My employer purchased a few hundred of these laptops. We've been complaining to them and dropping evidence on their laps since the fall of 2002 that something was wrong. Now, nearly two years later, they finally admit that there's a problem. It's nice to see a company admitting that there is a problem and fixing it, it would have been nice to see a company admitting that there is a problem and fixing it in a timely fashion.
These aren't laptops that they sold to consumers a few months ago. These are models that consumers have been suffering with for years, and being told that there is no problem.
Lieberman? Senator from an ``urban liberal area'' that borders on both of the states you mentioned? You might have heard of him, ran for a national office recently. He's attacked video games, music, and tons of ``offensive'' media.
Mozilla crashes for me more than any other application I use, and I use Photoshop and the Macromedia MX suite often. I've got poorly written legacy apps that are more stable than Mozilla.
But that could have something to do with the hundreds of tabs I have open at any given time, I guess.
Those were great, but I think Total Annihilation did it even better. Amazing original orchestral scores for building, exploring, attacking, defending, and you could even customize it with your own music for the different moments in the game. That game was truly ahead of its time, even when it came to music.
Getting into E3 is not the hardest feat in the world. Get a domain, have your friends do a few reviews, and you can BS your way into getting tickets.
I'm friends with some people who work at a retail videogame store that manage to get in year after year with just that trick. An ex of mine's older sister's college friend works for Infogrames/Atari, and has offered me tickets year after year. Some guy I used to play on a MOO with's done the same.
If your networking skills or social engineering skills are at least half-way decent, you can figure a way in. It's not like sneaking into the Oscars or Grammys.
According to court documents and his own confession, Breen and other Razor1911 members acquired, cracked, and sold advance copies of Quake, Command & Conquer Red Alert, Terminal Velocity, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, and many other games.
If he were a Linux user, that list would consist of Tuxracer and... err... yeah.
My name is Russell Sprague, and I have been frightened and alarmed.
I've had this/. article emailed a few times to me, had my boss's boss taunting me since the moment he walked in the door... Today's not a good day to be a Russell Sprague.
Actually, you don't need a credit card. They make game time available through game cards, which you can purchase from retail stores using cash, making it even harder to find the real identity if they don't want to be found.
When you steal cable, you and those in your household are ripping off stolen content. You're not stealing cable and then making said cable available on the internet for those who wish to view it as well. If you were doing that, I'm sure they'd come down with a suit of RIAA-ish levels.
For post-apocalyptic action, I recommend Cybersphere. It's been around since 1993/1994, and growing ever since.
It's not straight Fallout post-apocalyptic, it's a mix between that and cyberpunk. So on top of the wastelands and mutants, you've got megacorporations, implants, and the matrix. Fully coded matrix, great implant and drug system, vehicles, multiple towns, completely custom code base developed from the old Lambda core back in 93. Dedicated playerbase.
Only downsides? Rough learning curve, and a vicious group of players who try to accurately simulate the cut throat nature of a gritty dark future.
Agreed, they do get too much credit. Whenever I hear someone attributing the origins of LARPing to WoD, I laugh my ass off.
I remember my stepfather's college roommate hosting LARPs on the beaches of Sandy Hook, based on the AD&D system, when I was ten. That was fifteen years ago, well before any WoD LARP.
Unless you're using the graphical Daemon screensaver, where the hell are your Baptists going to see the cute little guy? Don't leave manuals with the daemon on the cover out, don't leave CD jewel cases with the daemon on them out, instead use burned copies.
Seriously, I've been running FreeBSD, and the only times I see the mascot is when I put him someplace.
Seriously, the other less-polite reply to your comment is right. It's one thing to just go around canning suspicious users on web games or M*s... it's quite a different story when the enduser is a paying customer.
Actually, I help run a cyberpunk game, where we've had people do that. We've had cab drivers, secretaries, lawyers, and various other mundane professions.
It amazed me how some guy living in Hawaii would really get into playing a janitor, walking around cleaning up people's apartment for piddly amounts of cash.
Seriously though, you're right. Read LOTR. Isn't that an amazing and beautiful world? Watch the movie. Isn't that amazing? But which is more vivid and personal? And is the average gamer's computer really capable of pushing out the graphics, sound, and AI required to depict that?
The fact that online text-based RPGs are still attracting new players in this day and age is a testament to the dying medium. There's a really great thesis written up about the medium I read here.
The MOO I am an administrator on, CyberSphere, had an economy re-vamp three or so years ago. A player had figured out an exploit to get endless money, so we shut the entire economy down and re-did it as a zero sum economy.
