if the game is too easy, then you probably wouldn't spend 7 months (paying fees) playing it.
What I don't get is why these companies just don't make it impossible to item farm. Make the big ticket items nodrop (can't be dropped or given to another character). Want the Slothful Sword of Everslaying? get it yourself, or not at all. Poof, item farmers get day jobs.
As for character trading, why not have a "master" account that is tied to your credit card number? This master account can create any number of "game" characters. But the master account can only play as it's own game characters. Poof, no more character trading, unless you are also willing to trade your ccard number in the transaction. Poof, character ranchers get day jobs.
Poof, everyone else continues to have fun playing the game as it was designed and balanced. Forget the legal department.
Re:Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
on
The Coldest March
·
· Score: 2
a documentary on this was recently shown at a theatre in Chicago. I saw it, it was amazing. It was not a "based on" story, but rather a true documentary.
there is an old (1999 ish) article at www.gamasutra.com/features/19990903/lincroft_01.ht m (free reg required) that talks about all the net play problems that the Xwing vs Tie Fighter team faced.
I remember reading it a while ago before you had to register, it had alot of insights as to saving game states, lag, updates, and "late joiners" to a game.
it would be interesting to setup a "workgroup" system, where many macs in a company all had the
cluster client and could also schedule their own tasks on the cluster.
You'd have one big "virtual cpu pool" that anyone could tap into as needed, and it would use any spare cycles available across the entire set. So if you need to do some crazy photoshop function and five of your neighbors are checking email or posting on slashdot, your job would run that much faster.
throw a nice -10 on the cluster client and nobody would even notice.
no kidding. I got a Kyocera Smartphone with verizon service and it ROCKS. The Smartphone is basically a cell phone that runs PalmOS (similar size black and white screen).
The phone acts as a modem, and verizon gives you a "free" ip address (it burns normal minutes if you log into their ISP, takes about 10 seconds). I can run any PQA and I can tap a phone number in the address book to dial it.
It can receive SMS messages via email gateway, and it comes with Eudora. I setup my email to fork a copy to the phone's email address, so I get wireless email notification. I can download the full message in Eudora, and respond or do whatever. Screw blackberry.
The "batman belt of death" is over for me: my cell phone, pager and Handspring Visor are all replaced by this one device. Battery life is about 60 hours standby, longer if you shut the phone off.
My major wishlist items for this phone are a color screen and some kind of MP3 playback ability. Then it would be the end all of belt gadgets!
as far as I know, most of the development on mozilla is done by netscape programmers who happen to be on AOL's payroll. Thus the statement ".. the improvements that have been made to it came through Mozilla not from AOL" doesn't make sense.
or they could provide patches only for the first few days after a release (forcing the rabid hordes to learn how to patch if they want the goods NOW) and then, at a random later time, post the full tarball. this might cause some percentage of ppl to get into the habit of patching, which should make a significant dent in their bandwidth needs.
I don't buy the "industry standard boilerplate" line. what, did a lawyer one day accidentally type up the idea of invading homes to verify compliance, and accidentally spell checked it, then accidentally cut and pasted it into the license document? Perhaps a cat walked across the lawyer's keyboard and managed to bang out the "you shall have no legal recourse and waive all constitutional rights" paragraph. Perhaps they should invest in that cat-walking-on-keyboard-detection program I read about on/. a while back.
And all the proofreaders accidentally skipped over reading it, too. Ridiculous, unless they employ cats for that too.
definitely. I put in spamassassin + vipul's razor on my utility linux machine, and I have it fetchmail my various accounts and scrub them. I use gotmail to fetch my hotmail and run it through the scrubber. this combo catches about 95% of all spam (and my hotmail account gets about 50 spams per day). Every other day I get one piece of spam or so.
Now I have all my accounts collected in one place and scrubbed. I even put in a webmail system (sqirrelmail.org) so I can fetch it remotely via ssl. If you have the means to hook up a setup like this I highly recommend it.
indeed chrisd. otherwise people will pick on every turn of phrase or minor comment in your post, trash it and you, and generate karma for themselves.
