here, y'are - after months of beta testing here's my definitave guide to playing SWG.
Guide to Starting out solo in Star Wars: Galaxies, by an_anonymous_eq_player00
Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) is a group based game, but it is possible, and possibly more enjoyable for the casual gamer to make some progress without banging too hard against the numerous artificial time sinks in SWG.
Character Creation:
Even if you are planning on creating a combat based character (killing things is why most people seem to play these games, a thought seemingly lost on the design team), it's best to start out as an artisan or medic in order to receive the crafting station and surveying kits. It's important to note here that the starting stats for the various profession templates are vastly different, so first make a combat profession character (brawler/marksman), write down the stats - then back up and select medic or artisan.
I chose medic when I started, mostly because I received the white jumpsuit rather than the rather bland artisan clothing. Also the medic starts with a wholly inadequate supply of stimpacks, which are helpful in reminding you how annoying it is to play a medic in this game.
Create your character, and BEFORE you select the travel terminal to select a starting planet, take advantage of the free stat migration to return your stats to the ones more suited for blasting or whacking things, which you wrote down in the step above.
First thing you'll need to do in the game is find the trainer of your craft of choice and train the profession you really want to play rather than the almost as fun as paint drying selection you have made.
Quick overview of the available professions at starting time:
a) Medic - contrary to the name of this class, medics don't actually heal people very much and as a rule are not terribly needed in fights. As a medic you'll spend most of your time either a) looking for resources to craft medicine or b) crafting said medicine. Sure, medics heal people - but usually by standing around in a hospital begging for the solo player to pay them to continue their main task, being crafting.
b) Artisan - the true soloers of the game, the artisan is the profession which is the least dependant on the other professions. If you really enjoy watching paint dry, this is the profession for you. They gather their own materials for crafting (the only class capable of doing so), usually as a result of long repetative macros which allow a player to Survey through the night unattended. After mining plants to death, the artisan then spends their time making shoes, 1,000s of necklaces, and 100s underpowered newbie weapons in order to advance to their true goal - placing structures on top of your favorite hunting grounds. If you see an artisan, the best thing to do I find is help them out by ensuring that their profanity filters are working properly.
c) Entertainers - somewhat similar to artisans in that they can be run by macro's or with the assistance of a group - entirely while AFK. The only difference is that they can act out lesbian porn much more accurately. They also require people standing around watching them while they go afk. Thus making them remarkably slower to level.
d) Scout - the scout is not really a profession in the standard sense in that you can't actually advance in it unless you receive other training. Scouts advance by harvesting resources from dead creatures, which it turns out, are awfully hard to come by unless you have a reliable method of making said creatures into the dead state that they need to be in. As a result, the entire scouting profession is used near exclusively by people like yourself who want to kill things, get frustrated by the utter lack of objects which appear on the corpses of the things you kill, and pick up scouting. Scouts can technicall
Amazon.com opened its virtual doors in
July 1995 with a mission to use the Internet to transform book buying into the fastest, easiest, and most enjoyable shopping experience possible. While our customer base and product offerings have grown considerably since our early days, we still maintain our founding commitment to customer satisfaction and the delivery of an educational and inspiring shopping experience.
Dell.com started online sales in 1995.
Shouldn't spurious use of invalid patents be a criminal offense, up there with Fraud, and Extortion?
And in a more ethereal manner, Redhat.com was doing online transactions (for $0, but a transaction is a transaction) as early as 1994.
I probably have a fairly unique view of contract law but it's always been my belief that things can be right, even though they're in contradiction of a contract.
to that end, it's my assertation, and one I would defend to the point of quitting an assanine job, that if I do things in my off time, it is not the property of the company no matter what they sat do or make me sign.
Though I'm the same type of person who believes heavily in derative work.
And if, by reading Code, I reach some understanding, that understanding of that code is mine and mine alone. Any work produced using that understanding of that code is mine and mine alone. To do with what I see fit.
I'm probably trolling GPL advocates right about now, but heck.
I'd comment on their site, but I don't trust them with my email address...
Here's what I wrote before their system figured out that sadasdasdasd@asdasdasda.asdasd was a bad address;)
---Begin--- Advertizers can bite me, and I say that as the owner of a web site which used to depend on advertizing revenue. (actually, oddly enough it was the company that now is Zdet that was providing our ads)
This was a year and a half ago during the final days of "we guarantee a sell out, $2.00/CPM.
anyhow, we went from pulling revenue of $70,000 a month to nothing inside of 30 days when ZDnet pulled the ad contract from us (new economy, nothing nefarious like content problems).
