I made the edit a good 4+ years ago. The article was a poorly written stub at the time, so for all I know it was deleted and remade since.
And even if it was recent, your response basically underscores my point. I spent 10 minutes of my time making a useful quick fix, only to see it reverted in under 60 seconds. You think I should go spend hours arguing that my 10 minute edit should have been kept? If someone doesn't want my donation of time and effort, why should I waste even more of it trying to convince them that they actually do want it? I'd rather (and in fact, did) move on to some other place on the internet was was much more willing to accept my help.
I should probably have read the GP's post more carefully. In an article that wasn't actually about aluminum/aluminium, these issues would be much less likely. I would still check each instance of the replace manually, though.
I said "find->replace" not "replace all". Every instance of a spelling being replaced was viewed by me before clicking replace.
Yep. My last (and only) time trying to edit wikipedia was years ago in an article about hot air balloons. I noticed that "aluminum" and "aluminium" were used interchangeably throughout the article, so I did some research into what the accepted spelling was (apparently it was split 50-50 at the time). Ultimately I settled on the spelling wikipedia used for their entry on aluminum (aluminium redirected to it). I copied the article into notepad, did a find->replace on aluminium, reloaded the page to make sure I wasn't blowing away anyones edit (page hadn't been touched for months but better safe than sorry right?), and submitted my changes with a useful description and justification of what I'd done. It took about 5 minutes for the thing to be reverted. I checked on it a few months later and it still had the mismash of spellings, and the addition of a note in the talk page critical of my edit.
It's not just a weight thing On a round trip between San Diego and Palm Springs (mostly freeway with a good dose of mountain switchbacks), my dads Mazda 6 got 42mpg (EPA rating is 38 highway). Modern engine design can do a lot to increase efficiency.
It felt like a version of Star Trek crafted specifically for people with short attention spans and little ability to spot plot holes.
Nailed it.
Not to show my inner hipster, but I really feel that massive box office sales actually mean that it's not a particularly good star trek. The series is enjoyed by nerds, and since the vast majority of people in the world aren't nerds, it will appeal to a very small subset of people. What appeals to nerds usually doesn't appeal to others, and vice versa. By expanding to include a wider audience, it will by definition need to abandon a lot of what made it "good". That might be great for making money, but the series is no longer star trek and has abandoned its initial fanbase.
I wonder why they aren't using gyros with magnetic bearings. Especially in micro-gravity, that could help quite a lot.
I was going to say the same thing (though for all I know maybe they are using magnetic bearings).
There's also some new R&D being done with active magnetic bearing control, basically you monitor the position of the shaft inside the bearing and apply changes to the magnetic field in order to dampen vibration and ensure the shaft stays centered.
My last employer I gave 2 months notice... just because I thought it'd help them fill my job in that time. I knew I was going to leave, and had no ill will towards them. They were happy with it, and aside from the occasional "are you sure you want to leave", everything was fine.
The few co-workers I've known who moved on to a different company basically went the same way:
"I might potentially be finding a new job soon, someone should probably start learning the stuff I'm working on just in case"
"hey guys I'm not going to be in a few days next week because I got an interview"
"they really liked me and I'm going to be out a day next week for a second interview"
"I got accepted, my last day here is 3 weeks from now"
No hard feelings, and we usually had a going away lunch or similar on the last day they were with us.
If they were willing to yell at you for things you didn't do, how do you know that they wouldn't have lied about you anyway had you given 2 weeks notice?
I've even signed receipts with random things before, unless they have a previous signature from you and are comparing them, the fact that you have to sign when buying with a credit card is pure security theater. And do you honestly think a minimum wage employee is going to turn down a sale because the picture on your drivers license is old and doesn't look like the guy trying to use the card? You're lucky if they even say anything about the names not matching.
Also, I highly recommend looking into exactly how the agreements are setup between banks/merchants/card companies in order for the entire system to work (find some people who own a business that does card transactions and ask them how it works), it's downright scary how easily the system could be (and often is) abused.
The system relies almost entirely on security through obscurity and mutual trust. The only reason it hasn't broken down is because there's so much money to be made through the increased commerce resulting from keeping transactions easy to make that the banks and card companies can eat the cost of the occasional abuse.
