Multiply those estimates by 10 and you'll get numbers closer to reality.
I picked up the game at 1pm, it wasn't until 7pm when I finally set my eyes on City 17.
Worth the wait for sure, but there's something incredibly frustrating in waiting for years for something, finally having your wait come to and end, PAYING YOUR MONEY FOR THE PRODUCT, and then being DENIED for another half a day until they decide to let you play.
This game was years in the making, there is *no* excuses whatsoever that could be made why this system didn't work flawlessly.
I prefer "Rush is a fat, hypocritical junkie who is despoiling a CNN anchorwoman by snorting powered oxycontin off her navel before impotently flailing her with his limp manhood and blaming liberals for his inability to perform."
There was something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me. The handwriting was all pretty curves.
"You're in a computer game, Max..."
The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. Weapon statistics hanging in the air, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. The endless repetition of the act of shooting, time slowing down to show off my moves, the paranoid feeling of someone controlling my every step...
I was in a computer game.
Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could I think of.
Hmmm... I think I've played a little too much Max.
I've played with programming the GBA (I'm toying with making a remake of M.U.L.E. on the platform) and even though I know the chances of my making any money off it are slim, it's an incredibly fun little gadget to tinker with. It really harkens me back to the days of the 65c02 and coding down to the metal with atari 8bits (complete with vblank and hblank interrupts, on-the-fly display list alterations and so forth), when writing a simple and enjoyable game was something where a one man crew could do a respectable job.
Don't do GBA if you plan on getting paid (although I suppose you could always shareware out one if it's really really good, and potentially stump it to nintendo types)... but if you just want to have fun with it, the GBA is an outstanding choice.
There's already things out there that do exactly what you describe for scooping text updates on DOS. BBSes used to use them in 'Doors' applications when playing text-based games online. It'd scoop changes and push them across the serial line.
Because I'd rather be part of the solution than part of the problem. As it is I sort of AM bouncing them back, de facto:
Virus mail spoofs a nonexistant from: address on my domain, sends it to server 'x'.
Server 'x' bounces the mail to the nonexistant From: with a 'this is a virus, bad bad bad' message. Maybe it also adds the virus itself into the message (yes, some do this!) and mangles it just enough that clamav won't detect it on my side.
My server receives the unfortunately now-legitimate mail and during processing realizes "I don't know this user", bouncing a 'User not found' message back to the sender. Adding in special rules to avoid bounces-on-bounces are only marginally successful, as there's no standard to judge if an incoming email is a bounce itself.
... and thus one virus mail generates 2 additional mails' worth of traffic in certain circumstances. The really annoying part is that it's well known these viruses are From: spoofers, and that the so-called 'industrial strength' tools that generate these replies (Norton, anyone?) haven't the brains to figure out that replying to a spoofed from: won't accomplish squat.
I could mitigate the problem somewhat by letting unknown user events just fall into the black hole, but there are many instances where they're legit typeos. It's just too useful a function to give up at the moment... and even if I did, it wouldn't solve the problem of traffic amplification due to mismanaged services.
Unfortunately I was caught working on another project, and the serious inflow came between 'freshclam' updates... inside that 12 hour spam we ended up with about 40,000 of the things clogging up the works and god only knows how many untold thousands dropped on the front end. After getting the update in and cleaning out the garbage we're getting several thousand an hour, but the server barely notices it.
One trick which helped ease the burden is that the majority of the emails are coming in with very specific topics: "hi", "hello", "test", "status" and "server report". Added this line to my postfix spamfilter rules and it eased a LOT of the burden immediately:
/Subject:.*(hi|hello|test|status|server report)$/ REJECT 550 Your email has the subject of an Worm.SCO.A viral message. Change your subject and resend.
If you're an administrator out there reading this, for the love of whatever god you hold dear TURN OFF YOUR BLOODY VIRUS BOUNCE MESSAGES! I've had as many 'replies' to faked From: headers as virus mails. You're making the problem far worse than it otherwise would be!
I just had to flush out 40,000 of those damn Worm.SCO.A mails, and they're still crunching along...
Amavis (running clamav) has an option in there to specify which virii should be dropped instead of replied to, although it's manual so until you know how your virus software will ID things you'll probably dump replies. Maybe it'd be handy for AV database maintainers to add a flag, like a 'from header spoofer, please don't reply or you'll just make things worse' boolean.
If there's any sort of god anywhere, he will NOT let another celluloid travesty be produced on the scale that the stinkfest 'House of the Dead' was.
HotD has replaced Gigli and Ishtar as the Worst Movie Evar(tm). Not only would I recommend not seeing it, I'd probably encourage people to gouge their own eyes out if they were to be forced to see it. It'd probably hurt less.
Natural diamonds are more valuable purely on the basis of an extensive (And obviously highly successful) marketing campaign by those heavily vested in the diamond trade.
It's really quite amazing what they've been able to pull off... probably the biggest coup being that they've been able to convince a big portion of the world that diamonds are rare and therefore justify their massive price. In fact the world is virtually awash with diamonds, and if offered as a commodity in a free market their value would plummet. Ahh, the joy of a monopoly.
