1. Client side. Absolutely trivial to hack: fire up DM client, set level=20, insert vorpal blade +5 (*yawn*). For this reason, I imagine most servers will not allow client-side characters.
2. Bioware's "Character Vault". Character files are not accessible by the client so direct hacking is not possible. "Twinking" (quick, easy leveling and procurement of undeserved items) is made moot by "filters" that will reject a character that has advanced too quickly. The Vault won't stop cheating, and that isn't really its goal. What it does is make sure that all level N characters are on an approximately equal footing, and it also puts some kind of throttle control on the rate at which one can level up.
3. Server-side character vault. Character files are stored on the DM's machine, and can (optionally) only be played in the DM's world, under his/her watchful eye. Cheating is all but impossible in this case.
Since everyone who owns the game will have a DM client, it's going to be absolutely trivial for anyone to make any kind of character they want, at any time. IMHO, this will make cheating a worthless enterprise in NWN, because there's no inherent prestige or value associated with a high-level character.
Plus, the server can filter incoming characters, allowing only those in a specified range of experience levels.
Bioware have been purposefully pretty silent on the story, because they don't want to spoil it. What we know is that your character starts the game in an Adventurer's Academy in the city of Neverwinter. There's a plague called the wailing death that the elders are hoping to stop by importing some exotic creatures from somewhere. The creatures go missing or are stolen, you have to recover them to stop the plague.
Bioware have seemed very proud of the single-player campaign, saying it will be even better than BG2/ToB.
The game will include Windows, Mac and Linux binaries all in the same box (except the toolset, which is windows-only). This is still the plan (I'm a regular at forums.bioware.com; for evidence search on "linux" there).
They just don't have system specs published for mac and linux yet.
It is great that it's coming out for Mac and Linux at the same time as Windows. However, be aware that the toolset (which is what really sets NWN apart from, well, everything) is Windows-only.
NWN gets around the problems you've outlined by using both methods at once: it's a real-time, turn-based system. That is, it's turn based in that you tell your character what to do, and then they do it. It's real-time in that there's no pause (in multiplayer), and if you don't tell your char to do anything, they'll do some default action when it's their turn.
Incidentally, the turns are rather long (a few seconds), so it definitely won't be a clickfest.
Never underestimate the extent the government will go...for example it's widely suspected the anthrax attacks last year was a government test gone awry
Uh, I think you need to adjust your tinfoil hat, there. At least try to have your conspiracy theories make some kind of sense. Exactly what kind of government test can go awry, resulting in anthrax being mailed to US senators?
Prof. Egbert: "Jenkins, I asked you to put that anthrax back into deep freeze, and mail our funding request to the capitol...I found our funding request in the freezer, but where is the anthrax?"
Except that the parent poster did in fact say that all Americans, without exception are more obnoxious, etc. than the rest of the world...he made the generalization, not me.
"They are just more obvious in America because Americans are, without exception, louder, brasher, more egotistical and obnoxious than the rest of the world."
You've met us all, have you? No?? Then where do you get off passing judgement on 280 million people like that?
This statement is certainly more brash and obnoxious than anything I've ever uttered, so unless you are an American, I think you just defeated your own argument...
I think you guys are reading way too much into this. The issue is not Open Source or proprietary, or even Free as in Beer. The issue is what should happen when the government pays money for software reasearch.
Exactly. I don't know about you, but I am sick and tired of so much public funding going to corporate welfare. If it's a researcher's intent to commercialize their code, they can bloody well find their own funding for it. Using the GPL for publically-funded software products makes perfect sense, because it guarantees that the software is "owned" by the public. Why is this so hard to understand?
Again, the article says that A root's functions can be easily duplicated on any of the other root servers:
From the article:
"Theoretically, if 'A' were to disappear, we could pick it up from one of the other servers," Crain said. "Moving the place where the zone is picked up is very simple."
The slashdot post is misleadingly sensationalist (I know, shocking!)
The article states that 8 of the 13 root servers (which are located throughout the US) would have to fail simultaneously before internet users would even notice something was wrong. I think that qualifies as "a little redundancy"...