Another fun trick if they're tailgaiting but not quite touching your bumper is to match RPMs (so there's no telltale shudder for the guy to notice) with the next gear or two lower (depending on speed) and then downshift. The idea is to use engine braking to slow suddenly without tipping off the offending tailgater until it's nearly too late. It usually shakes them up enough that they'll back off a bit. Keep your eye on the mirror and be ready to nail the gas again to avoid being rear-ended, just in case they're too close for their reflexes.
Me and a friend tried to talk to them about it when they were showing it off at maker faire. Unfortunately they had sent a booth full of marketing people who told us to come back in an hour when their one person who actually understood the technical side of it got back from lunch. Nvidia should have known better than to send a bunch of marketing people to an event geared towards engineers and other technical people.
Wait, that also implies that Bush didn't singlehandedly start two wars, throw "terrorists" into gitmo to be held indefinitely, and crash the economy. Are you sure that your logic is correct there?
And if you're worried about road deaths, you can always start a public awareness campaign to get those people to just recharge their phones in the microwave as a slightly safer alternative.
I have an Emotive unit, and it's pretty terrible at brainwave detection. What it is slightly better at is detecting the movements of facial muscles. If you use the gyroscope output and then couple that with monitoring something like eyeblinks, you can have a pretty decent hands free headmouse (though it's annoying to have to close your eyes in order to click things). Most of the ~~awesome~~ demos that you see of it on youtube are based on detecting a combination of the gyroscope and facial movements, not actual mental state.
Every IT department I ever worked in was the definition of "unprofessional", as least as far as most peoples definitions were concerned. jeans and a t-shirt featuring a metal band were standard despite the business casual dress code, sometimes someone would wear a polo shirt if they were feeling particularly formal.
There was an nvidia booth at maker faire in san mateo this year, and they had one there. I was attending with a friend who was a game developer, so we went to check it out. I was thoroughly unimpressed, not because there was anything wrong with the system (it played games as far as I could tell), but because all of our technical questions were met with blank stares. Eventually they told us to come back in an hour because the one technical guy was off getting lunch or something. Apparently nvidia sent a booth full of marketing people to an event specifically for engineers and technical people.
This guy is a blathering moron. You dont study wardec mechanics and 'win them' by exploiting the fact that a single industrial, something for hauling ore, can be beat by 3 pvp fitted ships...
That was a weeks worth of action condensed into one sentence since the post was getting pretty long. If you want a slightly fuller version of the story:
We were all less than 3 month old players. 5 million was still a hefty amount to us. A mission running and industry corp full of players (40+) in the 2 year+ range wardeced our corp, which had 4 people in it. The biggest thing one of us could fly was a BC. The rest of us were in cruisers. The aggressor corp was dumb and apparently didn't bother to warn their members that the wardec was going through. Rather than be intimidated and not log in for a week (most people did this in my experience), we checked up on the forums and made sure we understood the mechanics right (this was our first wardec, remember we've only been playing for ~2 months), then flew 20 jumps to the enemy corps HQ (which happened to be a mission hub, though we didn't really know a lot about mission hubs at the time). In the 15 minutes before the dec went live, we found several of them mining in different belts. We all picked a target, then sat there and waited for the dec to go live (I think one of us even started chatting, pretended to be clueless, and offered to defend them from the belt rats). We got several industrial kills in the first minute, then got lucky and snagged someone on a gate who was returning with a mission item. They were all pretty confused, and we explained to them that their CEO had wardecced us and apparently not informed them. We were also messaged by a neutral in a battleship who wanted some action, so we fleeted up to give him wardec agro (yes it used to work that way, and it was hilarious, search "lofty scam") and watched him alpha the CEO when he undocked. From there we avoided fighting anyone in an actual pvp ship and concentrated on their industrials (why they flew them during a wardec I have no idea, though we didn't realize how dumb they were at the time). They let it expire in the next week, and I'm pretty sure everyone was rather upset at their CEO for thinking he could kick around 4 newbie pirates.
Can flipping mechanics? You open the can and take the ore, then you are flagged as free to kill by the owner of that can for a brief period of time. Let me guess, you ran and hid in station?
