When I look back over the past four years and add up all the money I've spent on WoW it comes up to maybe $1500. That sounds like a lot until I think that a carton of beer a week at $45 a carton is what, 10 times that? And then I compare that $45 a week with the $80-$150 a night that I'd spend if I were going out on the town and buying drinks for myself plus any particularly lucky ladies who happened along...
$20/month is *cheap* unless you only get paid pocket money.
2 hours commute either way?! That's crazy - how far is your round trip commute, 200km? Or do you think he just has a hideous number of public transport transfers? If I were spending four hours a day in transit I'd seriously consider either moving house or moving job.
There's only so many times you can pull the "halve your work hours, quadruple your hourly rate" trick. It works if your overheads are low, and it's great if you're going from 50 hour work weeks at McDonalds to a few hours of I.T. consulting a week, but if you're working 12 hours a week you're very unlikely to be earning enough to support a family and pay off a mortgage. Eventually, when you *need* twice as much money to cover the costs of supporting your dependents as well as yourself, you'll end up having to work longer hours.
Hatefests for anyone not running their character as a predetermined "optimized build" and paying massive $$$ to the gil sellers who camp all the necessary "optimal" boss mobs to drop your needed loot, and grief anyone who comes near? Check.
Coming from WoW, this statement seems odd. If you could get "needed loot" off "optimal boss mobs" by simply paying in-game currency for them, why would you bother to join a group in the first place?
Maybe this is just the perspective I have after playing 4+ years of WoW, but the general progression that I've seen is that you solo your way to the level cap and 'acceptable' starter gear. Then you look for a group, and work your way through progressively harder content, upgrading your gear as you go. If you could just farm a bunch of gold and buy the top end gear, the only motivation to raid would be to see the content. For me, personally, that's plenty - I try and see each raid instance at least once before the next expansion comes out, although in BC I missed some bosses due to social constraints (didn't see Vashj, Archimonde, anything past Supremus in BT, or any TK bosses). After that, though, farming the same instance over and over rapidly gets boring.
I have an elegant solution but this margin is too small to contain it.
It's easy to make things harder by adding "but what if"s. The question is whether those what-ifs apply. For instance, if the question is "how can I find duplicate images that were independantly compressed from the same (or almost identical) source image" as I guessed, then my solution works. On the far other end of the scale, you could ask for an algorithm that will scan your picture collection of lolcats, cute puppies, pron, and your holiday snaps, and return one each from those categories.
Anyone who doesn't love Visual Studio should spend some time working in Borland Turbo C++. Then they'll understand what "buggy unstable crap" is really like.
The Capitalist way would be to try to enforce harsher DRM, outsource to an anti-cheat scheme that also lets you keep banning a steady number of people who will hopefully rebuy the game, and then blame piracy when the game doesnt sell well.
Only if that makes more profit for the shareholders.
Let's say I can sell $GAME second-hand for $30. That lets me justify paying $70 for it off the shelf (I figure new car smell is worth maybe $20) when, if I couldn't resell it after I'm done with it, I wouldn't be willing to pay more than $30-$40.
Or you could just measure the amount of data in the DCT space. Duh.
This is the direction I was going in, partly because then you don't have to render the image out in order to test it. As for detecting similar images, perform some standardized munching on all images to turn them into 32x32 4-grey-level icons and then sum the differences in pixels. If there's only a few pixels different, and they're only out a little on brightness, then you have a match.
Plus, everyone knows you're not supposed to believe anything until its been posted on at least two different blogs. TV just isn't a reliable source of information anymore.
In fact, it doesn't need to be water; anything will do. The most efficient way to do it in future might even be to build a rail gun and launch a small (few tens of kilograms) projectile with a timed explosive. Projectile gets out of the atmosphere, projectile explodes into a cloud of debris, target hits debris and slows down, debris falls back to earth (it's on a straight up-and-down trajectory, not an orbital path) and burns up on re-entry because it's now the consistency of sand.
Current railguns can't do this, as their peak muzzle velocity is only around 3km/s, but the U.S. navy is researching them and there's no real theoretical limit (to my knowledge).
Your thread title reminded me of this book which I had when I was a kid. For something slightly more advanced, there was a great book I had that I can't remember the name of now, but it started with simple light circuits and worked up to building a metal detector and a toy version of an aircraft's instrument landing system. I'll see if I can find it when I get home, it must be around somewhere...
Doesn't it do that anyway? Or rather, battle.net is a matchmaking service rather than a game server, and the games are (as I understand it) hosted on a player's machine and connected up peer-to-peer (with NAT punchthrough and other assorted cleverness).
Coming from Australia, where you all but need a cavity search to enter or leave the country, I was astounded to get on a coach in London and travel via Paris and most cities in Germany to end up in Amsterdam, all without anyone so much as asking me for a passport. I'd imagine I'd need to show ID if I were buying a house, say, but it seems pretty relaxed there.
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When I look back over the past four years and add up all the money I've spent on WoW it comes up to maybe $1500. That sounds like a lot until I think that a carton of beer a week at $45 a carton is what, 10 times that? And then I compare that $45 a week with the $80-$150 a night that I'd spend if I were going out on the town and buying drinks for myself plus any particularly lucky ladies who happened along...
$20/month is *cheap* unless you only get paid pocket money.