That's very interesting to hear, because I also noticed several glaring typos in the transcription (not misspellings, things like missing verbs). Damn sloppy, ZD, damn sloppy.
This "Gravastar" might be indistinguishable from a black hole. The article says that the star collapses to the point that the material undergoes some kind of phase transition to become a single waveform of space-time, analogous to a Bose-Einstein Condensate.
If this happens when the object is less than a Schwarzschild radius in size, it would look and behave exactly like a black hole to an outside observer.
(The Schwarzschild radius is the distance inside of which not even light can escape from the object. It doesn't make a difference how the matter is distributed inside the Schwarzschild radius)
I'd also be interested to know how gravastars scale with mass. The article mentioned only stellar-mass black holes, but our greatest evidence for BHs is the supermassive black holes that are thought to exist at the centers of most massive galaxies. These have masses of millions of solar masses; can a gravastar hold up that much mass?
Of course not. If you don't want to share your code with me, then don't license it under a Free software license.
Or are you talking about the so-called "viral" nature of the GPL? (i.e., you may not use my GPL'd code in your program unless yours is GPL'd too). Sorry, you have it exactly backwards. *You* have no right (moral or otherwise) to use *my* code, unless you agree to my license.
You are effectively saying that all things of value are economic, because things that are not economic have no value (i.e., "aimless" academic study...)
Sounds pretty circular.
There's more to life than making money. Indeed, volunteer Free Software developers would be quite inexplicable in a world in which all things were reducible to economic entities, no?
One question: Could someone clarify what exactly you mean by "in the ecliptic?" Unless you are assuming a source of asteroids which has a period related to Earth's I cannot see any reason that one hemisphere would be prefered over the other even when there is a source(with period unrelated to Earth's) of asteroids.
I assume that by "in the ecliptic", he meant that it was inside the Earth's orbit (i.e. closer to the sun).
The ecliptic is the projection of the Earth's orbital plane onto the sky. It is also the path that the Sun appears to follow across the sky over the course of a year. The parent poster's reference to the ecliptic doesn't make much sense. It's true that most solar system bodies lie near the ecliptic, because the solar system is relatively flat. However, the Earth is tiny compared to the size of the solar system; the asteroid could have hit either pole on any day of the year and still be considered near the ecliptic plane.
There's no need to speculate what Taco et al. are thinking with regards to caching linked webpages, it's spelled out nicely in the FAQ.
As it says there, the problem is a matter of courtesy to sites that generate revenue from banner ads. They say nothing about being bandwidth-limited or technically challenged.
This gets pointed out each time somebody asks about caching...surely you saw one of them?
The most innovative suggestion I've seen recently is that slashdot look for the <META> tags that a site can use to tell google not to cache their page. Or perhaps they can invent their own META tag, although I personally think it should be opt-in, not opt-out (i.e., the default should be that slashdot will not cache; only if the slashdot meta tag is found will a cache be created).
I'm not sure if I read it correctly, but did it read that the basic LX install did NOT include the source code? So are they shipping a version that violates the GPL?
They don't have to ship the sources with the binaries; they're only violating the GPL if they refuse to provide the source code to a customer that requests it. They can even charge a fee for providing the source, and still not be in violation of the GPL. You can read the GPL here".
How many times have you emailed a developer of a GPL'd program for some feature or help, and gotten a reply along the lines of, "You have the source code, you figure it out!"?
Never. Not even once, and I've been on both sides of that conversation, many times. I don't buy your argument that a programmer of GPL'd software has no incentive to support or improve the program beyond what they personally see fit to do. I get a huge kick out of the fact that people use and enjoy my program, and I've made a large number of changes based on user feedback. I think the same can be said for many (if not most) GPL'd programs, including all of KDE.
Slashdot Mirror
There are three ways to store a NWN chaarcter:
1. Client side. Absolutely trivial to hack: fire up DM client, set level=20, insert vorpal blade +5 (*yawn*). For this reason, I imagine most servers will not allow client-side characters.
