Then you should really take a look at the games being published by Paradox Interactive. Classics such as the Europa Universalis-series and the Hearts of Iron-series are great strategy games. They're also publishing several other games in the same genre and I'd strongly suggest taking a closer look for games that play well and don't need a brand new gaming rig.
As others have pointed out, FAST does not currently provide a public Search Engine which most people associate with the term. They provide the actual engine for their customers, which range from regular, public search engines, to yellow pages providers, inhouse research document indexing, public information indexing (their software is among others deployet as a search services for the norwegian house of representatives, where the representatives and their staff can obtain documentation indexed by several key properties).
Microsoft is buying FAST to get this expertise, to get a software development house which can develop custom solutions for very large customers (think 10-50k employees, where the amount of documents produced are enormous) in a private and personal setting. FAST deliver quite a few consultancy services too, although they've had quite the burn rate lately and downsized a bit recently.
FAST previously showcased their engine as alltheweb.com, their ftpsearch (which was very popular in the late 1998-1999) and were one of the main players in the market when Google launched. The latest "regular" search engine to use FAST in Norway was SESAM, which features a news search, a regular search index, a yellow pages search and several others. They did however recently switch to Yahoo for their regular index. And as other also have mentioned, Yahoo bought overture.. which bought another division of FAST before that again.. FAST in Trondheim went from being FAST, to Overture and now Yahoo Norway.
BackupPC is not a client based solution, but consists of a server that retrieves files to back up through already existing channels, such as Samba (for windows based computers), rsync and ssh.
My MSN Messenger currently thinks that all MP3-files should be treated that way.. Quite ingenious the first time someone sent me some music they've made and voilá, all gone after the transfer (because we all know how fast MSN Messenger is at sending files)..
This issue was brought to my attention a while back when they blocked _all_ links containing download.php. Yep. Not sure if they still do that, tho.
Yeah, we all know how easy it is to run an updated Windows without IE7...:-D
But yeah, the UI of both IE7 and Safari is way out there. An example is that the Safari-window can't be resized by any other means than using the lower right corner, instead of all corners or sides for regular windows.
I've been playing the game for the last four or five days, and my first impressions are that the game could have used quite a more bit of testing before being launched. There are quite a few obvious blunders in the UI and the game itself, and I've not spent much time playing (just getting around level 7).
The diplomacy idea is nice, but it gets a bit tiresome after doing one round of cards after another. The quests for getting started is probably my biggest grief so far, as they're not as tailored and adjusted as was the case in WoW. The same is the case for the user interface and the game environment in itself, and some places it just shines through that they're attempting a bit too much at being WoW (at least that's the way it feels, although you can argue otherwise).
The gameplay is a bit more advanced than WoW, in particular the diplomacy aspect of the game which is completely lacking other places. The crafting is far more advanced, but not on the level of Star Wars Galaxies (which still is my fav when it comes to crafting and resources). A cross between the easy-to-use interface of WoW and the more advanced form in Vanguard (possibly by starting people out with the easy version and incrementing it along to where Vanguard stands today) could have worked better. I see great potential here, but I'm getting a bit tired of reading conversations and doing tutorials just to understand the concepts that are basics of the game. The learning curve is simply a bit too steep when concerned with the fact that I can't sink that much time into a mmorpg any more, and I'm afraid that it may alienate potential customers.
To sum it all up: it could have used a couple of months more of closed / open beta testing and adjusted both the UI and the structure of the game. It's not as polished as one could wish. The concepts that separates the game from WoW (as this is what most people know) is interesting, but the execution could probably be timed better.
Running the game in 1920x1200 on a GF 7800GT, had to turn off hardware occlusion and are having quite a few issues with game objects (stones, npcs, close objects) popping out when they arrive within the first LOD-distance.
It's just not possible, it also opens up quite a few new possibilities. As part of my master thesis we fitted a mobile phone with a camera in the front of a car, linked the phone to a bluetooth gps and recorded both the view and the path of the road in the landscape. It also uploaded the images and position directly to a web site, so viewers could track both the vehicle and the view online.
