Yeah, on that subject... Some of the NPCs that give you a costume are in stores. The way the costumes work is that it's a kind of "buff," that takes place immediately after giving the costumed NPC a "treat."
These stores have a door which you must open to enter them. In FFXI, doors open by targetting them and "acting" on them. They then open for five seconds or so and then automatically close.
Since they automatically close, you must therefore also open them to leave. Except openning doors is a targetted action, and players in costumes can't do targetted actions.
After the fifth time I got stuck in a store with a costume on, I could only find myself wondering WTF the developers were thinking...
(To be fair, though, there are a ton of wandering costumed NPCs outside the stores so it's not like you can only get a costume inside the store and then be stuck in a little house. Plus I'm still working on getting a Trick Staff... C'mon, you stupid NPCs, stop giving me ??????? Jack'o'lanterns!)
Think of it as pay-back for the fact that the FFXI Chains of Promathia expansion came out 5 days earlier in Europe than it did in North America.
Well... almost. In a sign of just how important Europe must be to the manufactorers, the version that came out there was a new "European version" and was incompatible with the version that Europeans who had imported the game had been using for months. So new European players could get an expansion they couldn't use since you needed to be basically level 20 or higher and they'd be starting at level 1, and existing players had to wait for the North American ship date anyway (along with the export delays).
So... um... yeah.
(Even better was that before the release, some customer service reps told some European players that the European version would work with the North American version... The best part of all this is that even with the European release, European players still need to pay in US dollars using Visa or Mastercard. Can't you just feel the love?)
Due to low scores on tests to determine American's abilities to detect sarcasm, we are going to be cutting school's budgets by a total of $2.4 billion. Halliburtin has been awarded a $1.2 billion contract over the course of 4 years to attempt to remedy the problem, by drilling for humor in Alaska.
You might not be SOL in Japan, as it turns out, because there's an external harddrive for the PS2 that is available in Japan... but not in the US.
Well, actually, they could be SOL, as it's unclear whether or not that drive will work with the new PSTwo. Apparently, this drive was made in very limited quantities too, since few people wanted an external one instead of the cheaper internal one.
There's a lot of speculation on USB2 drives being made available for use with the new PStwo. There are more US PS2 FFXI users than I expected, so there's been quite a bit of talk in the FFXI community about the original PS2 which is compatible with the hard drive being discontinued in the US and being replaced with the PStwo that doesn't support the harddrive.
Oh please. Even if I had read the documentation, I probably wouldn't have known the file was too large at first anyway. I just picked a fairly small binary file to use. It turns out it was over the MySQL BLOB size.
The proper response when receiving bad data is to throw an error. My program should not have to check its data to make sure it's valid for MySQL. Well, that's not true, it should do some checks, but bugs still exist. Eventually, some wrong data will go through to the database server.
The DB should never "decide what's best" and do that. It should always raise an error. Yes, the client programs should try and always send valid data. But sometimes, things get messed up, and bad data gets sent. The proper response shouldn't be to just mangle the data, it should be to raise an error.
You're forgetting the other great thing about MySQL: it doesn't bother reporting data errors!
A recent example involves BLOBs and MySQL. The basic feature request is to be able to attach various binary files to other data. One of the ways to do that is with a BLOB. So I create a simple test so we can compare this approach with various other approaches.
Code up the test, and attach a file. Pull the file back out, and try and read it back in. Doesn't work, the file is corrupted. At first I figure I'm interfacing with the database wrong, since I've never used BLOBs before. So I muck around with the API some, still no go.
Then I realize I should check how much data is going in and how much is going out. Turns out I'm trying to attach a 70KB file, and I'm getting 64KB back. A little bit of research tells me that MySQL BLOB types only support up to 64KB. Oops. Change to a MEDIUMBLOB (I think) and then it works.
Turns out instead of flagging it as an error to insert more data into the field than it can contain, MySQL just trunucates it. (So if you try and do something like insert "MYSQL SUCKS" into a CHAR(5) column, it'll say it successfully inserted one row. A select will then get "MYSQL" back.)
Some page out there has a really nice list of things that MySQL will do with bad data. Besides trunucating values, it has some interesting ways of handling bad numeric values.
* Combat Locking - in order to avoid kill-stealing, once a player/group attacks a mob, nearby players cannot do damage to this mob. Apparently the player can yell for help and disable this "feature" at the cost of xp/loot.
Kill stealing has always been a troubling issue in EQ, but I'm not sure I like this mod. It flies in the face of realism. Furthermore, I see much potential for this feature to be abused.. casters with long-range spells can now easily take a mob away from another group heading to pull it.