2. Bioware's "Character Vault". Character files are not accessible by the client so direct hacking is not possible. "Twinking" (quick, easy leveling and procurement of undeserved items) is made moot by "filters" that will reject a character that has advanced too quickly. The Vault won't stop cheating, and that isn't really its goal. What it does is make sure that all level N characters are on an approximately equal footing, and it also puts some kind of throttle control on the rate at which one can level up.
3. Server-side character vault. Character files are stored on the DM's machine, and can (optionally) only be played in the DM's world, under his/her watchful eye. Cheating is all but impossible in this case.
Since everyone who owns the game will have a DM client, it's going to be absolutely trivial for anyone to make any kind of character they want, at any time. IMHO, this will make cheating a worthless enterprise in NWN, because there's no inherent prestige or value associated with a high-level character.
Plus, the server can filter incoming characters, allowing only those in a specified range of experience levels.
Bioware have been purposefully pretty silent on the story, because they don't want to spoil it. What we know is that your character starts the game in an Adventurer's Academy in the city of Neverwinter. There's a plague called the wailing death that the elders are hoping to stop by importing some exotic creatures from somewhere. The creatures go missing or are stolen, you have to recover them to stop the plague.
Bioware have seemed very proud of the single-player campaign, saying it will be even better than BG2/ToB.
The game will include Windows, Mac and Linux binaries all in the same box (except the toolset, which is windows-only). This is still the plan (I'm a regular at forums.bioware.com; for evidence search on "linux" there).
They just don't have system specs published for mac and linux yet.
It is great that it's coming out for Mac and Linux at the same time as Windows. However, be aware that the toolset (which is what really sets NWN apart from, well, everything) is Windows-only.
NWN gets around the problems you've outlined by using both methods at once: it's a real-time, turn-based system. That is, it's turn based in that you tell your character what to do, and then they do it. It's real-time in that there's no pause (in multiplayer), and if you don't tell your char to do anything, they'll do some default action when it's their turn.
Incidentally, the turns are rather long (a few seconds), so it definitely won't be a clickfest.
Uh, I think you need to adjust your tinfoil hat, there.
At least try to have your conspiracy theories make some kind of sense. Exactly what kind of government test can go awry, resulting in anthrax being mailed to US senators?
Prof. Egbert: "Jenkins, I asked you to put that anthrax back into deep freeze, and mail our funding request to the capitol...I found our funding request in the freezer, but where is the anthrax?"
Prof Jenkins: "D'oh!"
Except that the parent poster did in fact say that all Americans, without exception are more obnoxious, etc. than the rest of the world...he made the generalization, not me.
"They are just more obvious in America because Americans are, without exception, louder, brasher, more egotistical and obnoxious than the rest of the world."
You've met us all, have you? No?? Then where do you get off passing judgement on 280 million people like that?
This statement is certainly more brash and obnoxious than anything I've ever uttered, so unless you are an American, I think you just defeated your own argument...
I think you guys are reading way too much into this. The issue is not Open Source or proprietary, or even Free as in Beer. The issue is what should happen when the government pays money for software reasearch.
Exactly. I don't know about you, but I am sick and tired of so much public funding going to corporate welfare. If it's a researcher's intent to commercialize their code, they can bloody well find their own funding for it. Using the GPL for publically-funded software products makes perfect sense, because it guarantees that the software is "owned" by the public. Why is this so hard to understand?
I don't understand why you are taking the wrong side here.
:)
Didn't you know? Carnage4Life is a MS employee (no big secret, right C4L?). So it isn't the "wrong side" for him, just for the rest of us
In short, you wanted to see an interview of ESR, not RMS.
Here's one.
Unfortunately, my laptop screen is 1024x768, so I don't have a lot of real estate to show off. Note the menu transparency.
From the article:
The slashdot post is misleadingly sensationalist (I know, shocking!)
The article states that 8 of the 13 root servers (which are located throughout the US) would have to fail simultaneously before internet users would even notice something was wrong. I think that qualifies as "a little redundancy"...