And you've just illustrated why understanding can flipping mechanics is important. If you take from a can, you're flagged to that players corp (consider NPC corps a one-man corp), not the player. It's only when the player shoots you that you're flagged to the player. Knowing this (keep in mind this is when I'd been playing for about a month, I had a cruiser and thought it was amazing and expensive), I once stole some ore, let the guy shoot me for about 30 seconds, then docked up. This meant that while the corp timer had 14:30 left on it, his personal agro timer, which was refreshing every hit, had 15:00. I undocked with 10 seconds left on the corp timer, then didn't move in order to keep my 30 seconds of undock invulnerability. After the undock invuln was up, the guy began shooting at me, which was fine because he still had personal agro. Upon seeing him shoot, his corpmates all assumed it was ok for them to do so and clicked through the concord warning to open fire, resulting in all of them being concorded. Another corpmate undocked with some remote reps on a destroyer, which gave me just enough of an edge to kill the last remaining guy while the rest raged in local.
In this case, lack of understanding of how those agro mechanics worked is what got the mining corp killed.
Nor are any new players going to beat any like number of senior players in any real engagement, they dont have the skills to equip the better mods and fly the better ships. It is non-sense.
I don't give two rat farts what you do in game, but bragging about being a dick then berating people that call what you do dickish seems churlish at best.
I'm not sure if that was directed at me, but I haven't berated anyone in this thread. I would suggest you re-read it while paying careful attention to the names.
That "it's a game and nobody knows who I am so I can beat them up with impunity" mentality is pervasive in EVE.
This is the part I find odd. Just because we blew someone up ingame doesn't mean we also want to slash their tires IRL. However, you seem to imply that the people who are victims of players like me would be completely justified in beating me up over actions taken ingame? And then it's implied (not necessarily by you) that I'm some kind of psychopath because of my ingame actions (which stay ingame). Double standard much?
Also, I never once saw anyone who I harassed in game make any kind of credible attempt to get even or get revenge. The closest thing someone did was make a bunch of profiles on a gay support group with the same usernames as our eve characters and then start spamming with them. If RL addresses were tied to eve accounts, I still would have done the things that I did in my 3 years of playing. It would be hilarious if someone got mad enough over actions taken in a computer game (actions the game developers fully intended to happen) that they felt the need to show up at my house and make physical threats.
To do what you want and have fun. I know this is a foreign concept to veterans of other MMOs who have been brainwashed into thinking that fun == reaching endgame, but as soon as you break out of that way of thinking, a huge amount of possibilities open up.
When I started playing eve, I subscribed at the same time as 3 other friends. We formed a corp, picked a.5 system bordered by several lowsec systems, and based out of there. After about a week of playing, we announced to anyone we saw in system that we were pirates and started demanding protection money from the local miners. No one paid up, so we read up on canflipping mechanics and started stealing their ore. Then we figured out how to suicide gank and racked up quite a few expensive mining barges that way. Eventually one of us pissed off the wrong person and a rather powerful mission running corp filled with veterans who had been around for years declared war on us. We read up on wardec mechanics, and won that through by exploiting the fact that an industrial is no match for three people in competently fit pvp ships, no matter what the player ages are. That got us into the business of wardecs, and we ended up merging with another corp at about the three month mark in our eve careers. From there we spent a good three years terrorizing people in highsec for isk, with some side interests of ninja salvaging and scamming.
The end result of all of my time playing is that I legitimately ruined the lives of several people (drama queens make great targets, several corps we went after had members who are now no longer RL friends), have two scams named after my scamming character, and made some awesome online friends. And when I flew through our old home system recently after after having been unsubbed for two years, the miners apparently still remembered me. Within minutes of entering the system they all docked up and immediately began cussing me out in local chat, so apparently I made a lasting impression on them.
Of course, this being so, there is ZERO achievement when the parent company handles a battle of any given size. "Our system simply slows down under stress" is no kind of technical achievement whatsoever. So, why is the story worth reporting? Because a record number of players fancied a rumble?
I think you misunderstand how their system works. When an event such as 4000 players in the same place at the same time all shooting at each other happens (no other MMO has come close to doing this), time in the game actually slows down in order to allow the servers to process everything. Now even though your ship is traveling at 300m/s, it will take it 10 seconds in realtime to travel 300 meters ingame. If your gun cycles in 6 seconds, it now takes it 1 minute of realtime to cycle. Game balance is unaffected, since everything scales at the same time.