And if KS'ing is such a deal that the developers had to hack the system to address it, what have they done about the even more annoying problem of training mobs on other people?
Final Fantasy XI does this, and it isn't that bad for the most part. You can "call for help" on a mob in FFXI, allowing anyone to attack it. However, mobs killed in this way never drop anything and offer no XP.
Yeah, it flies in the face of realism, but, it's a game. Realism is just a tool. If realism gets in the way of having fun, then it should be ignored. Do your characters have to eat and use the lavatory? Do they have to sleep?
There are several issues with the way the system works in Final Fantasy XI. Yes, casters and players with ranged attacks and abilties can "steal" monsters from other players, claiming them with ranged abilities before another player can. (It should be noted that in FFXI, at least, every class has some form of ranged ability, even if it is just a ranged weapon.) Generally speaking, though, if someone is going to try and do that, they probably would have stolen the kill anyway, since such a thing is, not surprisingly, looked down on.
Far more annoyingly, a player can run past a group which has aggroed another mob but not "claimed" it, and use some ability that doesn't damage it much to "claim" the monster, but the monster will continue to attack the group it has hate against.
Ultimately, though, it doesn't really hurt much (although it turns camping various NMs into a "who-can-claim-it-first" battle over lag), and helps quite a bit. I like the feature, honestly. It works well.
The most notable addition seems to be player housing -- that's intriguing. The notion of player and guild cities would seem cool, but it's not enough to encourage me to play.
It sounds, although there wasn't enough detail for me to confirm this 100%, that the "housing" will be like the "housing" in Final Fantasy XI: you get a room in some amorphous "residential area" all to your own, that no one else can ever enter.
So there are no "player-built" cities, just some zone that instead of taking you to another area instead takes you to your "house." It sounds like it's exactly like Final Fantasy XI's "Mog-House," in that you can do things like check your mail for items people have sent you, place and arrange furniture, and store items from your inventory into a safe.
I'd love to see an MMORPG that allowed players to tame wilderness areas and build towns - it sounds intriguing. I don't know if computers and network connections have yet come to the point where they can do that, though. Modem connections probably make that infeasible for the near future.
The annoying thing with the media today is that they just report on what someone tells them to. What I mean is that they'll just rehash the talking points or press releases that are sent to them.
So you see things like "Bush said this, and Kerry said that." Which is 100% true. But there's no investigation into whether the quotes are actually, like, true.
So Microsoft will release a press release saying "We're improving security!" and then various media reports will say "Microsoft says it's improving security." But the media won't actually investigate whether or not Microsoft actually is improving security, they'll just report that Microsoft has said that they are.
About the only time you'll hear any discussions about the truth of any position anyone has is on various talk shows, where to "show both sides" you'll get two people who are representing "opposite sides" of a given debate. Directly opposite sides.
Since these people are soley debating for their side, we're ultimately left with no middle ground. Only two extreme views on a topic.
So while the two "sides" of the debate are represented, the media generally "let's the reader decide" which side they believe in. But since the veracity of the two sides has never been called into question (other than each side calling the other wrong), the average reader/listener/viewer has no way of judging complicated scenarios they don't really understand.
(For example, I don't really know what Kerry's position is on Iraq. I have no idea whether or not it's a good position, because I only hear polarized viewpoints on it. About all I know is that he intends to "do it differently" and "get international support." I have no idea about the details and don't know enough about international politics and warfare to judge it even if I did know.)
This is one of the main reasons I get all my news from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. At least then I know it's all fake.:)
I'm currently up due to insomnia, so if any of that makes no sense, I'll try and post a correction tomorrow. It'll be in fine print and on the fifth page.:)
Excellent! I've been wanting that feature for ages. I've wanted to get all Games and Politics stories, but only "best" in the rest of the sections for ages.
I hope this actually works... Things seem to be a bit messed up right now.
Turns out this is happening in all sections (although it wasn't happening in Games earlier this morning, the other section I check out on occasion).
I've also got a nice screenshot of slashdot.org coming up as it.slashdot.org for some reason (at least, in that color scheme, but with articles from every section).
I suppose it could be my user preferences, I messed around with them some regarding filtering stories, because I happen to want to read stuff in the Politics section, although I can understand that others do not.
Good luck with those front page settings... last I checked this bug still hasn't been fixed, so you'll accomplish nothing.:(
(I keep on bringing this up in the hopes that the squeeky wheel will get some oil, but so far, nothing.)
Oh, and on another note, I guess it's on the front page because if you go to the Politics section, you'll get a random jumble of stuff, so I suppose they want to do that to everyone or something.