What you said about new players quitting at any point and changing the economy is a good point. We've set a limited number of 'credits' (the currency most of the people use), that slowly increases. People arriving draws money from the welfare fund, which is repleneshed by the various corporations, which gain and lose money on the stock market and through other actions. Players start on the streets with next to nothing, and most of the rich ones have created their wealth through finding a niche and exploiting it instead of through mere coded actions. Instead of performing coded automated tasks for a paltry sum, they create a role where they can milk dozens of people doing the automated tasks to gather even more resources. Muggings, implanting cyberwear, selling drugs.... a variety of characters have fulfilled a variety of self-built roles, creating interaction and conflict through economic means, and avoiding having to introduce too many artificial conflicts as you warn against.
The only problem I've found is increasing the size of the drain. It's easy to pump money into the player economy. Creating jobs, missions, quests... it's easy to come up with a dozen detailed coded systems to provide money. It's taking the money back out that's a problem. We have rent, and disadvantages for living in cardboard boxes or such. Large apartments which hold a variety of gear or garages that store vehicles cost money. Vehicle armor needs re-building, computers break or have one-shot programs, and medicine decays. But short of staging large administrator-run raids on player hoards, I've found it hard to think of realistic ways to increase the size of the drain when a bottleneck occurs in the player economy. Once a player has 'won', they have no motivation not to sit on their hoard. And in a zero-sum economy, this stagnates the game. Many of our players have a mature attitude about it. They play and scheme and plot until they've 'won', and then stage their own defeat, allowing their gear and money to be taken by a pack of young blood. But certain people just want to sit on their stagnant throne for literally years. And I have yet to figure out how to encourage them off without being too heavy-handed.
These kind of conflicts could not occur in a MMORPG. The game I refer to has only a few hundred players, usually twenty to forty people on at a given time. With a dozen or so active administrators, we can offer small plots, large game-wide campaigns, and custom-coded groups and events. The zero-sum economy forces a good amount of player on player action. But these things, like true democracy and communism, don't scale well to a massive populace.
I agree, bashing your head against such code improves your coding theory and skills.
I'd recommend a MOO for someone looking to code. Created by a coder as a coder's playground, everything is 'hackable' in a MOO. You can re-do the verb editor, how it parses input, even alter the server. You can run the same MOO core on a variety of *nix boxes, Windows, etc. It's an easy way to play around and code a bit. For more information about MOO coding, check out the Sourceforge project for it. Most MOOs are social MOOs, and wouldn't hold much of an appeal to the same crowd that would code MMORPGs. However, quite a few MOO's are set up as full-fledged RPG's.
If you're interested in making your own online RPG and want to learn how to code instead of facing the daunting task of a MMORPG, try starting with Ghostcore. It's an extremely well put together piece of code, and while I may not like the way the combat system's done, on your place you'll be able to pick it apart and play with it as you wish. For an example of it in use, check out GhostWheel. As far as other well done RPG MOO's, check out Sindome (a younger MOO, still in development) or Cybersphere, one of the older MOO's (where I code).
I know that text-based online gaming is a bit old fashioned and retro to the kind of people the article is talking about, but I think it's an excellent place to hone and refine your coding skills to become part of a real project later on in life. You're not responsible for artwork, animation, or other things. You're working on artificial intelligence, combat systems, translating your concepts into code, and even dealing with customer support and fixing players' problems. It's full of valuable lessons for a real career in such a thing. And no form of M* is better, from a coding point of view, than a MOO. During periods of my time where I couldn't have a programming job, due to also being a full time student or such, I've found that coding up new projects on the MOO kept my skills fresh and kept that mindset easily reachable.
Also, if you're looking to refine your object oriented theory skills, nothing will cram it down your throat without lube like a MOO. Just as that horrible language Scheme forces you to learn how recursion works, working on a MOO will force you to think in good OOP terms.
Autoresponder bots? Try actually getting one of them on the phone, asking for clarification of a problem, etc.
Once I found myself in the whole debit-card doublecharge problem that most PayPal people end up in once. The person I got on the phone for that problem was helpful in WHAT they were saying, yet very terse and defensive. After a few horrible phone calls in the past to them, I wanted to take down his name and extension so that I could use him in the future and avoid the other drones. After I asked for his name and extension he snapped, "What, to threaten me? Is this some sort of a threat?" and hung up on me. And that was my most POSITIVE customer service experience from them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's utterly insane. In our case, we were customers one through eleven and all the way up over four hundred. And still we were told nothing.
Here's a co-worker of mine, here's the parent of a student (I believe).