The norwegian road authorities apparently does something similiar when doing road maintenance, and have stored 18m+ pictures of the road network in Norway from the view of the driver. They do probably use a bit more hi-resolution images than a camera phone, but the concept is the same.
Re:Just like there will never be another Doom
on
Can Anyone Beat WoW?
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· Score: 1
Maybe in the US, but here in Europe.. Well, we had AO, we had DAoC, but while they were kinda.. smallish popular and made an ok impression, it's nothing -- completely nothing -- like the following that WoW has established. It has made MMORPGs and in fact , rpg's and games in general, available to a whole new group of people. Both those in their 40+ and a lot of girls are finding themselves playing WoW.
The Conan MMORPG was announced quite some time ago; this is just an announcement regarding the publisher. The game is also being developed by the norwegian company Funcom, who developed Anarchy Online, two expansion packs, The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. They do at least have some merit in finishing their projects.
What you can't do is make a copy of the book, or a copy of your CD, and give that to your friend while you keep the original.
Except in countries like "Norway" and a few other civilized parts of the world, where sharing between friends is perfectly legal, and is in fact, protected by law. Certain corporations are of course trying to change this, so it's not easy to say how long it will remain the way that it has been for decades.
Many movie theaters in norway already have this as an available service. Pay $100 an hour, bring your home console etc and play for a day. While the movies themselves are shown on regular old school projectors, the ads (movies, still images) are distributed in digital form and shown on regular, high quality digital projectors. This goes for most modern cinemas, at least.:)
This can be answered by looking at the MMS conformance spec 2.0.0, where the following is stated:
Minimum supported message size shall be 30 kBytes. From a terminal manufacturer's point of view this means, that the terminal has to support receiving of messages of at least 30 kBytes.
So, 30 KB is the max size that anyone really can expect to receive per message. In addition, there is a size restriction on the image size for MMS messages (that should adhere to the conformance document):
The maximum image resolution for which interoperability is guaranteed is 160x120 pixels.
Seems like it's time to update our standards and move along.
These security breaches occur at the plants that manufacture the PS2 discs themselves. Rockstar doesn't do this, an outside (sony approved?) company does this.
In fact, I don't think you can blame the manufacturing plant this time around. The game is due for a North American release in five days and have probably been shipped to all major outlets and distribution houses several days ago. This is really not news (while the Halo 2 leek surely was), and it may seem that Rockstar is trying to get some pity and undeserved attention because of the recent Halo 2-leek. This happens with absolutely each and every release on the market, and this is truely "Nothing to see here, move along"-stuff.
they're pissing on their feet though, with the hl key system horribly sucking too(it's not really that uncommon that you lose your key to someone running some keygen, leading into some major suckery to get it back, in some cases people have bought the game still in wrappers and went home for some cs and noticed that the key was already in use).
The serial code for Half-Life is 14 digits, meaning a total of 289.254.654.976 possible combinations.. giving that the game has sold something like 20 million copies, that would turn out to try at least 20.000 keys before hitting one successful.. and as far as i know, no key generators checked with the WON network, so you'd just have to try (and that takes at least 15 seconds)..
No, most keys that people experienced that already were in use, were because of a handful of different things:
1. sloppy caretaking of covers etc on local LANs 2. getting their computers exploited (there were several worms afaik that stole cdkeys) 3. people writing down serial keys in stores (many stores used to have such things on display) 4. employees at mentioned stores, also writing down and supplying keys to friends 5. etc etc etc
The keygens were useless.
And Steam is the best thing to happen to Valve since Counter-Strike.
This is not really a new way to do stuff, and as several other has pointed out, the EXIF-standard already has fields for geographical placement. A new dimension is provided in the data, and allows us to do a whole new range of applications. We've built a small application on Symbian OS (currently running under Personal Java, and another solution in development running under Symbian OS natively) which tags images, audio and other information on a cellular phone (we use the Ericsson P900) with location (provided by an gps with a bluetooth interface).
We've done several interesting projects in relevance to this, and the probably biggest field of usage would be the utility and maintenance industry.