Chrisd, everything you said is wrong and sucks, and you are a slashdot editor, so everything you said is doubly wrong and sucky. And I can't believe you used the word "the" in your article. Clearly you do not understand even the basics of computing, and you should submit yourself to the Soylent Green recycling center immediately.
and I now their is a spelling mis take in they're somewhere, I just don't halve thyme to find it and generate karma form it. Ewe should use a spell czech pogrom.
true, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for some of the defendants in the article:
Company officials say two former workers acted with malice by putting up about 14,000 postings on 100 message boards. The messages accused managers of being homophobic and of discriminating against pregnant women, officials say.
and Last month, a California appeals court ruled against a fired Intel employee, Ken Hamidi. He had sent e-mails to as many as 35,000 workers airing grievances; Intel officials say they took legal action only after asking him to stop.
at some point, you gotta stop and think about what's actually happening.
I noticed that too. probably a cheap attempt to cash in on a slashdotting. I think it's pretty lame, I hope the editors filter out such junk in future posts.
actually, that did happen to her pc. by some freak of bios during a power outagage, her frontside bus got reduced and she ended up losing about 30% of her cpu speed (and less clock too).
she never noticed. The only reason she mentioned it is because she remembered the bios boot screen used to say a different number near the "Mega something".
give her "American Online," Word, and the games for the kids, and she has all she needs. I'd put her on linux if it had the apps.
the speed of the desktop will not be wha makes or breaks linux on the desktop. As a matter of fact, nothing that KDE/Trolltech/Ximian/whatever will make a difference to user adoption rates.
It's all about apps. 100%. The linux desktop revolution will start with a set of killer apps, which will draw people in. Nobody gives a rats ass about QT vs Athena vs GTK, or even how fast or stable they are. A buggy, slow, unstable 16 bit OS will beat the fastest, snazziest, most stable 32 bit OS any day, if the 16 bit OS has the apps in it's corner.
If you ask my sister in law what operating system she is running on her pc, you get a short silence, followed by "Microsoft Office 98. And AOL." At first this seems like a ridiculous response, but it's more insightful than you think. To her, and everyone else who doesn't hack computers for a living, the apps ARE the computer, and are not really distinguishable.
So don't wait for KDE or Redhat or Suse to do some Magic Thing that will cause the linux-on-desktop numbers to start climbing. Look at the functionality of Evolution, Star Office and the Gimp. The apps will be your barometer.
One of the reasons it died is sort of summed up by this comment in the linked article:
Most of this applications section isn't really about operating systems, but about the apps available for the operating systems, so you might want to skip it if you're just looking for the OS comparisons. However, I believe that the applications landscape is an integral part of the total OS experience, so included it here.
The problem is that apps are not "an integral part" of a computing experience. They are almost the totality of it. With the exception of some supergeeks, nobody buys a computer in order to run the operating system. People buy computers to run apps. No matter how lickable the shutdown/adduser/finder screen interface is, without real apps a system is doomed. If Be had all the killer apps that people buy computers for, it would still be alive today.
Nobody cares about threading, "multimedia support", or POSIX. Users want Photoshop, MS Word, Quicken, Halo and that goofy little custom VB app that runs your small company's entire finance department.
Marcelo, please discuss what exactly this great responsibility means to you in terms of your childhood and your relationship with your parents.
MT: it's groovy...
Tell us your psychological approach to kernel development vis-a-vis great 19th century philosophers.
MT: not now. maybe later. sorry...
Some people have likened coding to a visual-perceptual dialectic where the dynamic energy of structure versus entropy result in communal "oneness." What are your thoughts on this?
MT: Code is green...
Is there anything else you'd like to add to this interview, given that you now have a chance to speak to the large slashdot community? Any particular issues you feel strongly about?
karma cap rant: what you're saying is 100% correct, except for the fact that 47 karma is exactly as valuable as 50 karma. once you can post at +1, what is the point?
The karma cap is a good idea, if only to prevent people from playing slashdot like a video game, trying to "max their score" by any available means.
because "songs" is actually a good way to describe approximate capacity to the average person. Try explaining "VBR, 128kbps floor, 320kbps ceiling, LAME" to your mother, along with a statistical analysis of how many femtoseconds of creative sonic intellectual property (or music) that gets you. And remind her of the difference between KBps and Kbps while you're at it.
Or you get your head out of your pci slot, and say "about a thousand songs."
this fink maintainer (Christoph Pfisterer) really does need to get off the project, and onto some valium. reading the threads he posted after his rant one gets the impression that he is on a permanent caffeine-stress-hairtrigger high. jeez.
The email exchange between him and the supposed gpl violators is a hoot. The very first response Christoph got from the company was "did we screw up? tell us how to give proper credit," and Christoph then proceeds to continue bashing and raving.