My employer purchased a few hundred of these laptops. We've been complaining to them and dropping evidence on their laps since the fall of 2002 that something was wrong. Now, nearly two years later, they finally admit that there's a problem. It's nice to see a company admitting that there is a problem and fixing it, it would have been nice to see a company admitting that there is a problem and fixing it in a timely fashion.
These aren't laptops that they sold to consumers a few months ago. These are models that consumers have been suffering with for years, and being told that there is no problem.
B.C. is the religious comic strip about cave people. Wizard of Id features a short king and a knight named Rodney.
Lieberman? Senator from an ``urban liberal area'' that borders on both of the states you mentioned? You might have heard of him, ran for a national office recently. He's attacked video games, music, and tons of ``offensive'' media.
Mozilla crashes for me more than any other application I use, and I use Photoshop and the Macromedia MX suite often. I've got poorly written legacy apps that are more stable than Mozilla.
But that could have something to do with the hundreds of tabs I have open at any given time, I guess.
Those were great, but I think Total Annihilation did it even better. Amazing original orchestral scores for building, exploring, attacking, defending, and you could even customize it with your own music for the different moments in the game. That game was truly ahead of its time, even when it came to music.
Getting into E3 is not the hardest feat in the world. Get a domain, have your friends do a few reviews, and you can BS your way into getting tickets.
I'm friends with some people who work at a retail videogame store that manage to get in year after year with just that trick. An ex of mine's older sister's college friend works for Infogrames/Atari, and has offered me tickets year after year. Some guy I used to play on a MOO with's done the same.
If your networking skills or social engineering skills are at least half-way decent, you can figure a way in. It's not like sneaking into the Oscars or Grammys.
If he were a Linux user, that list would consist of Tuxracer and... err... yeah.
My name is Russell Sprague, and I have been frightened and alarmed.
/. article emailed a few times to me, had my boss's boss taunting me since the moment he walked in the door... Today's not a good day to be a Russell Sprague.
I've had this
Actually, you don't need a credit card. They make game time available through game cards, which you can purchase from retail stores using cash, making it even harder to find the real identity if they don't want to be found.
When you steal cable, you and those in your household are ripping off stolen content. You're not stealing cable and then making said cable available on the internet for those who wish to view it as well. If you were doing that, I'm sure they'd come down with a suit of RIAA-ish levels.
Compare oranges and oranges next time.
Personally, I love the two key keyboard.
I too work at an EB, about once every two or three months to keep the discount and free games.
We had a goal of a few dozen. We got two preorders... the highest in the district...
For post-apocalyptic action, I recommend Cybersphere. It's been around since 1993/1994, and growing ever since.
It's not straight Fallout post-apocalyptic, it's a mix between that and cyberpunk. So on top of the wastelands and mutants, you've got megacorporations, implants, and the matrix. Fully coded matrix, great implant and drug system, vehicles, multiple towns, completely custom code base developed from the old Lambda core back in 93. Dedicated playerbase.
Only downsides? Rough learning curve, and a vicious group of players who try to accurately simulate the cut throat nature of a gritty dark future.
Having said that, I strongly recommend it.
Madison, NJ has power. Chatham, its neighbor, does not. It's like that all over up here.
Both towns are less than an hour from Manhattan. I just moved to Hoboken, right across the river from Manhattan, and am dreading my commute now.
Agreed, they do get too much credit. Whenever I hear someone attributing the origins of LARPing to WoD, I laugh my ass off.
I remember my stepfather's college roommate hosting LARPs on the beaches of Sandy Hook, based on the AD&D system, when I was ten. That was fifteen years ago, well before any WoD LARP.
Yeah, never...
C'mon, even JWZ has a LiveJournal...
Unless you're using the graphical Daemon screensaver, where the hell are your Baptists going to see the cute little guy? Don't leave manuals with the daemon on the cover out, don't leave CD jewel cases with the daemon on them out, instead use burned copies.
Seriously, I've been running FreeBSD, and the only times I see the mascot is when I put him someplace.
Seriously, the other less-polite reply to your comment is right. It's one thing to just go around canning suspicious users on web games or M*s... it's quite a different story when the enduser is a paying customer.
Actually, I help run a cyberpunk game, where we've had people do that. We've had cab drivers, secretaries, lawyers, and various other mundane professions.
It amazed me how some guy living in Hawaii would really get into playing a janitor, walking around cleaning up people's apartment for piddly amounts of cash.
Hey Bungle, get an account!
Seriously though, you're right. Read LOTR. Isn't that an amazing and beautiful world? Watch the movie. Isn't that amazing? But which is more vivid and personal? And is the average gamer's computer really capable of pushing out the graphics, sound, and AI required to depict that?
The fact that online text-based RPGs are still attracting new players in this day and age is a testament to the dying medium. There's a really great thesis written up about the medium I read here.