We're currently submitting the data from the phone, tagged with a location or a track, to a Java-based server. This server can in turn store the data locally to be retrieved from another phone with additional information (like a regular map) and/or pass the data on to a webserver where the repository can be browsed from a normal web browser. The application may be tested on The OneMap GeoMeta Browser Client. This is part of Project OneMap, a project where we aim to build a completly free and freely managed geodata repository.
There is still much work going on in this field, but the japanese are 2 years ahead of everyone else. Several of their phones already have built in GPS-receivers and tag the images they capture automagically (this was done as early as in 2002). There still isn't any regular consumer interest for this in Europe or the US, but we could all hope for a better future.:)
As you say yourself, computer programs did get special protection, in addition to: databases, physical buildings and creating copies of art that may be interpreted as the original copy.
Re:Downloading music itself is not illegal...
on
NYT Promotes File Sharing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That may be true for your countrys legilisation, but here in Norway it is perfectly legal to download any copyrighted material from any location, as long as it's done in a private (not corporate) manner. This is covered by fair use in our laws. This does however not cover executable programs, so games etc is illegal.
You've apparently not used Steam too much, as there is an "Use Steam in Offline Mode" there. All games that can be played offline has the possibility to use this mode. Steam is the best thing to happen to Counter-Strike etc since the release of the given products. No more waiting in line for 3-5 days to get an unhosed mirror and the stability has gotten to a point where it's way better than WON was back in the days.
People aren't whining about the hitboxes in particular, but the problem about lag between where the server thinks the player is and where the client displays the player. You'll have this problem no matter what kind of hit-detection algorithm you use, and it isn't really any better in D3 multiplayer (when it comes to hit detection).
Finding a new way to combat lag and synching displays so that everything feels natural for both the player shooting and the player getting hit, would probably make you quite a few bucks.:)
.. and all that were done in Europe (where the CD actually contains a "Copy Controlled"-marking, which I didn't see anything about when ordering it on the web), under Windows 2000 (with Auth-play disabled). The OGGs came out perfectly fine without any problems. Yes, the CD should be perfectly playable under linux (unless someone has implemented insertion notification and auto-run and automagical installation and implementation of windows drivers into the kernel.;)
And this also goes for all other current protection systems that I've had my hands on during the last months.. No idea why they even try.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we certainly know how the PS3 got popular because of its ability to install Linux and from the recommendations from the people doing just that.
Then you should really take a look at the games being published by Paradox Interactive. Classics such as the Europa Universalis-series and the Hearts of Iron-series are great strategy games. They're also publishing several other games in the same genre and I'd strongly suggest taking a closer look for games that play well and don't need a brand new gaming rig.
Yes, we all know how you determine directionality from an icon like: <->.
It's a good thing they made sure that the electroncs doesn't go off in the second dimension.
As others have pointed out, FAST does not currently provide a public Search Engine which most people associate with the term. They provide the actual engine for their customers, which range from regular, public search engines, to yellow pages providers, inhouse research document indexing, public information indexing (their software is among others deployet as a search services for the norwegian house of representatives, where the representatives and their staff can obtain documentation indexed by several key properties).
.. which bought another division of FAST before that again.. FAST in Trondheim went from being FAST, to Overture and now Yahoo Norway.
Microsoft is buying FAST to get this expertise, to get a software development house which can develop custom solutions for very large customers (think 10-50k employees, where the amount of documents produced are enormous) in a private and personal setting. FAST deliver quite a few consultancy services too, although they've had quite the burn rate lately and downsized a bit recently.
FAST previously showcased their engine as alltheweb.com, their ftpsearch (which was very popular in the late 1998-1999) and were one of the main players in the market when Google launched. The latest "regular" search engine to use FAST in Norway was SESAM, which features a news search, a regular search index, a yellow pages search and several others. They did however recently switch to Yahoo for their regular index. And as other also have mentioned, Yahoo bought overture
The best answer so far is probably The Transporter. The squeezebox also has quite a nice sound to it, while being a tad cheaper.
You could also go the route of using an external D/A-converter.
BackupPC is not a client based solution, but consists of a server that retrieves files to back up through already existing channels, such as Samba (for windows based computers), rsync and ssh.