8 Months ago we moved to a premium subscription model, now we have over 25,000 subscribers. Revenue is much more stable than it ever was during the Advertizing phase.
We still run advertizing on the site, but it's there to mostly convince people to pay to get rid of it, since we make about 100x more off a viewer who pays than a viewer who sees the ads.
Yes, we're an awful demographic. But in the end, the fact that we serve some 60 Million Ads a month should account for more than $3,000 revenue (which is all we get for ads these days)
So, the advertizers can do whatever the heck they like, but untill they're willing to pay more than the individual is willing to pay me to not see the ads, the can lick at the heels of people who don't buy things online as far as I'm concerned.
It's not short sighted. It's called comminity building. Many people will pay $2.00 a month to get rid of the ads on their favorite site. How many advertizers are willing to pay $2.00 for every viewer that comes to your site in a month?
I used to work alot with LDAP, my job function has changed since then so I'm not as upto date as I'd like to be.
I ran up against the same problem, using LDAP for a dropin replacement for most authentication systems (PAM, etc) isn't very practical since there are almost NO tools available for management.
The problem is the lack of defined specifications for what objects in LDAP have what attributes. CompanyA might want certain things in a user object, CompanyB might want other elements there.
It's good and bad. The scalability and flexibility is that there are few specifications, the downside is that there are no tools because of this.
I ended up writing a web based admin application in perl which did add/delete/update. I can't post it since it's not mine to post. It's not hard to write however.
Net::LDAP, DBI:LDAP, and LDAP::API are all good perl modules for manipulating OO databases via LDAP. I used LDAP::API, since it was the only one available at the time.
In Calgary, Shaw Cablesystems is currently testing True VOD on the employee cable map.
In terms of the challenges left to launch, the server infastrucute is easy to set up. We wrote all our own software for 90% of the session and playback control. (It's a wacky combination of Perl ASP(ick) and Java).
All that's left now is figuring out how much we need to build up the cable plant before rolling it out publicly.
Right now, we can serve 2,000 streams off a given server. Problem is that in the traditional Cable network setup, that would mean about 2000 channels of video available to a given city. Which isn't near close enough. We're trying some tricks now with our gear (hence the employee rollout), and hope to be able to launch with 50,000 VoD channels to a city with about 500,000 cable customers.
Fun fun:) Though I should point out that while most of us here are pondering the uses for watchign good Films at any time, 45% of the revenue off Nvod (near video on demand, pay per view) comes from Porn. I doubt that's going to change for VoD.
The one which I though was the most fair, was a setup I had at a company a few years back.
When on-call, you'd get an hourly rate for incidents. The smallest increment was 1 hour, with a 4 hour base. In other words if it took me 30 mins to resolve a problem, I'd get to bill for 4 hours.
If it took me 4.5 hours to fix a problem, I would get to bill for 5 hours.
Additionally, you got 8 hours "for free" for carrying the phone per week. It's not really "free" as is mentioned in the article header, but it seemed enough.
On a good week, you'd get 8 hours to haul around a cellphone. On a bad week you'd easily be able to get 40+ hours of overtime while working about 8.
Average download speed: 140 Kbytes/sec
Average upload speed: 55 Kbytets/sec
Two static IPs
Various other stuff I never use (email, webspace)
Port blocked on all ports 130 for incoming connections. (no port 80 webserver or port 25 smtp)
I'm just wondering, and would love feedback, but isn't the issue of coopyright here not based on the US version of the Law, but on the Canadian or Sweedish versions of the law?
This link: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/it03022e.html is all I could find in a cursory search for articles on the same points of Canadian law.
It mentions: In order for something to be copyrightable, it mst meet the following criteria: a) author must be a resident of Canada or treaty country. (which one of the original authors is) b) the work must be original (which it is) c) it must have a distribution (which cphack does)
Again, it mentions that in order for ownership to be transfered, it must be done in writing, but I believe that legal interpretations recently have accepted digital writing as writing.
The same document goes on to indicate that in the event of Join ownership, FULL copyright is assigned to each of the authors, unless otherwise specified.
In my ever-so-non-legal opinion, this would seem to imply that the GPL can work very effectively in Canadian law, since by allowing colaborative work by anyone who downloads the program, they would seem to become entitled to full ownership (thus extending the GPL).
IMO, the best answer to this question, is not to think of the question as "why perl in CGI?" and more as "Why perl at all?"
