Rant du jour...
Why is it that there's always someone who thinks that their right to 'free speech' is being inpinged upon when a moderator removes their post? Or that they have the right to bitch/rant about how we are biased against them/on a power trip/just plain incompetent when they get a post deleted?
Case in point: If you post something which is all article with no reference or an improper reference (if. chapter title only, simply saying 'Associated Press'), we will remove it. This is not because we are trying to block the free press from getting around the world; nor is it some bizarre game we play among ourselves. It's because of a little thing called plagerism, which anyone who's been to school should know about. You can even get sued for it in some cases. This is not just for our benefit; we're trying to protect you too. So please, don't come up with a five-post diatribe, including at one point some legalistic mumbo-jumbo, which is basically saying (a)you deleted me and I don't like it! Censorship!, and (b)some bizarre nonsense about how, if it's not being used for commercial profit, then it should stay. (Especially when the mod you're arguing all this to is a lawyer/law student, ie. Nick)
Furthermore, it says right there in the Rules of Conduct that, if you post complaints about host actions publically, they will be removed. It's not our fault if you can't read. (There's always someone though, who will say "I think you're just deleting my posts because I'm critisising what you do..." and then wonders why he gets an inordinate amount of ironic/sardonic answers)
Gah. It's just been one of those days.
In other news:
I eventually got my ice-cream last night, about an hour after I rang. This was pretty good, actually, since I know we live somewhat off the beaten track and any delivery guy would have had to make a special trip out to us. Plus it was one of the two usual guys who delivers to us, so we had a bit of a chat before he went off to his next job.
Nick is not having a good time with his computer games, however. Being the impulse purchaser he is, back when the loan installment came in at the end of April, he went out and bought himself a good few games, including Postal 2, Devastation and a few others I can't remember right now. A couple of months earlier he also bought Black and White.
Unfortunately, B&W has apparently decided that it doesn't like XP. No matter what he or the guy from EA Games Tech Support thought of to do, it just won't work and never has (apart from a two-week stint right at the beginning, when it crashed every half-hour). And because it's a good couple of months old, he can't take it back (of course, there's no receipt any more, either...) So now he's waiting in the hope that an XP patch will be brought out.
Devestation, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish. It requires 1.7 Gb of hard drive space (WTF? What is it installing - Bolivia?), and even then, when he tried to play it, it told him there was an error and an iff.config file missing. Now, Nick is a hardware techie, and knows some but not much about games. For some reason I've ended up with that area of expertise. So when that error came up my alarm bells started clanging. So we checked their tech support section in the manual.
It was a whole three lines long. And was almost exclusively "It's not our fault; check your systems." Add to that the fact that I'd never heard of the company putting this game out, and I was about ready for a ritual cleansing of the hard drive. But we had to check their web site (they had given the address, almost as a grudging afterthought) to see if anything was there.
Pretty site. No support section though. Just the words "Coming soon" when you clicked on the link. Checking the forum, however, revealed some interesting things. Such as the fact that just about everybody had a problem with this damn game. Just about half the complaints were about people who couldn't even get the game to play with the same error message we were getting, and the company rep was having the audacity to tell people to delete their Documents folders and move things about "because the game can't read them if they're in a certain place". Well, maybe you should have coded it better, dumbkopf. Eventually, we heard mention of a patch, aparently on the support section of the site (ha!) - turns out there was a page for this - it's just that no-one had bothered to add it to the menu. Half the mirror sights for this download of 67 Meg (...you know, if you have to release a patch that big, then I hope it at least runs through their heads that they might have released the game before it was ready...) wanted payment for the download; the other half were quoting a waiting time to dowload of 2+ hours.
Eventually Nick gave up and took it back to the shop, where he learned that all the guys there had had problems with it as well. There is a valuable lesson here, children...
Case in point: If you post something which is all article with no reference or an improper reference (if. chapter title only, simply saying 'Associated Press'), we will remove it. This is not because we are trying to block the free press from getting around the world; nor is it some bizarre game we play among ourselves. It's because of a little thing called plagerism, which anyone who's been to school should know about. You can even get sued for it in some cases. This is not just for our benefit; we're trying to protect you too. So please, don't come up with a five-post diatribe, including at one point some legalistic mumbo-jumbo, which is basically saying (a)you deleted me and I don't like it! Censorship!, and (b)some bizarre nonsense about how, if it's not being used for commercial profit, then it should stay. (Especially when the mod you're arguing all this to is a lawyer/law student, ie. Nick)
Furthermore, it says right there in the Rules of Conduct that, if you post complaints about host actions publically, they will be removed. It's not our fault if you can't read. (There's always someone though, who will say "I think you're just deleting my posts because I'm critisising what you do..." and then wonders why he gets an inordinate amount of ironic/sardonic answers)
Gah. It's just been one of those days.
In other news:
I eventually got my ice-cream last night, about an hour after I rang. This was pretty good, actually, since I know we live somewhat off the beaten track and any delivery guy would have had to make a special trip out to us. Plus it was one of the two usual guys who delivers to us, so we had a bit of a chat before he went off to his next job.
Nick is not having a good time with his computer games, however. Being the impulse purchaser he is, back when the loan installment came in at the end of April, he went out and bought himself a good few games, including Postal 2, Devastation and a few others I can't remember right now. A couple of months earlier he also bought Black and White.
Unfortunately, B&W has apparently decided that it doesn't like XP. No matter what he or the guy from EA Games Tech Support thought of to do, it just won't work and never has (apart from a two-week stint right at the beginning, when it crashed every half-hour). And because it's a good couple of months old, he can't take it back (of course, there's no receipt any more, either...) So now he's waiting in the hope that an XP patch will be brought out.
Devestation, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish. It requires 1.7 Gb of hard drive space (WTF? What is it installing - Bolivia?), and even then, when he tried to play it, it told him there was an error and an iff.config file missing. Now, Nick is a hardware techie, and knows some but not much about games. For some reason I've ended up with that area of expertise. So when that error came up my alarm bells started clanging. So we checked their tech support section in the manual.
It was a whole three lines long. And was almost exclusively "It's not our fault; check your systems." Add to that the fact that I'd never heard of the company putting this game out, and I was about ready for a ritual cleansing of the hard drive. But we had to check their web site (they had given the address, almost as a grudging afterthought) to see if anything was there.
Pretty site. No support section though. Just the words "Coming soon" when you clicked on the link. Checking the forum, however, revealed some interesting things. Such as the fact that just about everybody had a problem with this damn game. Just about half the complaints were about people who couldn't even get the game to play with the same error message we were getting, and the company rep was having the audacity to tell people to delete their Documents folders and move things about "because the game can't read them if they're in a certain place". Well, maybe you should have coded it better, dumbkopf. Eventually, we heard mention of a patch, aparently on the support section of the site (ha!) - turns out there was a page for this - it's just that no-one had bothered to add it to the menu. Half the mirror sights for this download of 67 Meg (...you know, if you have to release a patch that big, then I hope it at least runs through their heads that they might have released the game before it was ready...) wanted payment for the download; the other half were quoting a waiting time to dowload of 2+ hours.
Eventually Nick gave up and took it back to the shop, where he learned that all the guys there had had problems with it as well. There is a valuable lesson here, children...