An on-line mmporg called Planetarion set up by a 5-person company called 5th Season in Norway has gone throught this cylcle already.
The game is/was based around hourly 'turns' running 24/7, and it is entirely html based, there is no client software beyond your browser. It has run for a few years now, and peaked at over 180,000 accounts when it was funded entirely by banner adverts, when the big advertising crash forced it to go 'pay to play' id dropped to around 10,000 people paying about $6-10 for a 3 month 'round'
Eventually, last November, they ran out of money and abandoned a round part way through. Possibly this was because the community of players didn't approve of recent changes to game design, or possibly because the game required too much on-line time to be successful in - strong alliances would expect a 12-hour on-line time per day from their members. The game has been take over by another company, Jolt, who plan a re-launch early this year.
I was very active in [Titans], the Legion [Vts], and originally in Yi-He Quan [YHQ], and had a lot of fun in the game, but I'm probably not playing the new round because to do well, you need to check your planet every 3-4 hours continually for 3 months.
...to simply look for a bug of weakness in the key verification software that exists in every xbox?
The object code for this must be readable somehow, and knowing microsoft it probably has some vulnerability, such as taking a few extra clock cycles to reject a key if it's partially correct, increasing as you get closer to the key.
Oh, btw, the legality of reverse engineering software for compatibility purposes is one of the very few rights that are actually enshrined in British law, so those of us who live in this jusridiction can find they key without falling foul of the law.
imagine if you could have one without all the DRM crap, with a firewire interface, in a nice case, with an LCD, then you could make a really neat portable MP3 player.
Oh wait, Apple already did this YEARS AGO! Why the hell is slashdot calling this news?
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, somehow, without internal nuclear fusion processes, like stars -- still manage to radiate more energy out into space than they receive directly from the Sun.
It's called 'cooling down', anything that you put in a relatively cold place, such as (for example) 'space', will do it.
This would need a bit of back-end work, but it could be automated, maybe a central cddb-type database of who the ads are for could be set up.
I'd like my browser to automagically block all corporate websites for companies that tried to push pop-us to me, politely informing me that I'm boycotting them. Until I actually try to visit their site, I don't even need to know that I'm boycotting, it's only important that I *they* know I am, which can be done by an automated mailing - It would not be spam, btw, as I do have a ralsky-style 'you sent me crap I'll send you crap' relationship with the clueless company.
You're missing my point - if the ads don't annoy me, then I don't avoid the company that placed the adverts, and they don't learn the lesson that annoying potential cusotmers is bad for business.
Anti-advert technology (such as Mozilla's pop up filtering, which I have turned on, and it's gif loop blocking which I choose not to have turned on btw) is removing the negative feedback element, which I feel is important if the offenders are to learn not to offend. All that happens is that the adverts carry on annoying the technological underclass that dosen't block them.
There needs to be some mechanism for people who are blocking pop ups to tell the company that is paying for the pop ups that their money is being wasted.
I would like to send out a standard form letter to marketing@foolishcompany.com telling them that: a) I didn't even see their dumb ad so they wasted nomey on it; and b) I will now be avoiding their products because they employ dumb advertising tactics.
The same goes for large format adverts, and for animated banners.
btw, if anyone from Sprint is reading this, well done for annoying me with a loop animated piece of crap at the top of the page I'm typing this in on. The product that doesn't work in my country, which I can't buy, because I don't even have any of the type of currency specified. I'd be boycotting you if you actually operated in any territory within 1000 miles of here, dumbasses!
From the Article: "Unlike with compression and decompression of computer programs (e.g. ZIP), that is to say, during lossy data compression (data reduction) the original signal is not reconstructed 1:1, but to reduce the data amount, only control signals for a synthesizer programs (called CODEC) get recorded, those are optimized in a way that during rendition the CODEC can reconstruct from these an approximation of the original picture or sound signal that appears as similar as possible for the human conscious perception, but is not identical to the original signal."
how they could decide that new TLDs were needed without first deciding what they would be.
Then I spotted this part of the BBC story:
Under the new plans, any organisation can propose a name. But it must prove that the new domain will represent a well-defined community closely associated with the domain name, and supply a $50,000 application fee. Final approval rests with Icann
Might I suggest that anyone stupid enough to give Icann $50,000 with the nothing in return but a 'we'll think about it' from a notoriously unaccountable organisation that is responsible for the lack of decent TLDs in the first place should be awarded a new.dumbass domain?
would be to simply overwhelm the spammer with false positives.
Spam generates at the very most 0.01% orders for the advertised product. What if 10% of recipients replied to the spam asking for more information, a borchure, or a sales representitive to visit a (false) address?
This would make it unconomic for the company theat the spam is being sent on befalf of to trawl the repies for the one real enquiry per thousand.
Implementing this would require a bit of effort, but running it for a year or so could prove very effective.
Dude, it's the ultimate Star Trek conversation, on the ultimate geek forum, ergo it's about as far from cool as it's possible to get without using a particle accelerator to crate an entire antimatter version of the Fonz.
