and their management, have a conformist position.

Social Networking, in my opinion anyways, is supposed to be about..ehhh...socializing. That should include me being able to be exposed to new ideas, new people, new opinions, and likewise being able to express my ideas and my opinions. I think one of the big problems that we've seen with the new Facebook, and resulting decline in Widgets, is they took away a large portion of what allowed people to be different on Facebook. I will admit I use Facebook for only 2 purposes... I use it to play Mobwars (a random and pointless game) and to chat with my friends (not via messages but that IM program in that handy little bar at the bottom of the page). I don't ever visit anyone's profiles... I've had a hell of a time trying to find groups and such that are interesting to join, as with pages. I also am blessed to be able to see everything my friends are doing... hello Stalkerbook.

Facebook it seems, is becoming a mere screw around (time sink) and basic communications system. Even the communication aspect I don't think will last as more people get SmartPhones and are able to use features that are becoming increasingly cheap to send text messages. We're left then with a time sink... At least at Myspace we can be expressive...and find new music, new groups...

- Code exactly what your client wants, not what you think the world wants. -

I had to point this out. Having been a leader on a good amount of projects that involved programming, I have completely lost count of the number of times someone didn't do their job and coded something completely different because they thought they were superman and could save the world by coding something else or coding it differently than what we thought. It turns out when their submission goes to be implemented, it doesn't work at all with the rest of the system.

I could care less if they closed as long as I could still put music on my iPod.

I don't think I'm necessarily an example, but in high school I was generally a A- student who got As because of either inflation or I just sucked up to the teachers to give me an A. =P In college I'm more of a B student but I also haven't changed any habbits and can happily say I am able to spend an abundance of time working on my start-up and driving it forward. It helps, however, that most of my professors are leanient on allowing me to miss classes for various business reasons without reprocussions.

I can say that I hope the stat about the B student tending to have the highest net worth is accurate. =)

Interesting concept... and valid points given as to why... but how is another question.

I agree with the post that not only is VC funding hard when you're working with a web-oriented project (I've tried), but in many cases its unreasonable. The relatively low operations cost has lead to making it a more viable option to make a Web 2.0 company and still keep your head without VC funding.

More appropriate, which the article failed to mention, would be Angel funding.

I've noticed this in not only my current project but previous projects that I've worked on. When we're looking for someone to help do some specific programming tasks we tend to have a problem with people not really being polite in their applications. They treat it as though they did it as more of an afterthought. I don't seem to see this problem in artistic positions...

I liked the article and found it extremely interesting how easy it was for him to circumvent the lines and policies of these places and get service that could in many ways be considered "above the rest."

However, in the mind of an entrepreneur I have to say that it seems as generally a waste of money to do such things, at least on a regular basis. Even if you had the money to do it, it would be extremely unwise. This would be the kind of thing you do and the kind of restaraunts you should eat at when it IS a special occassion... not because you're hungry.

Under most circumstances I would not and have not hired any programmer who could not provide some sort of demonstration program with a clean source and stable compile (depending on the language).

I think its a very good concept and, from my personal research with my own start-up, an industry with a lot of potential for growth. The question is, what is it that will seperate you out specifically from the rest of these CMS and similar systems? I'm not just talking about Blackboard or other enterprise only systems, there are a growing amount of these free/open-source systems. Also, how do you expect to reach your audience. The internet is big and even advertising about it on the side of Facebook or some other place isn't going to get that many people. (Most of the time students aren't going to opt to go out of there way to setup something like this.)

I like the concept of it but the layout of the results page is...well... not so good. I, like others, was impressed by the results I got for my search, but it was hard to tell what I was looking at for a minute. I didn't instantly know that what I was looking at was in a certain category and so on and so forth. It looked more like a bunch of random text about X topic thrown up on the page in an unstructured manner with hyperlinks to who knows where. I think with a little bit of work on structuring the results that it will be a pretty decent system. Not that I see it rocking the foundation of Google anytime soon, but that doesn't mean Microsoft ;-) they are only 6% after all.