The MOO I am an administrator on, CyberSphere, had an economy re-vamp three or so years ago. A player had figured out an exploit to get endless money, so we shut the entire economy down and re-did it as a zero sum economy.
What you said about new players quitting at any point and changing the economy is a good point. We've set a limited number of 'credits' (the currency most of the people use), that slowly increases. People arriving draws money from the welfare fund, which is repleneshed by the various corporations, which gain and lose money on the stock market and through other actions. Players start on the streets with next to nothing, and most of the rich ones have created their wealth through finding a niche and exploiting it instead of through mere coded actions. Instead of performing coded automated tasks for a paltry sum, they create a role where they can milk dozens of people doing the automated tasks to gather even more resources. Muggings, implanting cyberwear, selling drugs.... a variety of characters have fulfilled a variety of self-built roles, creating interaction and conflict through economic means, and avoiding having to introduce too many artificial conflicts as you warn against.
The only problem I've found is increasing the size of the drain. It's easy to pump money into the player economy. Creating jobs, missions, quests... it's easy to come up with a dozen detailed coded systems to provide money. It's taking the money back out that's a problem. We have rent, and disadvantages for living in cardboard boxes or such. Large apartments which hold a variety of gear or garages that store vehicles cost money. Vehicle armor needs re-building, computers break or have one-shot programs, and medicine decays. But short of staging large administrator-run raids on player hoards, I've found it hard to think of realistic ways to increase the size of the drain when a bottleneck occurs in the player economy. Once a player has 'won', they have no motivation not to sit on their hoard. And in a zero-sum economy, this stagnates the game. Many of our players have a mature attitude about it. They play and scheme and plot until they've 'won', and then stage their own defeat, allowing their gear and money to be taken by a pack of young blood. But certain people just want to sit on their stagnant throne for literally years. And I have yet to figure out how to encourage them off without being too heavy-handed.
These kind of conflicts could not occur in a MMORPG. The game I refer to has only a few hundred players, usually twenty to forty people on at a given time. With a dozen or so active administrators, we can offer small plots, large game-wide campaigns, and custom-coded groups and events. The zero-sum economy forces a good amount of player on player action. But these things, like true democracy and communism, don't scale well to a massive populace.
I agree, bashing your head against such code improves your coding theory and skills.
I'd recommend a MOO for someone looking to code. Created by a coder as a coder's playground, everything is 'hackable' in a MOO. You can re-do the verb editor, how it parses input, even alter the server. You can run the same MOO core on a variety of *nix boxes, Windows, etc. It's an easy way to play around and code a bit. For more information about MOO coding, check out the Sourceforge project for it. Most MOOs are social MOOs, and wouldn't hold much of an appeal to the same crowd that would code MMORPGs. However, quite a few MOO's are set up as full-fledged RPG's.
If you're interested in making your own online RPG and want to learn how to code instead of facing the daunting task of a MMORPG, try starting with Ghostcore. It's an extremely well put together piece of code, and while I may not like the way the combat system's done, on your place you'll be able to pick it apart and play with it as you wish. For an example of it in use, check out GhostWheel. As far as other well done RPG MOO's, check out Sindome (a younger MOO, still in development) or Cybersphere, one of the older MOO's (where I code).
I know that text-based online gaming is a bit old fashioned and retro to the kind of people the article is talking about, but I think it's an excellent place to hone and refine your coding skills to become part of a real project later on in life. You're not responsible for artwork, animation, or other things. You're working on artificial intelligence, combat systems, translating your concepts into code, and even dealing with customer support and fixing players' problems. It's full of valuable lessons for a real career in such a thing. And no form of M* is better, from a coding point of view, than a MOO. During periods of my time where I couldn't have a programming job, due to also being a full time student or such, I've found that coding up new projects on the MOO kept my skills fresh and kept that mindset easily reachable.
Also, if you're looking to refine your object oriented theory skills, nothing will cram it down your throat without lube like a MOO. Just as that horrible language Scheme forces you to learn how recursion works, working on a MOO will force you to think in good OOP terms.
Autoresponder bots? Try actually getting one of them on the phone, asking for clarification of a problem, etc.
Once I found myself in the whole debit-card doublecharge problem that most PayPal people end up in once. The person I got on the phone for that problem was helpful in WHAT they were saying, yet very terse and defensive. After a few horrible phone calls in the past to them, I wanted to take down his name and extension so that I could use him in the future and avoid the other drones. After I asked for his name and extension he snapped, "What, to threaten me? Is this some sort of a threat?" and hung up on me. And that was my most POSITIVE customer service experience from them.