True, perl tends to run a bit slower than say C or C++ or even Java in certain applications. It's certainly slower than coding the whole CGI application in ASM. At least that would be conventional wisdom.
There is an excellent article on Why perl? at http://perl.oreilly.com/news/importance_0498.html Written by Tim O'Reilly and Ben Smith.
The article makes a number of points, but one of my favorites is that when coding in perl, it's easier to write a good (fast, stable, secure) application than it is in a lower level language, the article goes on to make the point that well coded perl can infact run FASTER than poorly coded C or C++.
And (for most CGI developers I know) it's certianly easier to write good perl than it is to write good C++.
The article is a good read, but granted I'm heavily biased as a frequent perl coder.
You chose to make this column about freedom, and about the "right to speak".
Along with the right to speak comes the right to ignore. I will vigoursously defend the rights of anyone to say anything in a public forum. I don't care if it's offensive to some, and I certainly don't care if some choose to ignore it.
"Nanny" Software like cybernanny, itself is not bad. As much as publications like wired and yourself tend to rail on against it, it holds no intrinsic evil or restriction.
It's the implementation that leads to censorship. I believe that all people have the absolute right to choose for themselves what to view, but as important as that right is, it's equally if not more important that anyone have the right NOT to view (or be exposed to) whatever they care.
Saying that it's somehow a violation of your rights not to be read after speaking is potentially true, but certainly about 1/100th as important as anyones right to simply not hear you.
In the information age, information becomes more and more valuable. As anything ioncreases in value the inherant quality of said item also becomes more and more apparent.
I use a comprehensive and effective.kill file when browsing news groups, and even now on my email, inorder to get the MOST important, and highest quality information I can.
For any right, it would seem, there is an equal right that may seem to contradict that right.
Slashdot Mirror
...but my FreeBSD/Apache/mod_perl/PgSQL boxen are currently serving 189 Req/Sec off a realtime data driven application.
.NET can do that. on the same hardware? dunno. For the same cost? Definitely not.
Hardware: $10,000 USD (4x Dell servers)
Software: $0 USD
Bandwidth: $6,000/mo USD
Uptime >99.99%
64% CPU use on the single most loaded box
Sure,
~a
here, y'are - after months of beta testing here's my definitave guide to playing SWG.
Guide to Starting out solo in Star Wars: Galaxies, by
an_anonymous_eq_player00
Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) is a group based game, but it is possible,
and possibly more enjoyable for the casual gamer to make some progress
without banging too hard against the numerous artificial time sinks in
SWG.
Character Creation:
Even if you are planning on creating a combat based character (killing
things is why most people seem to play these games, a thought
seemingly lost on the design team), it's best to start out as an
artisan or medic in order to receive the crafting station and
surveying kits. It's important to note here that the starting stats
for the various profession templates are vastly different, so first
make a combat profession character (brawler/marksman), write down the
stats - then back up and select medic or artisan.
I chose medic when I started, mostly because I received the white
jumpsuit rather than the rather bland artisan clothing. Also the
medic starts with a wholly inadequate supply of stimpacks, which are
helpful in reminding you how annoying it is to play a medic in this
game.
Create your character, and BEFORE you select the travel terminal to
select a starting planet, take advantage of the free stat migration to
return your stats to the ones more suited for blasting or whacking
things, which you wrote down in the step above.
First thing you'll need to do in the game is find the trainer of your
craft of choice and train the profession you really want to play
rather than the almost as fun as paint drying selection you have made.
Quick overview of the available professions at starting time:
a) Medic - contrary to the name of this class, medics don't actually
heal people very much and as a rule are not terribly needed in
fights. As a medic you'll spend most of your time either a) looking
for resources to craft medicine or b) crafting said medicine. Sure,
medics heal people - but usually by standing around in a hospital
begging for the solo player to pay them to continue their main task,
being crafting.
b) Artisan - the true soloers of the game, the artisan is the
profession which is the least dependant on the other professions. If
you really enjoy watching paint dry, this is the profession for you.
They gather their own materials for crafting (the only class capable
of doing so), usually as a result of long repetative macros which
allow a player to Survey through the night unattended. After mining
plants to death, the artisan then spends their time making shoes,
1,000s of necklaces, and 100s underpowered newbie weapons in order to
advance to their true goal - placing structures on top of your
favorite hunting grounds. If you see an artisan, the best thing to do
I find is help them out by ensuring that their profanity filters are
working properly.
c) Entertainers - somewhat similar to artisans in that they can be run
by macro's or with the assistance of a group - entirely while AFK.
