Blizzard absolutely has something like this going on. When they first started cracking down on gold buyers, there were some instances where guild "treasurers" were mistakenly banned because they had insane amounts of gold they were holding for their guild.
People are going crazy over this, but I don't think it's the end of the world. I wonder if a rollback is even necessary. If a character is exploiting this for massive gain, it'll be pretty easy to catch them in the act; either their selling 15 copies of [UberPurpleSword] or they've gone from like 50 to 5000 gold in 6 hours. Those characters that get in under the radar or just exploit it for minimal gain aren't really going to hurt the economy that much. Fine, maybe some characters get a lot of gold or a lot of good items, but so what? The gold will eventually be spent one way or the other, and Soulbound ensures that eventually all the items will become worthless as well.
....and pharmaseutical companies are telling us every commercial break that things like heartburn, insomnia, and arthritis are threats to our very lives.
Isn't that overstating the job title a little bit? Engineer sure, but scientist? It's not like increasing the number of bump maps is going to lead to cold fusion or the cure for cancer.
number of dl's means nothing, but actual usage could just as easily be higher than the number of dl's than lower.
But it's not. Look, that 50 million or whatever number is through how many versions? And how many of us have downloaded each version as it's come out?
I love Firefox and I think it will continue to succeed, but reality check here folks. Inroads have been made, but it's still an IE world for the most part.
Re:Of course it isn't dead!
on
DECnet Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Allow me to translate this for the rest of you (*Disclaimer: I'M JOKING!*):
DECnet is often used these days for very mission critical applications. The firm I work for uses DECnet because it is the easiest and most reliable way for us to maintain our VAX and Alpha clusters.
Our network guys are so old they played spades with Moses. We haven't upgraded a server in 15 years, and that's the way we like it!
Indeed, it is by far the most superior form of networking out there for applications where the uptime must be literally 100%.
I can get double time and a half anytime I want since I convinced the CEO that our SQL server needed to be up 24/7.
We have had sales reps from various vendors come and suggest moving to a Windows 2003/PC setup (HAHA!) or towards a more UNIX/Linux-based setup.
The entire city's sales force is drooling over the possibility of snagging our contract once our old kit finally goes into meltdown.
But we will stick with our DECnet-based VAX and Alpha clusters because they are known to work, and they work pretty damn well!
But I'm one of those power-tripping BOFH's who won't let a Blackberry into the building without my say-so.
But that's because it is amongst the finest of DEC engineering. That's the sort of engineering you just don't find these days.
My dad played gold with Ken Olsen.
Depends on your point of view. If I spend $200 for phat lewt in WoW, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of playing with that lewt, have I really wasted my money? Is it any more wasted than if I'd have dropped $200 going to the movies or buying DVD's for a month or so?
We all piss off money for entertainment purposes, it's just a question of how.
Disposable income is just that: disposable. $200 is a lot of money for most of us, but for a lot of people it's not.
I mean, it's a little like asking why someone would go spend $1200 on a big screen TV, or $4000 on a new motercycle. People have different interests, and are willing to pay money for different things.
When the game first launched a lot of people probably referred to things in terms of silver, but these days it's all about the gold. High level items will go for 100+ gold easily; I've seen some really rare stuff go for 1500g. Hell an epic mount (Level 2 Horse) costs 900g.
But what I really need from this issue of Byte is that article that had 5000 lines of BASIC you could type in verbatim to your computer and play a clone of Pitfall.
That is: 'Something breaks, call the repair guy.' But customers expect more...
More what exactly? Psychic predictive repair? Technicians dressed as 1950's pop icons? Free balloons for the kids?
Look, it's computer repair. You can talk about making computers more reliable or easier to use, but there's always going to be a need for the "call the repair guy" option. At that point, the customer just wants their computer fixed. Quickly and efficiently, and preferrably cheap or free.
Yes, there are a lot of companies out there who are horrible at computer service, but there are also some good ones as well. The focus needs to be on improving that level of service, not redefining or creating new services.
Yeah, pretty much. You'd be hard pressed to find a court in this land that would rule in favor of a minor-aged child having the legal right to play GTA or go see Faces of Death 9 or whatever if their parents had told them they could not.
Since there's no way that Microsoft could fast track this project, put about a thousand engineers on it, have a working beta by Christmas and have a full client downloading onto 50 million Windows XP machines from WindowsUpdate.com before good old Bram could say "What's WinAmp?"
Yes I know, the above scenario is complete BS and all of you would keep using Bittorrent anyway. The point is that, regardless what you think about them, MS is still a very large company with a very large amount of clout and a staggering amount of resources at their disposal. If I'm Bram I don't think I would be waving a red hankerchief at that particular bull.