Bottom line, the majority of value in diamonds is 'branding' (of a unusual sort). Should that branding ever be co-opted by, say, widespread acceptance of low-cost manufactured diamonds you'll start seeing every mallrat teenybopper picking up diamonds at la senza and wearing 'em to school.
Counter-prediction: Simply by the fact that things will be able to be reproduced for pennies means exactly that the original, hard-to-assemble objects will become exceedingly rare and valuable collectors peices, and command exhorbitant prices.
I can easily get lithographics of a Renoir for a few bucks, but an original will cost big bucks.
I think it's mostly just a nostalgia thing. People can play pacman via MAME too, but some still love having the original stand-up to play at. Drop in a quarter, crank up the Talking Heads (or whatever your fave 80s band is) and just let the worries of today melt away...
...back to a simpler time, when everyone knew good from bad, computers were things mostly just the propellorheads buried deep in the bowels of universities and banks used, and hair was BIG!
That's what the focus of the article is on, anyways. You kids today wouldn't understand these things.:D hehe
Probably the nicest packaging of a game I'd ever had in my hand was the instructions for Omnitrend's Universe, a large padded binder which housed the disks and the games' extensive instructions, beautifully printed. Nothing today even comes close. Hell, the International Olympics Committee probably doesn't get documentation that fine when being pitched.
A massive game in its day (5 disks!), it covered pretty much every aspect of the space-trader genre, including combat, mining, and used "real" equations to match orbits with space stations and target ships given the parameters of the parts you had installed in your vessel. The only downside of the magnum opus was the fact that all the disk swapping made it tedious to play at times.
Ahhh, the memories. I should see if I can find some images of that and throw it on an Atari emulator for a retro trip. Maybe it won't be quite so obnoxious if I don't actually have to physically swap all those disks back and forth.:D
I've seen a lot of people comment (well, piss and moan really) about the fact that they:
a) Never heard of these things, and
b) Would probably never use them
Obviously the criteria for choosing these tools as being worthy of mention isn't based on how sexy they are, it's based on how USEFUL they are.
OSS development still suffers from an excess of people wanting to work on the 'sexy' code... the things that blink and humm and make people go 'wow cool', and a deficit of coders willing to slug it out on the basic, relatively un-sexy tools that make those other things possible. Giving kudos to people who take the time to build solid and dependable frameworks enhances OSS and software generally, and imo deserves more recognition than they currently get.
Who knows, maybe they can encourage a shift in young coder minds that building solid tools can be sexy too...
Stuff like that and IPv6 support are still not all that important for many people providing simple, 'classic' authoritative lookup. It is starting to show its age at this point though, I'd agree, and is probably a function more of the author's stubbornness than anything else as to why the software hasn't seen updates.
I'd opt for damn near anything over BIND, though. I've been around for a while, and it's caused me more than enough headaches to last me a lifetime, thank you all the same, zippy ska-bang dhcp updating or no.
Nah, you're being honest. I've seen the third party patches but for what I need them to do (basically push out classic ipv4 resolutions reliably and securely without any of the newer, fancier addon goodies), it works peachy. The point of the post wasn't whether it does everything that everyone wants it to do today, more a reflection as to how solid and hax0rproof the code itself is.
Unfortunately, a lot of highly skilled immigrants are denied recognition of their skills in canada without length re-certification... witness the hoops foreign doctors have to endure.
That being said, pretty much every recent arrival to canada I've had the pleasure of chatting with have all expressed an overall satisfaction with coming, aside from those 'little issues' that everyone has to deal with when switching countries and cultures.
Recently, some neighbors of ours had an "80s Retro House Party" (yes, it really WAS as lame as it sounds;) and being the good neighborhood geek I trundled out an old p2-300 and stuck MAME on it with the 80s gaming classics: Galaga, Joust, Pacman and so forth.
I think perhaps 2 adults of the several dozen that were there ever got a chance to play. The kids were fighting over who got to have a chance at jousting each other.
Maybe these kids are particularly "urbanized" (once you play GTA:VC it's hard to go back to nibbling dots, admittedly) but from what I've seen kids are just as enthused about oldschool games as we were... except now, they don't have to pay for 'em. GG MAME!:D
... you count the *nix administrators who had to scramble to put in antivirus software on the corporate mail server to stem the tide of 50k+ virus mails per day.
On the plus side, if you work as a contractor, it's billable hours.:D GG SoBillable^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSoBig!
Slashdot Mirror
Which means that you won't be passing the buck. ;)
I picked up the game at 1pm, it wasn't until 7pm when I finally set my eyes on City 17.
Worth the wait for sure, but there's something incredibly frustrating in waiting for years for something, finally having your wait come to and end, PAYING YOUR MONEY FOR THE PRODUCT, and then being DENIED for another half a day until they decide to let you play.
This game was years in the making, there is *no* excuses whatsoever that could be made why this system didn't work flawlessly.