That's very interesting to hear, because I also noticed several glaring typos in the transcription (not misspellings, things like missing verbs). Damn sloppy, ZD, damn sloppy.
Yes, that's what I meant by "look and behave like a black hole"...
This "Gravastar" might be indistinguishable from a black hole. The article says that the star collapses to the point that the material undergoes some kind of phase transition to become a single waveform of space-time, analogous to a Bose-Einstein Condensate.
If this happens when the object is less than a Schwarzschild radius in size, it would look and behave exactly like a black hole to an outside observer.
(The Schwarzschild radius is the distance inside of which not even light can escape from the object. It doesn't make a difference how the matter is distributed inside the Schwarzschild radius)
I'd also be interested to know how gravastars scale with mass. The article mentioned only stellar-mass black holes, but our greatest evidence for BHs is the supermassive black holes that are thought to exist at the centers of most massive galaxies. These have masses of millions of solar masses; can a gravastar hold up that much mass?
You have moral right to my creation?
Of course not. If you don't want to share your code with me, then don't license it under a Free software license.
Or are you talking about the so-called "viral" nature of the GPL? (i.e., you may not use my GPL'd code in your program unless yours is GPL'd too). Sorry, you have it exactly backwards. *You* have no right (moral or otherwise) to use *my* code, unless you agree to my license.
Hope that clears it up for you.
Stallman doesn't advocate free (gratis) software; he advocates Free (libre) software.
You are effectively saying that all things of value are economic, because things that are not economic have no value (i.e., "aimless" academic study...)
Sounds pretty circular.
There's more to life than making money. Indeed, volunteer Free Software developers would be quite inexplicable in a world in which all things were reducible to economic entities, no?
One question: Could someone clarify what exactly you mean by "in the ecliptic?" Unless you are assuming a source of asteroids which has a period related to Earth's I cannot see any reason that one hemisphere would be prefered over the other even when there is a source(with period unrelated to Earth's) of asteroids.
I assume that by "in the ecliptic", he meant that it was inside the Earth's orbit (i.e. closer to the sun).
The ecliptic is the projection of the Earth's orbital plane onto the sky. It is also the path that the Sun appears to follow across the sky over the course of a year. The parent poster's reference to the ecliptic doesn't make much sense. It's true that most solar system bodies lie near the ecliptic, because the solar system is relatively flat. However, the Earth is tiny compared to the size of the solar system; the asteroid could have hit either pole on any day of the year and still be considered near the ecliptic plane.
A plot fiendishly clever in its intricacies!
:)
There's no need to speculate what Taco et al. are thinking with regards to caching linked webpages, it's spelled out nicely in the FAQ.
As it says there, the problem is a matter of courtesy to sites that generate revenue from banner ads. They say nothing about being bandwidth-limited or technically challenged.
This gets pointed out each time somebody asks about caching...surely you saw one of them?
The most innovative suggestion I've seen recently is that slashdot look for the <META> tags that
a site can use to tell google not to cache their page. Or perhaps they can invent their own META tag, although I personally think it should be opt-in, not opt-out (i.e., the default should be that slashdot will not cache; only if the slashdot meta tag is found will a cache be created).
I agree, altough I can't think of a sense in which throwing everything under /usr is the "right" way. Redhat does it as well...anyone know why?
I'm not sure if I read it correctly, but did it read that the basic LX install did NOT include the source code? So are they shipping a version that violates the GPL?
They don't have to ship the sources with the binaries; they're only violating the GPL if they refuse to provide the source code to a customer that requests it. They can even charge a fee for providing the source, and still not be in violation of the GPL. You can read the GPL here".
Check it out.
How many times have you emailed a developer of a GPL'd program for some feature or help, and gotten a reply along the lines of, "You have the source code, you figure it out!"?
Never. Not even once, and I've been on both sides of that conversation, many times. I don't buy your argument that a programmer of GPL'd software has no incentive to support or improve the program beyond what they personally see fit to do. I get a huge kick out of the fact that people use and enjoy my program, and I've made a large number of changes based on user feedback. I think the same can be said for many (if not most) GPL'd programs, including all of KDE.