I don't know if anyone else is having this issue, but the current stories for me on the politics section are:
The Mezonic Agenda: Hacking the Presidency
Politics: Did Kerry Use a Cheat Sheet?
Games: Sony CTO Reassures PSP Fans
Your Rights Online: RFID Drivers' Licenses Debated
The Lowell Sun is a well-known conservative newspaper, though. Their endorsement of Bush is as much of a non-story as the Boston Globe endorsing Kerry would be. They endorsed Bush in the last election, too.
Square-Enix admitted there was a problem October 1st.
Square-Enix announced the problems were resolved October 4th
In other words, Square-Enix didn't mention anything was wrong while there was a problem, and didn't announce that it was resolved until four days after people had been able to get back online.
They've been better with the recent batch of random server outages, they actually annouced there was a problem some four hours after people first got disconnected from the game.
7. Add 'obvious' trusted sites like mozilla.org to trusted sites list (I can't believe mozilla forgot this!) Be very careful here.
They didn't forget. This is on purpose.
If you place mozilla.org as a trusted site, this would include bugzilla.mozilla.org as trusted (since it matches against the end of the domain). Anyone can upload anything to bugzilla.mozilla.org as an attachment to a bug report - including XPIs.
This would make it very easy for a malicious user to make you install a bad XPI from a "trusted" site.
Of course he's Pro-Choice. He's a Democrat. Part of being a Democrat is that he's Pro-Choice.
He's also against gay marriage. Why? Because the polls are against gay marriage. (You should have seen his position on this after the court ruling in Massachusetts. He wavered for a bit, trying to find a position acceptable to his consitutants and the nation as a whole. I think he settled on some "against, but civil unions are acceptable if required" position.)
Kerry's positions flow with the polls. If a new poll came out saying that most democrats favored not murdering children before they could be born, he'd instantly become Pro-Life and would have always been Pro-Life.
If the next week another poll came out saying that people favored allowing women to have the right to choose what they do with their body, he'd become Pro-Choice again.
Being from Massachusetts, I've watched his positions flow based on what the media says he should think. And, actually, so has the nation. Remember the Patriot Act? He supported and helped write it. Now he's against it, because most Democrats are against it. Same with the war in Iraq.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, considering he's supposed to represent "the will of the people," but I don't really see it as a sign that he is a man of his own mind.
I was kind of confused, because it's been well known (well, I've known for several years) that both Coke and Pepsi sell tap water for their bottled water. Of course, I also live one town over from the Pepsi bottling plant that serves the New England region.
It makes logical sense - they need to have this filtered water to begin with anyway. All Dasani and Aquafina are is the base water the two companies start with for making all their beverages, plus some minerals for "taste."
But it turns out that in the UK they also managed to add twice the legal limit of bromate, which is a carcinogen. I guess they wanted to hark back to the days when the Coca in Coca-Cola stood for Cocain.
Slashdot Mirror
These stores have a door which you must open to enter them. In FFXI, doors open by targetting them and "acting" on them. They then open for five seconds or so and then automatically close.
Since they automatically close, you must therefore also open them to leave. Except openning doors is a targetted action, and players in costumes can't do targetted actions.
After the fifth time I got stuck in a store with a costume on, I could only find myself wondering WTF the developers were thinking...
(To be fair, though, there are a ton of wandering costumed NPCs outside the stores so it's not like you can only get a costume inside the store and then be stuck in a little house. Plus I'm still working on getting a Trick Staff... C'mon, you stupid NPCs, stop giving me ??????? Jack'o'lanterns!)
Well... almost. In a sign of just how important Europe must be to the manufactorers, the version that came out there was a new "European version" and was incompatible with the version that Europeans who had imported the game had been using for months. So new European players could get an expansion they couldn't use since you needed to be basically level 20 or higher and they'd be starting at level 1, and existing players had to wait for the North American ship date anyway (along with the export delays).
So... um... yeah.
(Even better was that before the release, some customer service reps told some European players that the European version would work with the North American version... The best part of all this is that even with the European release, European players still need to pay in US dollars using Visa or Mastercard. Can't you just feel the love?)
I know I shouldn't reply to myself, but I feel the need to point out that $11 million was already cut after giving up on teaching the apostrophe.
Due to low scores on tests to determine American's abilities to detect sarcasm, we are going to be cutting school's budgets by a total of $2.4 billion. Halliburtin has been awarded a $1.2 billion contract over the course of 4 years to attempt to remedy the problem, by drilling for humor in Alaska.
Well, actually, they could be SOL, as it's unclear whether or not that drive will work with the new PSTwo. Apparently, this drive was made in very limited quantities too, since few people wanted an external one instead of the cheaper internal one.