It really sounds like christoph needs a major vacation, the stress seems to be breaking him. I don't know any of the people/orgs involved, but just read his rant and the links he posted at the bottom.
indeed. Are movies art? are photographs art? Well, it's too broad a question. Films, photography, and videogames are a *medium*, and as such they can be many different things. "movies" and "photographs" encompass things like documentaries, security camera videos, medical images, astronomical images, etc. Whether any particular product is "art" depends on what you define art to be.
In the same vein, it's ridiculous to ask whether "video games" are art. Video games can be anything from educational, to part of scientific experiments, to, well, anything.
The field of photography initially went through a stage where people doubted and debated whether photographs were art or mere transcription. As the field evolved the question became more refined: is *this particular* photograph art? That the technology of photography can produce art is no longer in question. Digital Interactive Entertainment or Video Games or whatever you want to call it will eventually go through the same cycle and come to the same conclusion.
Is Final Fantasy VII "art"? Is Mavis Beacon Typing Teacher? Is this even a valid comparison?
I'd recommend finding a solution that works for 200 or so video stations, then split up your cameras/back end systems into chunks of that size.
So find a 200 video solution, and duplicate it five times, situating each site in a geographically convienient manner. A bit of coding glue on the back end might let you have a centralized index.
A single mechanism to handle that much traffic is going to run into many problems and probably won't be satisfactory. bandidth, storage, encoding time, etc for a smaller number of cameras is far more tractable for a smaller number of machines.
This also gives you a way to scale. What happens six months later, when now you have 1300 cameras to deal with? add another site. With a good template, your costs become very predictable, you have a built in mechanism for pilot testing (you will learn ALOT from building the first site), and your project time to scale up becomes easier to estimate.
hmn... what could a giant company with more money that God and more lawyers than Satan possibly do to scare anyone?
Perhaps a nice, friendly reminder was sent that Experian could possibly sic an entire legal firm on *each* of the MAPS team members, attacking them personally with dozens of lawsuits that would bankrupt them immediately. Or perhaps another reminder that credit reports sometimes have errors that could cause your bank account and credit cards to all be cancelled, not to mention your house and car might be repossessed. Such errors are usually caught in fixed in only a couple of years.
Then there's the small matter of the long cooperation between credit rating companies and various law enforcement agents. How far could that go... hmn.
Slashdot Mirror
if the game is too easy, then you probably wouldn't spend 7 months (paying fees) playing it.
What I don't get is why these companies just don't make it impossible to item farm. Make the big ticket items nodrop (can't be dropped or given to another character). Want the Slothful Sword of Everslaying? get it yourself, or not at all. Poof, item farmers get day jobs.
As for character trading, why not have a "master" account that is tied to your credit card number? This master account can create any number of "game" characters. But the master account can only play as it's own game characters. Poof, no more character trading, unless you are also willing to trade your ccard number in the transaction. Poof, character ranchers get day jobs.
Poof, everyone else continues to have fun playing the game as it was designed and balanced. Forget the legal department.
a documentary on this was recently shown at a theatre in Chicago. I saw it, it was amazing. It was not a "based on" story, but rather a true documentary.
there is an old (1999 ish) article at www.gamasutra.com/features/19990903/lincroft_01.ht m (free reg required) that talks about all the net play problems that the Xwing vs Tie Fighter team faced.
I remember reading it a while ago before you had to register, it had alot of insights as to saving game states, lag, updates, and "late joiners" to a game.
it would be interesting to setup a "workgroup" system, where many macs in a company all had the
cluster client and could also schedule their own tasks on the cluster.
You'd have one big "virtual cpu pool" that anyone could tap into as needed, and it would use any spare cycles available across the entire set. So if you need to do some crazy photoshop function and five of your neighbors are checking email or posting on slashdot, your job would run that much faster.
throw a nice -10 on the cluster client and nobody would even notice.
no kidding. I got a Kyocera Smartphone with verizon service and it ROCKS. The Smartphone is basically a cell phone that runs PalmOS (similar size black and white screen).
The phone acts as a modem, and verizon gives you a "free" ip address (it burns normal minutes if you log into their ISP, takes about 10 seconds). I can run any PQA and I can tap a phone number in the address book to dial it.
It can receive SMS messages via email gateway, and it comes with Eudora. I setup my email to fork a copy to the phone's email address, so I get wireless email notification. I can download the full message in Eudora, and respond or do whatever. Screw blackberry.
The "batman belt of death" is over for me: my cell phone, pager and Handspring Visor are all replaced by this one device. Battery life is about 60 hours standby, longer if you shut the phone off.