The devil is in the details. :D
... to plot how quickly his site gets slashdotted. ;)
"You're in a computer game, Max..."
The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. Weapon statistics hanging in the air, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. The endless repetition of the act of shooting, time slowing down to show off my moves, the paranoid feeling of someone controlling my every step...
I was in a computer game.
Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could I think of.
Hmmm... I think I've played a little too much Max.
Don't do GBA if you plan on getting paid (although I suppose you could always shareware out one if it's really really good, and potentially stump it to nintendo types)... but if you just want to have fun with it, the GBA is an outstanding choice.
There's already things out there that do exactly what you describe for scooping text updates on DOS. BBSes used to use them in 'Doors' applications when playing text-based games online. It'd scoop changes and push them across the serial line.
I could mitigate the problem somewhat by letting unknown user events just fall into the black hole, but there are many instances where they're legit typeos. It's just too useful a function to give up at the moment... and even if I did, it wouldn't solve the problem of traffic amplification due to mismanaged services.
One trick which helped ease the burden is that the majority of the emails are coming in with very specific topics: "hi", "hello", "test", "status" and "server report". Added this line to my postfix spamfilter rules and it eased a LOT of the burden immediately:
If you're an administrator out there reading this, for the love of whatever god you hold dear TURN OFF YOUR BLOODY VIRUS BOUNCE MESSAGES! I've had as many 'replies' to faked From: headers as virus mails. You're making the problem far worse than it otherwise would be!Amavis (running clamav) has an option in there to specify which virii should be dropped instead of replied to, although it's manual so until you know how your virus software will ID things you'll probably dump replies. Maybe it'd be handy for AV database maintainers to add a flag, like a 'from header spoofer, please don't reply or you'll just make things worse' boolean.
as
House of the Dead is to gaping inescapable gravitic black hole event horizion ultra doom deathsuction.
Although I might be understating the situation somewhat.
HotD has replaced Gigli and Ishtar as the Worst Movie Evar(tm). Not only would I recommend not seeing it, I'd probably encourage people to gouge their own eyes out if they were to be forced to see it. It'd probably hurt less.
It's really quite amazing what they've been able to pull off... probably the biggest coup being that they've been able to convince a big portion of the world that diamonds are rare and therefore justify their massive price. In fact the world is virtually awash with diamonds, and if offered as a commodity in a free market their value would plummet. Ahh, the joy of a monopoly.
Bottom line, the majority of value in diamonds is 'branding' (of a unusual sort). Should that branding ever be co-opted by, say, widespread acceptance of low-cost manufactured diamonds you'll start seeing every mallrat teenybopper picking up diamonds at la senza and wearing 'em to school.
I can easily get lithographics of a Renoir for a few bucks, but an original will cost big bucks.
That's what the focus of the article is on, anyways. You kids today wouldn't understand these things. :D hehe
A massive game in its day (5 disks!), it covered pretty much every aspect of the space-trader genre, including combat, mining, and used "real" equations to match orbits with space stations and target ships given the parameters of the parts you had installed in your vessel. The only downside of the magnum opus was the fact that all the disk swapping made it tedious to play at times.
Ahhh, the memories. I should see if I can find some images of that and throw it on an Atari emulator for a retro trip. Maybe it won't be quite so obnoxious if I don't actually have to physically swap all those disks back and forth. :D
a) Never heard of these things, and
b) Would probably never use them
Obviously the criteria for choosing these tools as being worthy of mention isn't based on how sexy they are, it's based on how USEFUL they are.
OSS development still suffers from an excess of people wanting to work on the 'sexy' code... the things that blink and humm and make people go 'wow cool', and a deficit of coders willing to slug it out on the basic, relatively un-sexy tools that make those other things possible. Giving kudos to people who take the time to build solid and dependable frameworks enhances OSS and software generally, and imo deserves more recognition than they currently get.
Who knows, maybe they can encourage a shift in young coder minds that building solid tools can be sexy too...
I'd opt for damn near anything over BIND, though. I've been around for a while, and it's caused me more than enough headaches to last me a lifetime, thank you all the same, zippy ska-bang dhcp updating or no.
I'll stipulate to his attitude 'issues' ;)
The DJBDNS suite can be added to that list. Hasn't changed in years... apparently hasn't ever needed to.
That being said, pretty much every recent arrival to canada I've had the pleasure of chatting with have all expressed an overall satisfaction with coming, aside from those 'little issues' that everyone has to deal with when switching countries and cultures.
Trust the Computer.
I think perhaps 2 adults of the several dozen that were there ever got a chance to play. The kids were fighting over who got to have a chance at jousting each other.
Maybe these kids are particularly "urbanized" (once you play GTA:VC it's hard to go back to nibbling dots, admittedly) but from what I've seen kids are just as enthused about oldschool games as we were... except now, they don't have to pay for 'em. GG MAME! :D
Gimmie some sugar, baby!
On the plus side, if you work as a contractor, it's billable hours. :D GG SoBillable^H^H^H^H^H^H^HSoBig!