There's a lot of speculation on USB2 drives being made available for use with the new PStwo. There are more US PS2 FFXI users than I expected, so there's been quite a bit of talk in the FFXI community about the original PS2 which is compatible with the hard drive being discontinued in the US and being replaced with the PStwo that doesn't support the harddrive.
Conversely, my "favorite" is 1 = 0, because it means that you get to spend another 5 minutes figuring out what you did wrong.
The proper response when receiving bad data is to throw an error. My program should not have to check its data to make sure it's valid for MySQL. Well, that's not true, it should do some checks, but bugs still exist. Eventually, some wrong data will go through to the database server.
The DB should never "decide what's best" and do that. It should always raise an error. Yes, the client programs should try and always send valid data. But sometimes, things get messed up, and bad data gets sent. The proper response shouldn't be to just mangle the data, it should be to raise an error.
Example:
That's just not right!Yep - that's the page I was thinking of all right. Thanks!
A recent example involves BLOBs and MySQL. The basic feature request is to be able to attach various binary files to other data. One of the ways to do that is with a BLOB. So I create a simple test so we can compare this approach with various other approaches.
Code up the test, and attach a file. Pull the file back out, and try and read it back in. Doesn't work, the file is corrupted. At first I figure I'm interfacing with the database wrong, since I've never used BLOBs before. So I muck around with the API some, still no go.
Then I realize I should check how much data is going in and how much is going out. Turns out I'm trying to attach a 70KB file, and I'm getting 64KB back. A little bit of research tells me that MySQL BLOB types only support up to 64KB. Oops. Change to a MEDIUMBLOB (I think) and then it works.
Turns out instead of flagging it as an error to insert more data into the field than it can contain, MySQL just trunucates it. (So if you try and do something like insert "MYSQL SUCKS" into a CHAR(5) column, it'll say it successfully inserted one row. A select will then get "MYSQL" back.)
Some page out there has a really nice list of things that MySQL will do with bad data. Besides trunucating values, it has some interesting ways of handling bad numeric values.
* Combat Locking - in order to avoid kill-stealing, once a player/group attacks a mob, nearby players cannot do damage to this mob. Apparently the player can yell for help and disable this "feature" at the cost of xp/loot.
Kill stealing has always been a troubling issue in EQ, but I'm not sure I like this mod. It flies in the face of realism. Furthermore, I see much potential for this feature to be abused.. casters with long-range spells can now easily take a mob away from another group heading to pull it.
And if KS'ing is such a deal that the developers had to hack the system to address it, what have they done about the even more annoying problem of training mobs on other people?
Final Fantasy XI does this, and it isn't that bad for the most part. You can "call for help" on a mob in FFXI, allowing anyone to attack it. However, mobs killed in this way never drop anything and offer no XP.
Yeah, it flies in the face of realism, but, it's a game. Realism is just a tool. If realism gets in the way of having fun, then it should be ignored. Do your characters have to eat and use the lavatory? Do they have to sleep?
There are several issues with the way the system works in Final Fantasy XI. Yes, casters and players with ranged attacks and abilties can "steal" monsters from other players, claiming them with ranged abilities before another player can. (It should be noted that in FFXI, at least, every class has some form of ranged ability, even if it is just a ranged weapon.) Generally speaking, though, if someone is going to try and do that, they probably would have stolen the kill anyway, since such a thing is, not surprisingly, looked down on.
Far more annoyingly, a player can run past a group which has aggroed another mob but not "claimed" it, and use some ability that doesn't damage it much to "claim" the monster, but the monster will continue to attack the group it has hate against.
Ultimately, though, it doesn't really hurt much (although it turns camping various NMs into a "who-can-claim-it-first" battle over lag), and helps quite a bit. I like the feature, honestly. It works well.
It sounds, although there wasn't enough detail for me to confirm this 100%, that the "housing" will be like the "housing" in Final Fantasy XI: you get a room in some amorphous "residential area" all to your own, that no one else can ever enter.
So there are no "player-built" cities, just some zone that instead of taking you to another area instead takes you to your "house." It sounds like it's exactly like Final Fantasy XI's "Mog-House," in that you can do things like check your mail for items people have sent you, place and arrange furniture, and store items from your inventory into a safe.
I'd love to see an MMORPG that allowed players to tame wilderness areas and build towns - it sounds intriguing. I don't know if computers and network connections have yet come to the point where they can do that, though. Modem connections probably make that infeasible for the near future.
Given that some of them are Microsoft programs (although the one's I'm thinking of are games), yes, yes it is.
So you see things like "Bush said this, and Kerry said that." Which is 100% true. But there's no investigation into whether the quotes are actually, like, true.