Step 1: Produce decent quality platformer (which incidently is helped greatly by people wanting a game that looks great on all those new hot-shit 3D accelerated cards they were buying), that features a unique character and finds a market.
Step 2: Churn out the same damn game every year for the next 5 years.
Step 3: Where's the profit?
You know, if you've got a groundbreaking game with insane depth and/or replay value like Civ or the Sims, or are able to cultivate a massive fanbase like Everquest or Mario, you can get away with this sort of thing, but come on, it's Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider 1 was nice, but nothing really more than your standard platformer. If it had been Lars Croft instead of Laura, Tomb Raider 1 would have still been successful, it might have had one sequel, and that would have been it. Laura's tits are the only thing that kept that franchise going beyond the second one, and even that wears thin eventually.
HowStuffWorks: Here are thousands upon thousands of articles on real items, devices, and phenomena that are both interesting and useful to the reader, composed and compiled over many years.
Yotto: *Yawn*
HowStuffWorks: Here are a handful of articles written for fun on technology seen in popular movies.
Yotto: OMG, HowStuffWorks sucks! They are teh sellouts! How can they do this to me?
It must be terrible to live in your serious, serious world.
Pluvius is right though. When Batman first came out in the 40's, his character was very dark and almost pulp-like. He killed bad guys on a regular basis. But when he got popular during the Golden Age, he was definitely the "Adam West" style Batman, who's biggest non-Batman-related concern was whether to go to the Charity Bachelor Auction or not. We still were told why he became Batman of course, but the comics were all about his actions as Batman, and any story we saw as Bruce Wayne was just peripheral.
It wasn't until Marvel came along and started writing characters who had problems in their non-hero lives that you started to see things like Batman going dark again.
- "Academic Freedom". Learn that term right away, because you will be hearing it a lot. Basically, if a professor wants to surf for goat-on-midget-on-chocolate ice cream pr0n, he thinks he can do it, because he has Academic Freedom. Doesn't matter if he's infecting the whole campus with viruses, he has Academic Freedom. If you're in a position of authority in the IS department, you need to do everything possible to become best friends with as many Deans as possible, because fights with professors/doctors/lawyers/whatever profession your university relies on become really nasty really fast.
- "My tuition pays your salary you know". Very quickly you will know what a cop feels like everytime he hears "My taxes pay your salary you know". Students on the whole are about the biggest bunch of arrogant pricks you will ever meet in your life. They know everything, you know nothing, how dare you tell me I can't host 20 gig worth of MP3's for the entire world. Luckily faculty and high-muckity-administration are much less forgiving when students start whining, but there will be a few that will take the students side over yours.
- "IT isn't meeting our needs". You've never seen so many mini Napoleons as you will in academia. Everyone wants their kingdom, and they're constantly trying to expand at the expense of other kingdoms. If you don't rule with an iron fist, you will have people setting up their own IT departments, setting up their own routers/switches, building their own servers and hiding them in closets, the whole nine yards.
- "Sure you can buy that, but did you check to see if it is on contract?" Applies to state schools mostly I would guess, but frustrating beyond words. If I want to buy a $49 piece of software from Best Buy, I can't do it, because we have a vendor on contract who will go to Best Buy, pay $49 for the software, then sell it back to us for $129. If I want to purchase some backup tapes from CDW, I can't do it, because backup tapes are offered in the catalog of the on contract office supply company, who doesn't have any of the correct DLT's in stock but will be able to order them in about two months. Purchasing are some of the worst kingdom-hoarding Napoleons in a state system, and incurring their wrath will not sit well with anyone in your department, including your boss and administrative assistants. Grin and bear it.
Isn't it time to investigate satellites for this sort of thing? Pointing out instead of in? I know maybe this isn't ideal since the satellite is moving both relative to the earth and the sky, it would probably make it difficult to lock onto any signal that was found? I got a B's in Physics, someone help me out here.
Seems like this would solve a lot of interference problems though, and perhaps even give you much better results. Is it just the cost factor that keeps this from happening?
Nope, this comes from "Deep Space Homer" (I think that's the name), the one where Homer gets launched into space with Buzz Aldrin and Race Bannon. At one point in the episode Homer accidently breaks a container containing an ant colony (Now they'll never know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space!), just as the news is breaking in with live coverage. The world gets a shot of what looks to be a giant ant (floating right next to the shuttle camera).
Anchor Kent Brockman draws the only assumption that can be drawn: (stolen from snpp.com)
Kent: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard absolutely has something like this going on. When they first started cracking down on gold buyers, there were some instances where guild "treasurers" were mistakenly banned because they had insane amounts of gold they were holding for their guild.