It's also notable in that it fails gracefully. As more players enter the system, TDI begins to kick in and everything slows down in proportion to the server load. Eventually the server will crash if enough people show up. However, it's a huge improvement over abrupt crashes and/or disconnects once some load (I think they could semi-smoothly get to around ~600 people pre-TDI) over the more traditional system they used to use (which is still used by pretty much every other mmo out there).
If you haven't ever done so already, go wave your fingers through a candle flame. Notice how they don't get burnt as long as you don't hold them in there? The reason your fingers don't get burned is the same reason the launch vehicle will survive the atmospheric "friction" (it's actually compression that causes the heating). It's just not exposed to the heat long enough to do damage.
Slashdot Mirror
I made the edit a good 4+ years ago. The article was a poorly written stub at the time, so for all I know it was deleted and remade since.
And even if it was recent, your response basically underscores my point. I spent 10 minutes of my time making a useful quick fix, only to see it reverted in under 60 seconds. You think I should go spend hours arguing that my 10 minute edit should have been kept? If someone doesn't want my donation of time and effort, why should I waste even more of it trying to convince them that they actually do want it? I'd rather (and in fact, did) move on to some other place on the internet was was much more willing to accept my help.
I should probably have read the GP's post more carefully. In an article that wasn't actually about aluminum/aluminium, these issues would be much less likely. I would still check each instance of the replace manually, though.
I said "find->replace" not "replace all". Every instance of a spelling being replaced was viewed by me before clicking replace.
Yep. My last (and only) time trying to edit wikipedia was years ago in an article about hot air balloons. I noticed that "aluminum" and "aluminium" were used interchangeably throughout the article, so I did some research into what the accepted spelling was (apparently it was split 50-50 at the time). Ultimately I settled on the spelling wikipedia used for their entry on aluminum (aluminium redirected to it). I copied the article into notepad, did a find->replace on aluminium, reloaded the page to make sure I wasn't blowing away anyones edit (page hadn't been touched for months but better safe than sorry right?), and submitted my changes with a useful description and justification of what I'd done. It took about 5 minutes for the thing to be reverted. I checked on it a few months later and it still had the mismash of spellings, and the addition of a note in the talk page critical of my edit.
obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1257/
It's not just a weight thing On a round trip between San Diego and Palm Springs (mostly freeway with a good dose of mountain switchbacks), my dads Mazda 6 got 42mpg (EPA rating is 38 highway). Modern engine design can do a lot to increase efficiency.
It felt like a version of Star Trek crafted specifically for people with short attention spans and little ability to spot plot holes.
Nailed it.
Not to show my inner hipster, but I really feel that massive box office sales actually mean that it's not a particularly good star trek. The series is enjoyed by nerds, and since the vast majority of people in the world aren't nerds, it will appeal to a very small subset of people. What appeals to nerds usually doesn't appeal to others, and vice versa. By expanding to include a wider audience, it will by definition need to abandon a lot of what made it "good". That might be great for making money, but the series is no longer star trek and has abandoned its initial fanbase.
I wonder why they aren't using gyros with magnetic bearings. Especially in micro-gravity, that could help quite a lot.
I was going to say the same thing (though for all I know maybe they are using magnetic bearings).
There's also some new R&D being done with active magnetic bearing control, basically you monitor the position of the shaft inside the bearing and apply changes to the magnetic field in order to dampen vibration and ensure the shaft stays centered.
My last employer I gave 2 months notice... just because I thought it'd help them fill my job in that time. I knew I was going to leave, and had no ill will towards them. They were happy with it, and aside from the occasional "are you sure you want to leave", everything was fine.
The few co-workers I've known who moved on to a different company basically went the same way:
"I might potentially be finding a new job soon, someone should probably start learning the stuff I'm working on just in case"
"hey guys I'm not going to be in a few days next week because I got an interview"
"they really liked me and I'm going to be out a day next week for a second interview"
"I got accepted, my last day here is 3 weeks from now"
No hard feelings, and we usually had a going away lunch or similar on the last day they were with us.
If they were willing to yell at you for things you didn't do, how do you know that they wouldn't have lied about you anyway had you given 2 weeks notice?
I've even signed receipts with random things before, unless they have a previous signature from you and are comparing them, the fact that you have to sign when buying with a credit card is pure security theater. And do you honestly think a minimum wage employee is going to turn down a sale because the picture on your drivers license is old and doesn't look like the guy trying to use the card? You're lucky if they even say anything about the names not matching.
