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Ubisoft strikes again!
05/08/2020, 17:15:53

    The Elf writes:

    I was happily playing along in MM10, when I ran into trouble. One of the main quest's requirements was to see a fellow about transportation to an area called The Elemental Forge, absolutely necessary to progress any further in the game. For some reason, when I talked to him, the option to ride with him never arose. (I'd played through the game at least four, if not six, times before, back in 2014-2016.) I rebooted, and tried again. No go. So I went to the Steam discussion section for the game, and looked up the question in their archives. Yes, there were several people who'd had the same difficulty. The answer was simple(?): you must be in something called Ubisoft Online, not just online.

    I think at this point I'll have a talk with the Steam Service people. Unless Ubisoft is looking to take over Steam, I don't believe it's even legal to insist on swapping services midstream.

    Anyway, caveat emptor. Avoid MM10 like the plague.





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P. S. It gets worse. . .
05/08/2020, 22:37:25

    The Elf writes:

    Ubisoft is committing nothing short of extortion. To play MM10 beyond Act 1, you must register in something called Uplay. (How a game in Steam successfully requires that players play in another company's gamesite is beyond my feeble imagination.) The registration is "free," with just one teeny-weeny little requirement: you must agree to allow Ubisoft to set cookies and ads in your game files. Generous, eh wot? Oh, you can request that they don't sell your data, but how can you prove compliance? I categorically refuse to bend to this outrageous requirement. (Unfortunately, Ubisoft now owns the entire output of the former New World Computing. The only exception to their outrageous Uplay demand is Assassin's Creed.) So beware if you play any of our favorite games outside of disks. You'll probably quickly run out of email space.




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Well that's it for me as far as Ubisoft is concerned.
05/09/2020, 10:42:09

    Peter2 writes:

    I totally agree with you; it is nothing short of extortion. In effect it means that it is no longer possible to BUY MM10, the best you can do is rent it. That I will not tolerate, and no way am I going to have anything further to do with Ubisoft and their games. I EVER expected to say this but if I really want to play it, I'll go and find a WAREZ version. Ubisoft can go and . . . er . . . "make love elsewhere", as the saying goes.




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Oops – correction
05/09/2020, 10:49:36

    Peter2 writes:

    I meant to say that I shall never EVER EVER expected to say this but if I really want to play it, I'll go and find a WAREZ version. etc . . .




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I said this when the game first came out
05/12/2020, 00:45:23

    Ossie writes:

    Ubisoft requires Uplay, and there is a - unintentional bug would be the most generous description - where you can't get past Act 1 without not only using Uplay, but using it in online mode. Elf, if you still care, if you turned on online mode in Uplay, that option to fly to the Forge with Lev will no longer be greyed out.

    And Peter2, this is why I said that Ubisoft would no longer get any of my money as long as they forced Uplay on games, and that the best way to play anything by Ubisoft until this changes wold be cracked versions





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Stymied right and left
05/12/2020, 13:06:28

    The Elf writes:

    Thanks, Ossie, but if I knew how to fire up Uplay, I would. (My daughter, who now lives with us [Baby Elf--who is nearly 60] tells me that I'll just have to suck it up or forget playing much of anything in the future. Seems nearly everything these days is "Accept cookies or don't let the door hit you in the posterior as you leave.") And we used to think Microsoft/Bill Setag was the villain!

    I agreed to let Ubisoft set their damnable cookies, but still have no clue how to go online in their furshlugginer Uplay. To complicate matters, I had a different email address when I first downloaded MM10, one which I can no longer use. So naturally Ubisoft wants me to use it to change to the new address! Isn't it nice they're so user friendly? I've tried their website, which is "Temporarily unavailable--try later," for three days. I think I'll go play Neverwinter Nights--it's on special for $9.99 U. S. this week.





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William Setag IS the villain!
05/13/2020, 11:46:34

    Ramillies writes:

    (I was so glad to kill him in MM7! )

    Anyway, he was a villain too, only in a little bit different way. He (and his successors) have been waging war on the free/libre software probably longer than I live, which obviously makes me, a hardcore free/libre software fan, very upset. And you know how little real control you have over any Windows computer (cases in point: Windows Update, or the awful lot of calling home on Win 10, etc. etc.) The only good thing about him is that he wanted to force you to buy his products and give up your money, while the newer villainy consists mainly of forcing people to give up their privacy and milk money out of that, and that's far worse.





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Please can you tell ne exactly what you mean by "calling home" with win10?
05/13/2020, 16:34:20

    Peter2 writes:





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Ah, "calling home" is often used in this context to mean...
05/14/2020, 07:02:43

    Ramillies writes:

    ... "spying on the users of a program or a website and saving those data on your servers", most usually in order to monetize the data later (by offering the so called "personalized ads").

    If you want to read more about what is phoned home from Win 10, you can peruse the linked article (a randomly DuckDuckGo'ed* one).

