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Curse Inc. users beware!
December 8, 2010: For the past 3 or 4 weeks, I have been the victim of the Curse Inc. Terms of Service (ToS). Within that document, when you create an account (free or subscription), you are giving the Curse Inc. staff the power to terminate your access for any petty reason they choose. Luckily, for me, I was not and never will be a subscriber to their service. One of their staff members posted a rude comment during a period of sporadic connection issues with all Curse Inc. sites. A ticket had been created in a wrong place, but that does not justify rude comments, nor excuse the staff member from posting links (from the very top of the same page) that directed people to yet another incorrect place for the complaint being discussed. I pointed that out, as well as adding that the reason the ticket was likely created in the wrong place was because the correct place was not accessible. I added that the staff member should have verified the situation before jumping down the users' throats, but all that seemed to do was paint a target on my account for that staff member (or, possibly, another staff member, but I doubt it) to abuse the power he or she has under the user-agreed ToS. No warning was given, nor is it explicitly guaranteed in the ToS, but I have had my account privileges dropped for pretty much every site they have the ability to administrate.
Now, considering the Curse Inc. staff member crossed the rude line to start with, I will not accept being the only "out of order" person involved. Do I think I deserve a permanent ban? No, but they have that right. I think that taking action as they have shows a level of immaturity and poor business practice that makes me wonder how they manage to keep subscribers. Of course, I'm sure they have the opinion that they silenced an immature, trouble-maker. The fact that they hide everything I post, that they can, tells me they're afraid to let me be seen by the public. I guess they don't know that Velnoq is the owner of a domain that predates Curse Inc. (2006-2010? I have log reports from my own server going back to 2004).
As of December 16, I have confirmed the use of an IP ban covering both wowace.com and curseforge.com being used to block my access. This was confirmed by disabling WiFi on my iPhone and browsing to wow.curseforge.com and being able to see and log into that site. While logged in, I re-enabled WiFi, refreshed the page that I was on while logged in, and was instantly given the 403 Forbidden page. It's rather childish, pathetic, and unprofessional for them to take that sort of action, but I guess it's actually kids that run the service. Surely, if adults were in control, they would know that taking such action makes them look bad.
December 30, 2010: Interesting reading on this story can be found at http://clientsupport.curse.com/news.aspx?id=33. The issue is ongoing, with research showing more occurrences of Curse Inc. staff (mostly Ackis) being rude and abusive to users. Kaelten, the self-proclaimed administrator for WowAce.com and CurseForge.com has seemingly decided to completely ignore my attempt to at least get the IP address ban converted to an account ban, so other users could even access their site(s) from my home. I sent him a private message on the 19th, which was 11 days before I wrote this. Not much of an administrator if the message simply hasn't been read, yet, in my opinion. Even less of an administrator if the IP ban is considered to be a good thing when all I have to do is connect from another IP address and have normal user access.
Ignorance Abounds
So, I'm a 3D gamer. Specifically, I play a LOT of World of Warcraft. Amazingly, after upgrading my 256MB video card to a 1024MB video card, and moving from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, the game started getting these "unable to allocate" crashes for some pitifully low amount of RAM. Fine, so, I guessed my 4GB of DDR2 wasn't enough for the game, Thunderbird, and Firefox to all run at the same time. I did find it odd that 1791MB of "Shared Video Memory" was being reported, since I had such a large amount of dedicated RAM on the card, but I assumed the situation would be fixed by increasing my RAM quantity to 8GB. No such luck, actually. Instead of 1791MB shared, now I'm at 3071MB shared. WTF?! The same game crashes are STILL there, too. Granted, I think it's mostly a fault of the game by not giving some option to limit the video RAM size used, but I went looking for ways to simply turn off or drastically reduce this sharing junk. As it turns out, the Web is full of complete idiots in this matter. "It's a BIOS setting," "disable your on-board video," and "Windows will reallocate that for other things as needed" are 99.999% of the responses to many posts asking for help on this subject. Windows will NOT "reallocate" that RAM if *any* program has requested use of it. Now, when an MMO sees 4GB of video memory reported, it will try to allocate all that it can for the sake of loading textures faster. This makes perfect sense, really. HOWEVER, given enough time in the game, that "shared video memory" ends up getting pushed to the pagefile, causing DREADFUL frame rates and/or complete graphics anomalies. Or, in some cases, random game crashes. It amazes and annoys me when I find so many people thinking they know the answer when they obviously have ZERO clue about the situation. If Windows simply had a "Disable Shared Video Memory" checkbox someplace, many gamers would be much happier. In what cyber-world does 4GB of video memory become necessary?
Final word on the subject: If you don't know how to TURN OFF the shared video memory, DON'T RESPOND TO REQUESTS ASKING FOR HELP ON THE MATTER!
Can you help?
A while back, I had a Micropolis 4345NS drive in one of my systems. The drive failed before I was able to get all the data backed up. Basically, all I lost was all my old DOS programming source code. I am currently in a situation where I would like to have that data recovered (and I finally have reliable backup devices, multiple CD and DVD burning drives). If there's anyone with one of these drives collecting dust, please contact me. MageLink is one of the programs I lost the current source for, and anyone that helps me recover this data will get a copy of that source (and any other source on the drive, if they like).
Update: I do have a functional drive mechanism and am currently working towards getting a clean room for the process of opening up both drives and transferring the platters from the bad mechanism to the good unit. As I do not know if the platters are required to be synchronized, I am planning to transfer them as if they are supposed to be synchronized. While I only need the drive to function long enough to copy off the data, I would rather not lose all hope of data recovery by failing to orient the platters correctly.