My major wishlist items for this phone are a color screen and some kind of MP3 playback ability. Then it would be the end all of belt gadgets!
as far as I know, most of the development on mozilla is done by netscape programmers who happen to be on AOL's payroll. Thus the statement ".. the improvements that have been made to it came through Mozilla not from AOL" doesn't make sense.
or they could provide patches only for the first few days after a release (forcing the rabid hordes to learn how to patch if they want the goods NOW) and then, at a random later time, post the full tarball. this might cause some percentage of ppl to get into the habit of patching, which should make a significant dent in their bandwidth needs.
I don't buy the "industry standard boilerplate" line. what, did a lawyer one day accidentally type up the idea of invading homes to verify compliance, and accidentally spell checked it, then accidentally cut and pasted it into the license document? Perhaps a cat walked across the lawyer's keyboard and managed to bang out the "you shall have no legal recourse and waive all constitutional rights" paragraph. Perhaps they should invest in that cat-walking-on-keyboard-detection program I read about on /. a while back.
And all the proofreaders accidentally skipped over reading it, too. Ridiculous, unless they employ cats for that too.
definitely. I put in spamassassin + vipul's razor on my utility linux machine, and I have it fetchmail my various accounts and scrub them. I use gotmail to fetch my hotmail and run it through the scrubber. this combo catches about 95% of all spam (and my hotmail account gets about 50 spams per day). Every other day I get one piece of spam or so.
Now I have all my accounts collected in one place and scrubbed. I even put in a webmail system (sqirrelmail.org) so I can fetch it remotely via ssl. If you have the means to hook up a setup like this I highly recommend it.
C'mon chrisd, do try harder next time
indeed chrisd. otherwise people will pick on every turn of phrase or minor comment in your post, trash it and you, and generate karma for themselves.
Chrisd, everything you said is wrong and sucks, and you are a slashdot editor, so everything you said is doubly wrong and sucky. And I can't believe you used the word "the" in your article. Clearly you do not understand even the basics of computing, and you should submit yourself to the Soylent Green recycling center immediately.
and I now their is a spelling mis take in they're somewhere, I just don't halve thyme to find it and generate karma form it. Ewe should use a spell czech pogrom.
C'mon chrisd, do try harder next time.
true, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for some of the defendants in the article:
Company officials say two former workers acted with malice by putting up about 14,000 postings on 100 message boards. The messages accused managers of being homophobic and of discriminating against pregnant women, officials say.
and
Last month, a California appeals court ruled against a fired Intel employee, Ken Hamidi. He had sent e-mails to as many as 35,000 workers airing grievances; Intel officials say they took legal action only after asking him to stop.
at some point, you gotta stop and think about what's actually happening.
sad when "the future of music" seems to depend more on lawyers than artists.
I noticed that too. probably a cheap attempt to cash in on a slashdotting. I think it's pretty lame, I hope the editors filter out such junk in future posts.
... and that to attempt communication you need a radio antenna.
I can't believe he let that slip either! I mean, really, now everyone knows that his satellite com link isn't a really long ethernet cable.
actually, that did happen to her pc. by some freak of bios during a power outagage, her frontside bus got reduced and she ended up losing about 30% of her cpu speed (and less clock too).
she never noticed. The only reason she mentioned it is because she remembered the bios boot screen used to say a different number near the "Mega something".
give her "American Online," Word, and the games for the kids, and she has all she needs. I'd put her on linux if it had the apps.
the speed of the desktop will not be wha makes or breaks linux on the desktop. As a matter of fact, nothing that KDE/Trolltech/Ximian/whatever will make a difference to user adoption rates.
It's all about apps. 100%. The linux desktop revolution will start with a set of killer apps, which will draw people in. Nobody gives a rats ass about QT vs Athena vs GTK, or even how fast or stable they are. A buggy, slow, unstable 16 bit OS will beat the fastest, snazziest, most stable 32 bit OS any day, if the 16 bit OS has the apps in it's corner.
If you ask my sister in law what operating system she is running on her pc, you get a short silence, followed by "Microsoft Office 98. And AOL." At first this seems like a ridiculous response, but it's more insightful than you think. To her, and everyone else who doesn't hack computers for a living, the apps ARE the computer, and are not really distinguishable.
So don't wait for KDE or Redhat or Suse to do some Magic Thing that will cause the linux-on-desktop numbers to start climbing. Look at the functionality of Evolution, Star Office and the Gimp. The apps will be your barometer.