So Microsoft will release a press release saying "We're improving security!" and then various media reports will say "Microsoft says it's improving security." But the media won't actually investigate whether or not Microsoft actually is improving security, they'll just report that Microsoft has said that they are.
About the only time you'll hear any discussions about the truth of any position anyone has is on various talk shows, where to "show both sides" you'll get two people who are representing "opposite sides" of a given debate. Directly opposite sides.
Since these people are soley debating for their side, we're ultimately left with no middle ground. Only two extreme views on a topic.
So while the two "sides" of the debate are represented, the media generally "let's the reader decide" which side they believe in. But since the veracity of the two sides has never been called into question (other than each side calling the other wrong), the average reader/listener/viewer has no way of judging complicated scenarios they don't really understand.
(For example, I don't really know what Kerry's position is on Iraq. I have no idea whether or not it's a good position, because I only hear polarized viewpoints on it. About all I know is that he intends to "do it differently" and "get international support." I have no idea about the details and don't know enough about international politics and warfare to judge it even if I did know.)
This is one of the main reasons I get all my news from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. At least then I know it's all fake. :)
I'm currently up due to insomnia, so if any of that makes no sense, I'll try and post a correction tomorrow. It'll be in fine print and on the fifth page. :)
<easy-shot>George W. Bush</easy-shot>
They're currently planning on having a conquerent release with Duke Nukem Forever.
I hope this actually works... Things seem to be a bit messed up right now.
Turns out this is happening in all sections (although it wasn't happening in Games earlier this morning, the other section I check out on occasion).
I've also got a nice screenshot of slashdot.org coming up as it.slashdot.org for some reason (at least, in that color scheme, but with articles from every section).
I suppose it could be my user preferences, I messed around with them some regarding filtering stories, because I happen to want to read stuff in the Politics section, although I can understand that others do not.
(I keep on bringing this up in the hopes that the squeeky wheel will get some oil, but so far, nothing.)
Oh, and on another note, I guess it's on the front page because if you go to the Politics section, you'll get a random jumble of stuff, so I suppose they want to do that to everyone or something.
I don't know if anyone else is having this issue, but the current stories for me on the politics section are:
They promised no partisan front-page politics stories until they fixed it...
The Lowell Sun is a well-known conservative newspaper, though. Their endorsement of Bush is as much of a non-story as the Boston Globe endorsing Kerry would be. They endorsed Bush in the last election, too.
- The outage was first noticed September 27th.
- The problems were mostly resolved October 1st.
Some more facts:- Square-Enix admitted there was a problem October 1st.
- Square-Enix announced the problems were resolved October 4th
In other words, Square-Enix didn't mention anything was wrong while there was a problem, and didn't announce that it was resolved until four days after people had been able to get back online.They've been better with the recent batch of random server outages, they actually annouced there was a problem some four hours after people first got disconnected from the game.
They didn't forget. This is on purpose.
If you place mozilla.org as a trusted site, this would include bugzilla.mozilla.org as trusted (since it matches against the end of the domain). Anyone can upload anything to bugzilla.mozilla.org as an attachment to a bug report - including XPIs.
This would make it very easy for a malicious user to make you install a bad XPI from a "trusted" site.
He's also against gay marriage. Why? Because the polls are against gay marriage. (You should have seen his position on this after the court ruling in Massachusetts. He wavered for a bit, trying to find a position acceptable to his consitutants and the nation as a whole. I think he settled on some "against, but civil unions are acceptable if required" position.)
Kerry's positions flow with the polls. If a new poll came out saying that most democrats favored not murdering children before they could be born, he'd instantly become Pro-Life and would have always been Pro-Life.
If the next week another poll came out saying that people favored allowing women to have the right to choose what they do with their body, he'd become Pro-Choice again.
Being from Massachusetts, I've watched his positions flow based on what the media says he should think. And, actually, so has the nation. Remember the Patriot Act? He supported and helped write it. Now he's against it, because most Democrats are against it. Same with the war in Iraq.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, considering he's supposed to represent "the will of the people," but I don't really see it as a sign that he is a man of his own mind.
I was kind of confused, because it's been well known (well, I've known for several years) that both Coke and Pepsi sell tap water for their bottled water. Of course, I also live one town over from the Pepsi bottling plant that serves the New England region.
It makes logical sense - they need to have this filtered water to begin with anyway. All Dasani and Aquafina are is the base water the two companies start with for making all their beverages, plus some minerals for "taste."
But it turns out that in the UK they also managed to add twice the legal limit of bromate, which is a carcinogen. I guess they wanted to hark back to the days when the Coca in Coca-Cola stood for Cocain.