Also, I highly recommend looking into exactly how the agreements are setup between banks/merchants/card companies in order for the entire system to work (find some people who own a business that does card transactions and ask them how it works), it's downright scary how easily the system could be (and often is) abused.
The system relies almost entirely on security through obscurity and mutual trust. The only reason it hasn't broken down is because there's so much money to be made through the increased commerce resulting from keeping transactions easy to make that the banks and card companies can eat the cost of the occasional abuse.
That's some of the dumbest advice I've ever read on the internet.
Intentionally so. Apparently sarcasm isn't one of your strong points.
Another fun trick if they're tailgaiting but not quite touching your bumper is to match RPMs (so there's no telltale shudder for the guy to notice) with the next gear or two lower (depending on speed) and then downshift. The idea is to use engine braking to slow suddenly without tipping off the offending tailgater until it's nearly too late. It usually shakes them up enough that they'll back off a bit. Keep your eye on the mirror and be ready to nail the gas again to avoid being rear-ended, just in case they're too close for their reflexes.
Since only 1 out of 5 letters has been mangled, wouldn't "galse" be like "false" except with 20% more typos?
Me and a friend tried to talk to them about it when they were showing it off at maker faire. Unfortunately they had sent a booth full of marketing people who told us to come back in an hour when their one person who actually understood the technical side of it got back from lunch. Nvidia should have known better than to send a bunch of marketing people to an event geared towards engineers and other technical people.
Wait, that also implies that Bush didn't singlehandedly start two wars, throw "terrorists" into gitmo to be held indefinitely, and crash the economy. Are you sure that your logic is correct there?
And if you're worried about road deaths, you can always start a public awareness campaign to get those people to just recharge their phones in the microwave as a slightly safer alternative.
I have an Emotive unit, and it's pretty terrible at brainwave detection. What it is slightly better at is detecting the movements of facial muscles. If you use the gyroscope output and then couple that with monitoring something like eyeblinks, you can have a pretty decent hands free headmouse (though it's annoying to have to close your eyes in order to click things). Most of the ~~awesome~~ demos that you see of it on youtube are based on detecting a combination of the gyroscope and facial movements, not actual mental state.
Every IT department I ever worked in was the definition of "unprofessional", as least as far as most peoples definitions were concerned. jeans and a t-shirt featuring a metal band were standard despite the business casual dress code, sometimes someone would wear a polo shirt if they were feeling particularly formal.
I didn't post as AC.
There was an nvidia booth at maker faire in san mateo this year, and they had one there. I was attending with a friend who was a game developer, so we went to check it out. I was thoroughly unimpressed, not because there was anything wrong with the system (it played games as far as I could tell), but because all of our technical questions were met with blank stares. Eventually they told us to come back in an hour because the one technical guy was off getting lunch or something. Apparently nvidia sent a booth full of marketing people to an event specifically for engineers and technical people.
This guy is a blathering moron. You dont study wardec mechanics and 'win them' by exploiting the fact that a single industrial, something for hauling ore, can be beat by 3 pvp fitted ships...
That was a weeks worth of action condensed into one sentence since the post was getting pretty long. If you want a slightly fuller version of the story:
We were all less than 3 month old players. 5 million was still a hefty amount to us. A mission running and industry corp full of players (40+) in the 2 year+ range wardeced our corp, which had 4 people in it. The biggest thing one of us could fly was a BC. The rest of us were in cruisers. The aggressor corp was dumb and apparently didn't bother to warn their members that the wardec was going through. Rather than be intimidated and not log in for a week (most people did this in my experience), we checked up on the forums and made sure we understood the mechanics right (this was our first wardec, remember we've only been playing for ~2 months), then flew 20 jumps to the enemy corps HQ (which happened to be a mission hub, though we didn't really know a lot about mission hubs at the time). In the 15 minutes before the dec went live, we found several of them mining in different belts. We all picked a target, then sat there and waited for the dec to go live (I think one of us even started chatting, pretended to be clueless, and offered to defend them from the belt rats). We got several industrial kills in the first minute, then got lucky and snagged someone on a gate who was returning with a mission item. They were all pretty confused, and we explained to them that their CEO had wardecced us and apparently not informed them. We were also messaged by a neutral in a battleship who wanted some action, so we fleeted up to give him wardec agro (yes it used to work that way, and it was hilarious, search "lofty scam") and watched him alpha the CEO when he undocked. From there we avoided fighting anyone in an actual pvp ship and concentrated on their industrials (why they flew them during a wardec I have no idea, though we didn't realize how dumb they were at the time). They let it expire in the next week, and I'm pretty sure everyone was rather upset at their CEO for thinking he could kick around 4 newbie pirates.