    * DuckDuckGo is a search engine that doesn't track you and actually seems to be really caring about your privacy (not only repeating that phrase ad nauseam while blatantly spying on you, like Google, M$, Facebook,.....). They also have a nice blog with lots of posts about retaining your privacy as much as possible.



    Related link: http://www.howtogeek.com/224616/30-ways-windows-10-phones-home/

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Thank you very much indeed.
05/15/2020, 05:56:23

    Peter2 writes:

    I am very careful about what I look for on the web, and I have always used different browsers for different purposes. My default browser is Firefox, but I use it with assorted blocks on pop-up windows, ads and trackers, and with limits on 3rd party gadgets as well. If you really want to be careful, it is still entirely possible to visit a library and use *gasp* text books and encyclopedias! It takes a lot longer, but if you know how to uses the Dewey Decimal system, there is no record at all of what you've looked at.

    I have found Bing a poor search engine and I don't use it. When using Bing, more than once I have found the results at the top of the hit list bore no relevance at all to the search terms I had entered – I can only assume these were sponsored hits. I switched to google (which, despite its drawbacks, is a very effective search engine), and these results did not appear.

    But again, than you very much for these – very useful!





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You do very well to be cautious on the Internet.
05/15/2020, 06:48:50

    Ramillies writes:

    Google offers good services. I can't say a single bad thing about the quality of anything they offer. However, you pay for that with your privacy. So if you are aware of being watched all the time, then they are great to use.

    All in all, I don't think there's much choice of search engines. Either you are willing to accept being spied upon and you use Google, or you aren't willing, and you use DuckDuckGo.

    (And I fully agree that books are still an option. In fact, I have four shelves overfull with books right next to me . And the library at our college is not only full of books, but it also has a lots of super-comfortable sofas and armchairs. In the breaks between the classes, I would often just go there, pick a random math book and sink into a sofa )





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And here I thought I was the only one. . .
05/15/2020, 13:43:23

    The Elf writes:

    . . .who could be entertained by a math book! I fell in love with math at age 13, when my algebra teacher explained balancing equations as being like a teeter-totter(seesawif you took something away from one side, you had to take it away from the other side, too to make it balance. The next year, geometry was taught by a woman who also gave piano lessons. She explained geometry as being an art form. I was hooked forever by those two. (And I had HATED arithmetic before. Still do. Bless the men who discovered (invented?) silicon chips!)




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Well, if I (as a physicist, or better put, physics student) haven't loved math, I couldn't have been doing physics at all!
05/16/2020, 16:40:06

    Ramillies writes:

    Let me paraphrase a Feynman quote once more (although this quote is maybe a bit too "expressive" — hopefully I don't get banned for it!): "Physics is like sex: it has some practical use, but that's not the reason why we do it."

    Anyway, arithmetic isn't really math, it's just number-pushing, and I totally understand why you don't like it. That's even the cause of my love/hate relationship with algebra, although I'd say I'm really good at it. However, people (myself included) sometimes tend to get a bit upset when they spend 2 hours calculating something, only to see that 1½ hour ago they have committed a sign error and most of their work is only good for throwing into the trash can .





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Amen! And the reason I never took physics. . .
05/17/2020, 05:21:04

    The Elf writes:

    . . .is because at that time, physics was by and large not much else BUT arithmetic! (This was back in the slide-rule and logarithm era--blech!) I had fun in chemistry class, though. It was more algebraic. I was born about 20 years too soon.




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I started off my career as a chemist
05/20/2020, 08:45:18

    Peter2 writes:

    I didn't get into patents until much later.

    But I still have one of the maths books that I found extremely useful – An Introduction to the Infinitesimal Calculus by G. W. Caunt (O.U.P. 1914), although my reprint is from 1946. At one time it was known as "Caunt's Bible", it was that good. It has the enormous advantage that it contains innumerable examples, and "practice makes perfect", as the saying goes. It may be over 100 years old, but it's still good today if you need a solid grounding in the basics of both theory and applications.

    Chapter 3 is titled Differentiation of Simple Algebraical Functions





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Practice does make perfect
05/22/2020, 00:40:55

    Ramillies writes:

    To master calculus, I used some old Soviet problem books like Demidovich. I know of a couple of really good ones that have (literally) thousands of problems ranging from rote calculations to hard theorem-proving.

    Ironically, back in those weird days when half of Europe was stuck under the Communist rule, math books like that were printed in ridiculous amounts (hundreds of thousands copies). Sometimes you couldn't buy the most basic things, but you could always get a good book about math for roughly the same money you would pay for a loaf of bread.

    Thankfully those times are long over, but many of those books can be purchased today for next to nothing (often for sums like 50 CZK, which is something like $ 2), because everybody hates math and everybody hates Russian. And those books have been serving me really well for years.





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