People are going crazy over this, but I don't think it's the end of the world. I wonder if a rollback is even necessary. If a character is exploiting this for massive gain, it'll be pretty easy to catch them in the act; either their selling 15 copies of [UberPurpleSword] or they've gone from like 50 to 5000 gold in 6 hours. Those characters that get in under the radar or just exploit it for minimal gain aren't really going to hurt the economy that much. Fine, maybe some characters get a lot of gold or a lot of good items, but so what? The gold will eventually be spent one way or the other, and Soulbound ensures that eventually all the items will become worthless as well.
....and pharmaseutical companies are telling us every commercial break that things like heartburn, insomnia, and arthritis are threats to our very lives.
Isn't that overstating the job title a little bit? Engineer sure, but scientist? It's not like increasing the number of bump maps is going to lead to cold fusion or the cure for cancer.
...is to make them work the Help Desk of any random ISP.
Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!
Damn Right! If EA keeps treating us like this, when Battlefield 3 comes out I might wait a whole week before running out and buying it!
number of dl's means nothing, but actual usage could just as easily be higher than the number of dl's than lower.
But it's not. Look, that 50 million or whatever number is through how many versions? And how many of us have downloaded each version as it's come out?
I love Firefox and I think it will continue to succeed, but reality check here folks. Inroads have been made, but it's still an IE world for the most part.
Allow me to translate this for the rest of you (*Disclaimer: I'M JOKING!*):
DECnet is often used these days for very mission critical applications. The firm I work for uses DECnet because it is the easiest and most reliable way for us to maintain our VAX and Alpha clusters.
Our network guys are so old they played spades with Moses. We haven't upgraded a server in 15 years, and that's the way we like it!
Indeed, it is by far the most superior form of networking out there for applications where the uptime must be literally 100%.
I can get double time and a half anytime I want since I convinced the CEO that our SQL server needed to be up 24/7.
We have had sales reps from various vendors come and suggest moving to a Windows 2003/PC setup (HAHA!) or towards a more UNIX/Linux-based setup.
The entire city's sales force is drooling over the possibility of snagging our contract once our old kit finally goes into meltdown.
But we will stick with our DECnet-based VAX and Alpha clusters because they are known to work, and they work pretty damn well!
But I'm one of those power-tripping BOFH's who won't let a Blackberry into the building without my say-so.
But that's because it is amongst the finest of DEC engineering. That's the sort of engineering you just don't find these days.
My dad played gold with Ken Olsen.
Depends on your point of view. If I spend $200 for phat lewt in WoW, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of playing with that lewt, have I really wasted my money? Is it any more wasted than if I'd have dropped $200 going to the movies or buying DVD's for a month or so?
We all piss off money for entertainment purposes, it's just a question of how.
Disposable income is just that: disposable. $200 is a lot of money for most of us, but for a lot of people it's not.
I mean, it's a little like asking why someone would go spend $1200 on a big screen TV, or $4000 on a new motercycle. People have different interests, and are willing to pay money for different things.
In WoW:
100 copper = 1 silver
100 silver = 1 gold
When the game first launched a lot of people probably referred to things in terms of silver, but these days it's all about the gold. High level items will go for 100+ gold easily; I've seen some really rare stuff go for 1500g. Hell an epic mount (Level 2 Horse) costs 900g.
But what I really need from this issue of Byte is that article that had 5000 lines of BASIC you could type in verbatim to your computer and play a clone of Pitfall.
That is: 'Something breaks, call the repair guy.' But customers expect more...
More what exactly? Psychic predictive repair? Technicians dressed as 1950's pop icons? Free balloons for the kids?
Look, it's computer repair. You can talk about making computers more reliable or easier to use, but there's always going to be a need for the "call the repair guy" option. At that point, the customer just wants their computer fixed. Quickly and efficiently, and preferrably cheap or free.
Yes, there are a lot of companies out there who are horrible at computer service, but there are also some good ones as well. The focus needs to be on improving that level of service, not redefining or creating new services.
There's also this little quote:
THOMPSON: Children don`t have a 1st Amendment...
Is this actually true?
Yeah, pretty much. You'd be hard pressed to find a court in this land that would rule in favor of a minor-aged child having the legal right to play GTA or go see Faces of Death 9 or whatever if their parents had told them they could not.
There is no other explanation for the recent series of coincidental stories and events.
Except for "coincidence".
Since there's no way that Microsoft could fast track this project, put about a thousand engineers on it, have a working beta by Christmas and have a full client downloading onto 50 million Windows XP machines from WindowsUpdate.com before good old Bram could say "What's WinAmp?"
Yes I know, the above scenario is complete BS and all of you would keep using Bittorrent anyway. The point is that, regardless what you think about them, MS is still a very large company with a very large amount of clout and a staggering amount of resources at their disposal. If I'm Bram I don't think I would be waving a red hankerchief at that particular bull.
What's been the Tomb Raider formula?