My MSN Messenger currently thinks that all MP3-files should be treated that way.. Quite ingenious the first time someone sent me some music they've made and voilá, all gone after the transfer (because we all know how fast MSN Messenger is at sending files)..
This issue was brought to my attention a while back when they blocked _all_ links containing download.php. Yep. Not sure if they still do that, tho.
Yeah, we all know how easy it is to run an updated Windows without IE7... :-D
But yeah, the UI of both IE7 and Safari is way out there. An example is that the Safari-window can't be resized by any other means than using the lower right corner, instead of all corners or sides for regular windows.
I've been playing the game for the last four or five days, and my first impressions are that the game could have used quite a more bit of testing before being launched. There are quite a few obvious blunders in the UI and the game itself, and I've not spent much time playing (just getting around level 7).
The diplomacy idea is nice, but it gets a bit tiresome after doing one round of cards after another. The quests for getting started is probably my biggest grief so far, as they're not as tailored and adjusted as was the case in WoW. The same is the case for the user interface and the game environment in itself, and some places it just shines through that they're attempting a bit too much at being WoW (at least that's the way it feels, although you can argue otherwise).
The gameplay is a bit more advanced than WoW, in particular the diplomacy aspect of the game which is completely lacking other places. The crafting is far more advanced, but not on the level of Star Wars Galaxies (which still is my fav when it comes to crafting and resources). A cross between the easy-to-use interface of WoW and the more advanced form in Vanguard (possibly by starting people out with the easy version and incrementing it along to where Vanguard stands today) could have worked better. I see great potential here, but I'm getting a bit tired of reading conversations and doing tutorials just to understand the concepts that are basics of the game. The learning curve is simply a bit too steep when concerned with the fact that I can't sink that much time into a mmorpg any more, and I'm afraid that it may alienate potential customers.
To sum it all up: it could have used a couple of months more of closed / open beta testing and adjusted both the UI and the structure of the game. It's not as polished as one could wish. The concepts that separates the game from WoW (as this is what most people know) is interesting, but the execution could probably be timed better.
Running the game in 1920x1200 on a GF 7800GT, had to turn off hardware occlusion and are having quite a few issues with game objects (stones, npcs, close objects) popping out when they arrive within the first LOD-distance.
Yeah, it's not like they had something like that on the N64 controller...
It's just not possible, it also opens up quite a few new possibilities. As part of my master thesis we fitted a mobile phone with a camera in the front of a car, linked the phone to a bluetooth gps and recorded both the view and the path of the road in the landscape. It also uploaded the images and position directly to a web site, so viewers could track both the vehicle and the view online.
The norwegian road authorities apparently does something similiar when doing road maintenance, and have stored 18m+ pictures of the road network in Norway from the view of the driver. They do probably use a bit more hi-resolution images than a camera phone, but the concept is the same.
Maybe in the US, but here in Europe.. Well, we had AO, we had DAoC, but while they were kinda .. smallish popular and made an ok impression, it's nothing -- completely nothing -- like the following that WoW has established. It has made MMORPGs and in fact , rpg's and games in general, available to a whole new group of people. Both those in their 40+ and a lot of girls are finding themselves playing WoW.
I'd consider that defining the genre.
The Conan MMORPG was announced quite some time ago; this is just an announcement regarding the publisher. The game is also being developed by the norwegian company Funcom, who developed Anarchy Online, two expansion packs, The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. They do at least have some merit in finishing their projects.
The Video (tm). Requires flash, and can be played back instantly.
Except in countries like "Norway" and a few other civilized parts of the world, where sharing between friends is perfectly legal, and is in fact, protected by law. Certain corporations are of course trying to change this, so it's not easy to say how long it will remain the way that it has been for decades.
More information can probably be found at EFN.
Many movie theaters in norway already have this as an available service. Pay $100 an hour, bring your home console etc and play for a day. While the movies themselves are shown on regular old school projectors, the ads (movies, still images) are distributed in digital form and shown on regular, high quality digital projectors. This goes for most modern cinemas, at least. :)
So, 30 KB is the max size that anyone really can expect to receive per message. In addition, there is a size restriction on the image size for MMS messages (that should adhere to the conformance document):
Seems like it's time to update our standards and move along.