The only difference is that they can act out lesbian porn much more
accurately. They also require people standing around watching them
while they go afk. Thus making them remarkably slower to level.
d) Scout - the scout is not really a profession in the standard sense
in that you can't actually advance in it unless you receive other
training. Scouts advance by harvesting resources from dead creatures,
which it turns out, are awfully hard to come by unless you have a
reliable method of making said creatures into the dead state that they
need to be in. As a result, the entire scouting profession is used
near exclusively by people like yourself who want to kill things, get
frustrated by the utter lack of objects which appear on the corpses of
the things you kill, and pick up scouting. Scouts can technicall
"So... true... but than again, "geek" isn't precisely the same thing as "smart"."
So true, as the comments here on slashdot remind us all on a daily basis.
From About Amazon.com:
Dell.com started online sales in 1995. Shouldn't spurious use of invalid patents be a criminal offense, up there with Fraud, and Extortion?And in a more ethereal manner, Redhat.com was doing online transactions (for $0, but a transaction is a transaction) as early as 1994.
~~
I probably have a fairly unique view of contract law but it's always been my belief that things can be right, even though they're in contradiction of a contract.
to that end, it's my assertation, and one I would defend to the point of quitting an assanine job, that if I do things in my off time, it is not the property of the company no matter what they sat do or make me sign.
Though I'm the same type of person who believes heavily in derative work.
And if, by reading Code, I reach some understanding, that understanding of that code is mine and mine alone. Any work produced using that understanding of that code is mine and mine alone. To do with what I see fit.
I'm probably trolling GPL advocates right about now, but heck.
~a
I'd comment on their site, but I don't trust them with my email address...
;)
/CPM.
Here's what I wrote before their system figured out that sadasdasdasd@asdasdasda.asdasd was a bad address
---Begin---
Advertizers can bite me, and I say that as the owner of a web site which used to depend on advertizing revenue. (actually, oddly enough it was the company that now is Zdet that was providing our ads)
This was a year and a half ago during the final days of "we guarantee a sell out, $2.00
anyhow, we went from pulling revenue of $70,000 a month to nothing inside of 30 days when ZDnet pulled the ad contract from us (new economy, nothing nefarious like content problems).
8 Months ago we moved to a premium subscription model, now we have over 25,000 subscribers. Revenue is much more stable than it ever was during the Advertizing phase.
We still run advertizing on the site, but it's there to mostly convince people to pay to get rid of it, since we make about 100x more off a viewer who pays than a viewer who sees the ads.
Yes, we're an awful demographic. But in the end, the fact that we serve some 60 Million Ads a month should account for more than $3,000 revenue (which is all we get for ads these days)
So, the advertizers can do whatever the heck they like, but untill they're willing to pay more than the individual is willing to pay me to not see the ads, the can lick at the heels of people who don't buy things online as far as I'm concerned.
It's not short sighted. It's called comminity building. Many people will pay $2.00 a month to get rid of the ads on their favorite site. How many advertizers are willing to pay $2.00 for every viewer that comes to your site in a month?
The advertizers can reap the seeds they sewed.
~a
---End---
I ran up against the same problem, using LDAP for a dropin replacement for most authentication systems (PAM, etc) isn't very practical since there are almost NO tools available for management.
The problem is the lack of defined specifications for what objects in LDAP have what attributes. CompanyA might want certain things in a user object, CompanyB might want other elements there.
It's good and bad. The scalability and flexibility is that there are few specifications, the downside is that there are no tools because of this.
I ended up writing a web based admin application in perl which did add/delete/update. I can't post it since it's not mine to post. It's not hard to write however.
Net::LDAP, DBI:LDAP, and LDAP::API are all good perl modules for manipulating OO databases via LDAP. I used LDAP::API, since it was the only one available at the time.
In Calgary, Shaw Cablesystems is currently testing True VOD on the employee cable map.
:) Though I should point out that while most of us here are pondering the uses for watchign good Films at any time, 45% of the revenue off Nvod (near video on demand, pay per view) comes from Porn. I doubt that's going to change for VoD.
In terms of the challenges left to launch, the server infastrucute is easy to set up. We wrote all our own software for 90% of the session and playback control. (It's a wacky combination of Perl ASP(ick) and Java).
All that's left now is figuring out how much we need to build up the cable plant before rolling it out publicly.