Step 1: Produce decent quality platformer (which incidently is helped greatly by people wanting a game that looks great on all those new hot-shit 3D accelerated cards they were buying), that features a unique character and finds a market.
Step 2: Churn out the same damn game every year for the next 5 years.
Step 3: Where's the profit?
You know, if you've got a groundbreaking game with insane depth and/or replay value like Civ or the Sims, or are able to cultivate a massive fanbase like Everquest or Mario, you can get away with this sort of thing, but come on, it's Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider 1 was nice, but nothing really more than your standard platformer. If it had been Lars Croft instead of Laura, Tomb Raider 1 would have still been successful, it might have had one sequel, and that would have been it. Laura's tits are the only thing that kept that franchise going beyond the second one, and even that wears thin eventually.
HowStuffWorks: Here are thousands upon thousands of articles on real items, devices, and phenomena that are both interesting and useful to the reader, composed and compiled over many years.
Yotto: *Yawn*
HowStuffWorks: Here are a handful of articles written for fun on technology seen in popular movies.
Yotto: OMG, HowStuffWorks sucks! They are teh sellouts! How can they do this to me?
It must be terrible to live in your serious, serious world.
It must have Real Ultimate Power.
It maybe doesn't need discussion at Slashdot, but odds are good your Dad doesn't know what a keylogger is.
Pluvius is right though. When Batman first came out in the 40's, his character was very dark and almost pulp-like. He killed bad guys on a regular basis. But when he got popular during the Golden Age, he was definitely the "Adam West" style Batman, who's biggest non-Batman-related concern was whether to go to the Charity Bachelor Auction or not. We still were told why he became Batman of course, but the comics were all about his actions as Batman, and any story we saw as Bruce Wayne was just peripheral.
It wasn't until Marvel came along and started writing characters who had problems in their non-hero lives that you started to see things like Batman going dark again.
But here are a few things I've picked up:
- "Academic Freedom". Learn that term right away, because you will be hearing it a lot. Basically, if a professor wants to surf for goat-on-midget-on-chocolate ice cream pr0n, he thinks he can do it, because he has Academic Freedom. Doesn't matter if he's infecting the whole campus with viruses, he has Academic Freedom. If you're in a position of authority in the IS department, you need to do everything possible to become best friends with as many Deans as possible, because fights with professors/doctors/lawyers/whatever profession your university relies on become really nasty really fast.
- "My tuition pays your salary you know". Very quickly you will know what a cop feels like everytime he hears "My taxes pay your salary you know". Students on the whole are about the biggest bunch of arrogant pricks you will ever meet in your life. They know everything, you know nothing, how dare you tell me I can't host 20 gig worth of MP3's for the entire world. Luckily faculty and high-muckity-administration are much less forgiving when students start whining, but there will be a few that will take the students side over yours.
- "IT isn't meeting our needs". You've never seen so many mini Napoleons as you will in academia. Everyone wants their kingdom, and they're constantly trying to expand at the expense of other kingdoms. If you don't rule with an iron fist, you will have people setting up their own IT departments, setting up their own routers/switches, building their own servers and hiding them in closets, the whole nine yards.
- "Sure you can buy that, but did you check to see if it is on contract?" Applies to state schools mostly I would guess, but frustrating beyond words. If I want to buy a $49 piece of software from Best Buy, I can't do it, because we have a vendor on contract who will go to Best Buy, pay $49 for the software, then sell it back to us for $129. If I want to purchase some backup tapes from CDW, I can't do it, because backup tapes are offered in the catalog of the on contract office supply company, who doesn't have any of the correct DLT's in stock but will be able to order them in about two months. Purchasing are some of the worst kingdom-hoarding Napoleons in a state system, and incurring their wrath will not sit well with anyone in your department, including your boss and administrative assistants. Grin and bear it.
I hadn't thought of that, good point. Presumably you would still need a pretty big dish to catch the signals you're interested in.
Isn't it time to investigate satellites for this sort of thing? Pointing out instead of in? I know maybe this isn't ideal since the satellite is moving both relative to the earth and the sky, it would probably make it difficult to lock onto any signal that was found? I got a B's in Physics, someone help me out here.
Seems like this would solve a lot of interference problems though, and perhaps even give you much better results. Is it just the cost factor that keeps this from happening?
Nope, this comes from "Deep Space Homer" (I think that's the name), the one where Homer gets launched into space with Buzz Aldrin and Race Bannon. At one point in the episode Homer accidently breaks a container containing an ant colony (Now they'll never know if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space!), just as the news is breaking in with live coverage. The world gets a shot of what looks to be a giant ant (floating right next to the shuttle camera).
Anchor Kent Brockman draws the only assumption that can be drawn: (stolen from snpp.com)
Kent: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Now I can spend another 8 hours trying to get my creature to poop in the right place.