2 hours commute either way?! That's crazy - how far is your round trip commute, 200km? Or do you think he just has a hideous number of public transport transfers? If I were spending four hours a day in transit I'd seriously consider either moving house or moving job.
There's only so many times you can pull the "halve your work hours, quadruple your hourly rate" trick. It works if your overheads are low, and it's great if you're going from 50 hour work weeks at McDonalds to a few hours of I.T. consulting a week, but if you're working 12 hours a week you're very unlikely to be earning enough to support a family and pay off a mortgage. Eventually, when you *need* twice as much money to cover the costs of supporting your dependents as well as yourself, you'll end up having to work longer hours.
Hatefests for anyone not running their character as a predetermined "optimized build" and paying massive $$$ to the gil sellers who camp all the necessary "optimal" boss mobs to drop your needed loot, and grief anyone who comes near? Check.
Coming from WoW, this statement seems odd. If you could get "needed loot" off "optimal boss mobs" by simply paying in-game currency for them, why would you bother to join a group in the first place?
Maybe this is just the perspective I have after playing 4+ years of WoW, but the general progression that I've seen is that you solo your way to the level cap and 'acceptable' starter gear. Then you look for a group, and work your way through progressively harder content, upgrading your gear as you go. If you could just farm a bunch of gold and buy the top end gear, the only motivation to raid would be to see the content. For me, personally, that's plenty - I try and see each raid instance at least once before the next expansion comes out, although in BC I missed some bosses due to social constraints (didn't see Vashj, Archimonde, anything past Supremus in BT, or any TK bosses). After that, though, farming the same instance over and over rapidly gets boring.
I have an elegant solution but this margin is too small to contain it.
It's easy to make things harder by adding "but what if"s. The question is whether those what-ifs apply. For instance, if the question is "how can I find duplicate images that were independantly compressed from the same (or almost identical) source image" as I guessed, then my solution works. On the far other end of the scale, you could ask for an algorithm that will scan your picture collection of lolcats, cute puppies, pron, and your holiday snaps, and return one each from those categories.
Thankyou, sir. I was hoping someone would get it. :D I admit I was possibly too obscure. :/
How on earth is this redundant? They *clearly* cannot take the whine in front of ZGeek!
Well, the most famous of the classic blunders is never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Anyone who doesn't love Visual Studio should spend some time working in Borland Turbo C++. Then they'll understand what "buggy unstable crap" is really like.
Well, given that a JPEG encoded image is stored as a compressed DCT in the first place, that makes things pretty easy. :)
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
The Capitalist way would be to try to enforce harsher DRM, outsource to an anti-cheat scheme that also lets you keep banning a steady number of people who will hopefully rebuy the game, and then blame piracy when the game doesnt sell well.
Only if that makes more profit for the shareholders.
Let's say I can sell $GAME second-hand for $30. That lets me justify paying $70 for it off the shelf (I figure new car smell is worth maybe $20) when, if I couldn't resell it after I'm done with it, I wouldn't be willing to pay more than $30-$40.
Or you could just measure the amount of data in the DCT space. Duh.
This is the direction I was going in, partly because then you don't have to render the image out in order to test it. As for detecting similar images, perform some standardized munching on all images to turn them into 32x32 4-grey-level icons and then sum the differences in pixels. If there's only a few pixels different, and they're only out a little on brightness, then you have a match.
If there's bleeding involved then either you're into really weird shit or you should come back in a few days when she's off her rags.
Then everyone shall be the guy on the left.
Step 3.5: ???
Meet women.
Plus, everyone knows you're not supposed to believe anything until its been posted on at least two different blogs. TV just isn't a reliable source of information anymore.
Internets killed the video star, I see. :P
In fact, it doesn't need to be water; anything will do. The most efficient way to do it in future might even be to build a rail gun and launch a small (few tens of kilograms) projectile with a timed explosive. Projectile gets out of the atmosphere, projectile explodes into a cloud of debris, target hits debris and slows down, debris falls back to earth (it's on a straight up-and-down trajectory, not an orbital path) and burns up on re-entry because it's now the consistency of sand.
Current railguns can't do this, as their peak muzzle velocity is only around 3km/s, but the U.S. navy is researching them and there's no real theoretical limit (to my knowledge).
There are a lot of fun things on that site. Thank you for the link, sir!
Naw, you're thinking of ass table vibrators.
Your thread title reminded me of this book which I had when I was a kid. For something slightly more advanced, there was a great book I had that I can't remember the name of now, but it started with simple light circuits and worked up to building a metal detector and a toy version of an aircraft's instrument landing system. I'll see if I can find it when I get home, it must be around somewhere...
Doesn't it do that anyway? Or rather, battle.net is a matchmaking service rather than a game server, and the games are (as I understand it) hosted on a player's machine and connected up peer-to-peer (with NAT punchthrough and other assorted cleverness).
Coming from Australia, where you all but need a cavity search to enter or leave the country, I was astounded to get on a coach in London and travel via Paris and most cities in Germany to end up in Amsterdam, all without anyone so much as asking me for a passport. I'd imagine I'd need to show ID if I were buying a house, say, but it seems pretty relaxed there.
So every time a user with a dynamic IP address's DHCP lease expires, zomg! it's a pirate! Avast the swabbing and beat to quarters!
Yarr harr fiddle-de-dee!
If ever you renew your D.H.C.P.
Yarr, harr, fiddle-de-dee!
You! Are! A Pirate!
(I'm sorry... I had to!)