If you are 100 metres deep, you are either going to be:
a) already dead, or about to die from decompression sickness b) a highly experienced scuba diver (in which case you will have a dive computer strapped where your watch would be) or c) in a pressurised submarine
You are unlikely to return alive and well from 50m unless you really know what you are doing, get anywhere near 100m and your watch will be the least of your worries.
Your criticisms are very much centred round the American music scene, and probably go a long way towards explaining the slower sales of Pistols product in America compared to Britain.
Rock music is not the same dominating force in music over here, pop, disco, r'n'b, even rap have much more mainstream success. The 'rock' bands that were successful before 1977 over here were in the middle of the excesses of 'prog-rock', where 3 disc concept albums roamed the earth like dinosaurs.
Effectively, we had such lame music scene that it was possible for an insightful person to step totally outside the types of music that were avaialable, pull influences from the punk scene (let's not forget that the Pistols were just the successful packaging of what The Damned and others were already doing), assemble the most objectionable people he could get, and capitalise on the disillusionment of the record buying public so successfully that we are still talking about it to this day.
The closest thing the US had to this was Nirvana - not such a big jump in musical style, but still a band that no-one in the record industry thought would sell.
btw, I'd disagree that the Pistols were talentless, they had a LOT of memorable songs (even if it was Tenpole Tudor that played some of them for them!), and as for guitarists, have a listen to Richard Thompson and tell me there are no amazing ones left!
Which country do you think the Oxford debating society is in?
It's worth noting that if you wanted to pick a group of people who are most likely to be in politics or influential media positions in Britain 10 years from now, you would be hard pushed to find a better grouping than 'students who are active in the Oxford debating society'
Probably because it's cheaper for the elevator (or lift if you are British like me) manufacturer to only stock 1 type of buttons (with braille) than make a special type just for multi-level car parks.
Oh, and there is the slim chance they would get sued by a blind person who couldn't work out which was the 'close door' button when the crack head who stabbed the person who drove them there was chasing after them.
Slashdot Mirror
An on-line mmporg called Planetarion set up by a 5-person company called 5th Season in Norway has gone throught this cylcle already.
The game is/was based around hourly 'turns' running 24/7, and it is entirely html based, there is no client software beyond your browser. It has run for a few years now, and peaked at over 180,000 accounts when it was funded entirely by banner adverts, when the big advertising crash forced it to go 'pay to play' id dropped to around 10,000 people paying about $6-10 for a 3 month 'round'
Eventually, last November, they ran out of money and abandoned a round part way through. Possibly this was because the community of players didn't approve of recent changes to game design, or possibly because the game required too much on-line time to be successful in - strong alliances would expect a 12-hour on-line time per day from their members. The game has been take over by another company, Jolt, who plan a re-launch early this year.
I was very active in [Titans], the Legion [Vts], and originally in Yi-He Quan [YHQ], and had a lot of fun in the game, but I'm probably not playing the new round because to do well, you need to check your planet every 3-4 hours continually for 3 months.
Wrong. The correct spelling of photograph is p-h-o-t-o-g-r-a-p-h.
Now spell...
...to simply look for a bug of weakness in the key verification software that exists in every xbox?
The object code for this must be readable somehow, and knowing microsoft it probably has some vulnerability, such as taking a few extra clock cycles to reject a key if it's partially correct, increasing as you get closer to the key.
Oh, btw, the legality of reverse engineering software for compatibility purposes is one of the very few rights that are actually enshrined in British law, so those of us who live in this jusridiction can find they key without falling foul of the law.
imagine if you could have one without all the DRM crap, with a firewire interface, in a nice case, with an LCD, then you could make a really neat portable MP3 player.
Oh wait, Apple already did this YEARS AGO! Why the hell is slashdot calling this news?
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, somehow, without internal nuclear fusion processes, like stars -- still manage to radiate more energy out into space than they receive directly from the Sun.
It's called 'cooling down', anything that you put in a relatively cold place, such as (for example) 'space', will do it.
It would have been so easy to say the machines used human brains as CPUs, and that's why they kept us around, instead of the battery rubbish.
I assume that in the later films we must find out that Morpheus was wrong about the reason the machnes are keeping humans around.
This would need a bit of back-end work, but it could be automated, maybe a central cddb-type database of who the ads are for could be set up.
I'd like my browser to automagically block all corporate websites for companies that tried to push pop-us to me, politely informing me that I'm boycotting them. Until I actually try to visit their site, I don't even need to know that I'm boycotting, it's only important that I *they* know I am, which can be done by an automated mailing - It would not be spam, btw, as I do have a ralsky-style 'you sent me crap I'll send you crap' relationship with the clueless company.
You're missing my point - if the ads don't annoy me, then I don't avoid the company that placed the adverts, and they don't learn the lesson that annoying potential cusotmers is bad for business.
Anti-advert technology (such as Mozilla's pop up filtering, which I have turned on, and it's gif loop blocking which I choose not to have turned on btw) is removing the negative feedback element, which I feel is important if the offenders are to learn not to offend. All that happens is that the adverts carry on annoying the technological underclass that dosen't block them.