Right now, we can serve 2,000 streams off a given server. Problem is that in the traditional Cable network setup, that would mean about 2000 channels of video available to a given city. Which isn't near close enough. We're trying some tricks now with our gear (hence the employee rollout), and hope to be able to launch with 50,000 VoD channels to a city with about 500,000 cable customers.
Fun fun
I've seen a few ways of doing this.
The one which I though was the most fair, was a setup I had at a company a few years back.
When on-call, you'd get an hourly rate for incidents. The smallest increment was 1 hour, with a 4 hour base. In other words if it took me 30 mins to resolve a problem, I'd get to bill for 4 hours.
If it took me 4.5 hours to fix a problem, I would get to bill for 5 hours.
Additionally, you got 8 hours "for free" for carrying the phone per week. It's not really "free" as is mentioned in the article header, but it seemed enough.
On a good week, you'd get 8 hours to haul around a cellphone. On a bad week you'd easily be able to get 40+ hours of overtime while working about 8.
Seemed fair to me.
In Calgary - Alberta - Canada:
Average download speed: 140 Kbytes/sec
Average upload speed: 55 Kbytets/sec
Two static IPs
Various other stuff I never use (email, webspace)
Port blocked on all ports 130 for incoming connections. (no port 80 webserver or port 25 smtp)
$29.95 + $5.00 for second IP == $35.00 / Month
no - it is the responsibility of the user to ensure that no GPL copyrighted driver is compiled to binary and then shipped without source.
Last I checked, the GPL still permits compiling the source code ;)
I'm just wondering, and would love feedback, but isn't the issue of coopyright here not based on the US version of the Law, but on the Canadian or Sweedish versions of the law?
This link: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/it03022e.html is all I could find in a cursory search for articles on the same points of Canadian law.
It mentions:
In order for something to be copyrightable, it mst meet the following criteria:
a) author must be a resident of Canada or treaty country. (which one of the original authors is)
b) the work must be original (which it is)
c) it must have a distribution (which cphack does)
Again, it mentions that in order for ownership to be transfered, it must be done in writing, but I believe that legal interpretations recently have accepted digital writing as writing.
The same document goes on to indicate that in the event of Join ownership, FULL copyright is assigned to each of the authors, unless otherwise specified.
In my ever-so-non-legal opinion, this would seem to imply that the GPL can work very effectively in Canadian law, since by allowing colaborative work by anyone who downloads the program, they would seem to become entitled to full ownership (thus extending the GPL).
Is this even remotely true?
--A
IMO, the best answer to this question, is not to think of the question as "why perl in CGI?" and more as "Why perl at all?"
True, perl tends to run a bit slower than say C or C++ or even Java in certain applications. It's certainly slower than coding the whole CGI application in ASM. At least that would be conventional wisdom.
There is an excellent article on Why perl? at http://perl.oreilly.com/news/importance_0498.html Written by Tim O'Reilly and Ben Smith.
The article makes a number of points, but one of my favorites is that when coding in perl, it's easier to write a good (fast, stable, secure) application than it is in a lower level language, the article goes on to make the point that well coded perl can infact run FASTER than poorly coded C or C++.
And (for most CGI developers I know) it's certianly easier to write good perl than it is to write good C++.
The article is a good read, but granted I'm heavily biased as a frequent perl coder.
--A
Pretty much the _only_ text editor.
Although others will beg to differ. If emacs doesn't run on it, it's not an OS, although it still might not be an OS even if emacs runs on it.
You chose to make this column about freedom, and about the "right to speak".
.kill file when browsing news groups, and even now on my email, inorder to get the MOST important, and highest quality information I can.
Along with the right to speak comes the right to ignore. I will vigoursously defend the rights of anyone to say anything in a public forum. I don't care if it's offensive to some, and I certainly don't care if some choose to ignore it.
"Nanny" Software like cybernanny, itself is not bad. As much as publications like wired and yourself tend to rail on against it, it holds no intrinsic evil or restriction.
It's the implementation that leads to censorship. I believe that all people have the absolute right to choose for themselves what to view, but as important as that right is, it's equally if not more important that anyone have the right NOT to view (or be exposed to) whatever they care.
Saying that it's somehow a violation of your rights not to be read after speaking is potentially true, but certainly about 1/100th as important as anyones right to simply not hear you.
In the information age, information becomes more and more valuable. As anything ioncreases in value the inherant quality of said item also becomes more and more apparent.
I use a comprehensive and effective
For any right, it would seem, there is an equal right that may seem to contradict that right.
--A