One of the reasons it died is sort of summed up by this comment in the linked article:
Most of this applications section isn't really about operating systems, but about the apps available for the operating systems, so you might want to skip it if you're just looking for the OS comparisons. However, I believe that the applications landscape is an integral part of the total OS experience, so included it here.
The problem is that apps are not "an integral part" of a computing experience. They are almost the totality of it. With the exception of some supergeeks, nobody buys a computer in order to run the operating system. People buy computers to run apps. No matter how lickable the shutdown/adduser/finder screen interface is, without real apps a system is doomed. If Be had all the killer apps that people buy computers for, it would still be alive today.
Nobody cares about threading, "multimedia support", or POSIX. Users want Photoshop, MS Word, Quicken, Halo and that goofy little custom VB app that runs your small company's entire finance department.
Spare me the "OS Shootouts." Gimme the apps.
Marcelo, please discuss what exactly this great responsibility means to you in terms of your childhood and your relationship with your parents.
...
MT: it's groovy...
Tell us your psychological approach to kernel development vis-a-vis great 19th century philosophers.
MT: not now. maybe later. sorry...
Some people have likened coding to a visual-perceptual dialectic where the dynamic energy of structure versus entropy result in communal "oneness." What are your thoughts on this?
MT: Code is green...
Is there anything else you'd like to add to this interview, given that you now have a chance to speak to the large slashdot community? Any particular issues you feel strongly about?
MT:
karma cap rant: what you're saying is 100% correct, except for the fact that 47 karma is exactly as valuable as 50 karma. once you can post at +1, what is the point?
The karma cap is a good idea, if only to prevent people from playing slashdot like a video game, trying to "max their score" by any available means.
Or you get your head out of your pci slot, and say "about a thousand songs."
this story sounds like it came right out of the Slashdot Story Generator
this fink maintainer (Christoph Pfisterer) really does need to get off the project, and onto some valium. reading the threads he posted after his rant one gets the impression that he is on a permanent caffeine-stress-hairtrigger high. jeez.
The email exchange between him and the supposed gpl violators is a hoot. The very first response Christoph got from the company was "did we screw up? tell us how to give proper credit," and Christoph then proceeds to continue bashing and raving.
It really sounds like christoph needs a major vacation, the stress seems to be breaking him. I don't know any of the people/orgs involved, but just read his rant and the links he posted at the bottom.
indeed. Are movies art? are photographs art? Well, it's too broad a question. Films, photography, and videogames are a *medium*, and as such they can be many different things. "movies" and "photographs" encompass things like documentaries, security camera videos, medical images, astronomical images, etc. Whether any particular product is "art" depends on what you define art to be.
In the same vein, it's ridiculous to ask whether "video games" are art. Video games can be anything from educational, to part of scientific experiments, to, well, anything.
The field of photography initially went through a stage where people doubted and debated whether photographs were art or mere transcription. As the field evolved the question became more refined: is *this particular* photograph art? That the technology of photography can produce art is no longer in question. Digital Interactive Entertainment or Video Games or whatever you want to call it will eventually go through the same cycle and come to the same conclusion.
Is Final Fantasy VII "art"? Is Mavis Beacon Typing Teacher? Is this even a valid comparison?
I'd recommend finding a solution that works for 200 or so video stations, then split up your cameras/back end systems into chunks of that size.
So find a 200 video solution, and duplicate it five times, situating each site in a geographically convienient manner. A bit of coding glue on the back end might let you have a centralized index.
A single mechanism to handle that much traffic is going to run into many problems and probably won't be satisfactory. bandidth, storage, encoding time, etc for a smaller number of cameras is far more tractable for a smaller number of machines.
This also gives you a way to scale. What happens six months later, when now you have 1300 cameras to deal with? add another site. With a good template, your costs become very predictable, you have a built in mechanism for pilot testing (you will learn ALOT from building the first site), and your project time to scale up becomes easier to estimate.
hmn... what could a giant company with more money that God and more lawyers than Satan possibly do to scare anyone?
Perhaps a nice, friendly reminder was sent that Experian could possibly sic an entire legal firm on *each* of the MAPS team members, attacking them personally with dozens of lawsuits that would bankrupt them immediately. Or perhaps another reminder that credit reports sometimes have errors that could cause your bank account and credit cards to all be cancelled, not to mention your house and car might be repossessed. Such errors are usually caught in fixed in only a couple of years.
Then there's the small matter of the long cooperation between credit rating companies and various law enforcement agents. How far could that go... hmn.