There needs to be some mechanism for people who are blocking pop ups to tell the company that is paying for the pop ups that their money is being wasted.
I would like to send out a standard form letter to marketing@foolishcompany.com telling them that:
a) I didn't even see their dumb ad so they wasted nomey on it;
and b) I will now be avoiding their products because they employ dumb advertising tactics.
The same goes for large format adverts, and for animated banners.
btw, if anyone from Sprint is reading this, well done for annoying me with a loop animated piece of crap at the top of the page I'm typing this in on. The product that doesn't work in my country, which I can't buy, because I don't even have any of the type of currency specified. I'd be boycotting you if you actually operated in any territory within 1000 miles of here, dumbasses!
The article used jpeg compression on the pictures, I'll never be able to see properly again!
From the Article: "Unlike with compression and decompression of computer programs (e.g. ZIP), that is to say, during lossy data compression (data reduction) the original signal is not reconstructed 1:1, but to reduce the data amount, only control signals for a synthesizer programs (called CODEC) get recorded, those are optimized in a way that during rendition the CODEC can reconstruct from these an approximation of the original picture or sound signal that appears as similar as possible for the human conscious perception, but is not identical to the original signal."
Translated to English:
Lossy compression loses some of the data,
The author of the article seems to lack any relevant qualifications, any proof of his ideas, or indeed basic proofreading abilities.
He does say that CDs are overpriced though, so it must be worth posting on Slashdot.
so the CD is not slot loading then? ;-)
Wow, Really? Well, that's one set of cut scenes I sure won't be skipping!
The pages are stuck together for a different reason!
Probably around the same time us British start writing our contry name on our postage stamps.
We set the idea of postage stamps up, so we ended up being the default, just like the US did for domains.
how they could decide that new TLDs were needed without first deciding what they would be.
.dumbass domain?
Then I spotted this part of the BBC story:
Under the new plans, any organisation can propose a name. But it must prove that the new domain will represent a well-defined community closely associated with the domain name, and supply a $50,000 application fee. Final approval rests with Icann
Might I suggest that anyone stupid enough to give Icann $50,000 with the nothing in return but a 'we'll think about it' from a notoriously unaccountable organisation that is responsible for the lack of decent TLDs in the first place should be awarded a new
would be to simply overwhelm the spammer with false positives.
Spam generates at the very most 0.01% orders for the advertised product. What if 10% of recipients replied to the spam asking for more information, a borchure, or a sales representitive to visit a (false) address?
This would make it unconomic for the company theat the spam is being sent on befalf of to trawl the repies for the one real enquiry per thousand.
Implementing this would require a bit of effort, but running it for a year or so could prove very effective.
Dude, it's the ultimate Star Trek conversation, on the ultimate geek forum, ergo it's about as far from cool as it's possible to get without using a particle accelerator to crate an entire antimatter version of the Fonz.
If you are 100 metres deep, you are either going to be:
a) already dead, or about to die from decompression sickness
b) a highly experienced scuba diver (in which case you will have a dive computer strapped where your watch would be) or
c) in a pressurised submarine
You are unlikely to return alive and well from 50m unless you really know what you are doing, get anywhere near 100m and your watch will be the least of your worries.
Your criticisms are very much centred round the American music scene, and probably go a long way towards explaining the slower sales of Pistols product in America compared to Britain.
Rock music is not the same dominating force in music over here, pop, disco, r'n'b, even rap have much more mainstream success. The 'rock' bands that were successful before 1977 over here were in the middle of the excesses of 'prog-rock', where 3 disc concept albums roamed the earth like dinosaurs.
Effectively, we had such lame music scene that it was possible for an insightful person to step totally outside the types of music that were avaialable, pull influences from the punk scene (let's not forget that the Pistols were just the successful packaging of what The Damned and others were already doing), assemble the most objectionable people he could get, and capitalise on the disillusionment of the record buying public so successfully that we are still talking about it to this day.
The closest thing the US had to this was Nirvana - not such a big jump in musical style, but still a band that no-one in the record industry thought would sell.
btw, I'd disagree that the Pistols were talentless, they had a LOT of memorable songs (even if it was Tenpole Tudor that played some of them for them!), and as for guitarists, have a listen to Richard Thompson and tell me there are no amazing ones left!
Which country do you think the Oxford debating society is in?
It's worth noting that if you wanted to pick a group of people who are most likely to be in politics or influential media positions in Britain 10 years from now, you would be hard pushed to find a better grouping than 'students who are active in the Oxford debating society'
This is just Dilbert wthout the jokes!
Probably because it's cheaper for the elevator (or lift if you are British like me) manufacturer to only stock 1 type of buttons (with braille) than make a special type just for multi-level car parks.
Oh, and there is the slim chance they would get sued by a blind person who couldn't work out which was the 'close door' button when the crack head who stabbed the person who drove them there was chasing after them.
"DRM enabled computers"
Don't you mean "DRM disabled computers"?
It's a crippling technology, not an enabling one.