In fact, I don't think you can blame the manufacturing plant this time around. The game is due for a North American release in five days and have probably been shipped to all major outlets and distribution houses several days ago. This is really not news (while the Halo 2 leek surely was), and it may seem that Rockstar is trying to get some pity and undeserved attention because of the recent Halo 2-leek. This happens with absolutely each and every release on the market, and this is truely "Nothing to see here, move along"-stuff.
The serial code for Half-Life is 14 digits, meaning a total of 289.254.654.976 possible combinations.. giving that the game has sold something like 20 million copies, that would turn out to try at least 20.000 keys before hitting one successful.. and as far as i know, no key generators checked with the WON network, so you'd just have to try (and that takes at least 15 seconds)..
No, most keys that people experienced that already were in use, were because of a handful of different things:
1. sloppy caretaking of covers etc on local LANs
2. getting their computers exploited (there were several worms afaik that stole cdkeys)
3. people writing down serial keys in stores (many stores used to have such things on display)
4. employees at mentioned stores, also writing down and supplying keys to friends
5. etc etc etc
The keygens were useless.
And Steam is the best thing to happen to Valve since Counter-Strike.
This is not really a new way to do stuff, and as several other has pointed out, the EXIF-standard already has fields for geographical placement. A new dimension is provided in the data, and allows us to do a whole new range of applications. We've built a small application on Symbian OS (currently running under Personal Java, and another solution in development running under Symbian OS natively) which tags images, audio and other information on a cellular phone (we use the Ericsson P900) with location (provided by an gps with a bluetooth interface).
:)
We've done several interesting projects in relevance to this, and the probably biggest field of usage would be the utility and maintenance industry.
We're currently submitting the data from the phone, tagged with a location or a track, to a Java-based server. This server can in turn store the data locally to be retrieved from another phone with additional information (like a regular map) and/or pass the data on to a webserver where the repository can be browsed from a normal web browser. The application may be tested on The OneMap GeoMeta Browser Client. This is part of Project OneMap, a project where we aim to build a completly free and freely managed geodata repository.
There is still much work going on in this field, but the japanese are 2 years ahead of everyone else. Several of their phones already have built in GPS-receivers and tag the images they capture automagically (this was done as early as in 2002). There still isn't any regular consumer interest for this in Europe or the US, but we could all hope for a better future.
As you say yourself, computer programs did get special protection, in addition to: databases, physical buildings and creating copies of art that may be interpreted as the original copy.
That may be true for your countrys legilisation, but here in Norway it is perfectly legal to download any copyrighted material from any location, as long as it's done in a private (not corporate) manner. This is covered by fair use in our laws. This does however not cover executable programs, so games etc is illegal.
You've apparently not used Steam too much, as there is an "Use Steam in Offline Mode" there. All games that can be played offline has the possibility to use this mode. Steam is the best thing to happen to Counter-Strike etc since the release of the given products. No more waiting in line for 3-5 days to get an unhosed mirror and the stability has gotten to a point where it's way better than WON was back in the days.
People aren't whining about the hitboxes in particular, but the problem about lag between where the server thinks the player is and where the client displays the player. You'll have this problem no matter what kind of hit-detection algorithm you use, and it isn't really any better in D3 multiplayer (when it comes to hit detection).
:)
Finding a new way to combat lag and synching displays so that everything feels natural for both the player shooting and the player getting hit, would probably make you quite a few bucks.
.. and all that were done in Europe (where the CD actually contains a "Copy Controlled"-marking, which I didn't see anything about when ordering it on the web), under Windows 2000 (with Auth-play disabled). The OGGs came out perfectly fine without any problems. Yes, the CD should be perfectly playable under linux (unless someone has implemented insertion notification and auto-run and automagical installation and implementation of windows drivers into the kernel. ;)
And this also goes for all other current protection systems that I've had my hands on during the last months.. No idea why they even try.