Can flipping mechanics? You open the can and take the ore, then you are flagged as free to kill by the owner of that can for a brief period of time. Let me guess, you ran and hid in station?
And you've just illustrated why understanding can flipping mechanics is important. If you take from a can, you're flagged to that players corp (consider NPC corps a one-man corp), not the player. It's only when the player shoots you that you're flagged to the player. Knowing this (keep in mind this is when I'd been playing for about a month, I had a cruiser and thought it was amazing and expensive), I once stole some ore, let the guy shoot me for about 30 seconds, then docked up. This meant that while the corp timer had 14:30 left on it, his personal agro timer, which was refreshing every hit, had 15:00. I undocked with 10 seconds left on the corp timer, then didn't move in order to keep my 30 seconds of undock invulnerability. After the undock invuln was up, the guy began shooting at me, which was fine because he still had personal agro. Upon seeing him shoot, his corpmates all assumed it was ok for them to do so and clicked through the concord warning to open fire, resulting in all of them being concorded. Another corpmate undocked with some remote reps on a destroyer, which gave me just enough of an edge to kill the last remaining guy while the rest raged in local.
In this case, lack of understanding of how those agro mechanics worked is what got the mining corp killed.
Nor are any new players going to beat any like number of senior players in any real engagement, they dont have the skills to equip the better mods and fly the better ships. It is non-sense.
All
I don't give two rat farts what you do in game, but bragging about being a dick then berating people that call what you do dickish seems churlish at best.
I'm not sure if that was directed at me, but I haven't berated anyone in this thread. I would suggest you re-read it while paying careful attention to the names.
That "it's a game and nobody knows who I am so I can beat them up with impunity" mentality is pervasive in EVE.
This is the part I find odd. Just because we blew someone up ingame doesn't mean we also want to slash their tires IRL. However, you seem to imply that the people who are victims of players like me would be completely justified in beating me up over actions taken ingame? And then it's implied (not necessarily by you) that I'm some kind of psychopath because of my ingame actions (which stay ingame). Double standard much?
Also, I never once saw anyone who I harassed in game make any kind of credible attempt to get even or get revenge. The closest thing someone did was make a bunch of profiles on a gay support group with the same usernames as our eve characters and then start spamming with them. If RL addresses were tied to eve accounts, I still would have done the things that I did in my 3 years of playing. It would be hilarious if someone got mad enough over actions taken in a computer game (actions the game developers fully intended to happen) that they felt the need to show up at my house and make physical threats.
Wait, what is the purpose then, really?
To do what you want and have fun. I know this is a foreign concept to veterans of other MMOs who have been brainwashed into thinking that fun == reaching endgame, but as soon as you break out of that way of thinking, a huge amount of possibilities open up.
.5 system bordered by several lowsec systems, and based out of there. After about a week of playing, we announced to anyone we saw in system that we were pirates and started demanding protection money from the local miners. No one paid up, so we read up on canflipping mechanics and started stealing their ore. Then we figured out how to suicide gank and racked up quite a few expensive mining barges that way. Eventually one of us pissed off the wrong person and a rather powerful mission running corp filled with veterans who had been around for years declared war on us. We read up on wardec mechanics, and won that through by exploiting the fact that an industrial is no match for three people in competently fit pvp ships, no matter what the player ages are. That got us into the business of wardecs, and we ended up merging with another corp at about the three month mark in our eve careers. From there we spent a good three years terrorizing people in highsec for isk, with some side interests of ninja salvaging and scamming.
When I started playing eve, I subscribed at the same time as 3 other friends. We formed a corp, picked a
The end result of all of my time playing is that I legitimately ruined the lives of several people (drama queens make great targets, several corps we went after had members who are now no longer RL friends), have two scams named after my scamming character, and made some awesome online friends. And when I flew through our old home system recently after after having been unsubbed for two years, the miners apparently still remembered me. Within minutes of entering the system they all docked up and immediately began cussing me out in local chat, so apparently I made a lasting impression on them.
Of course, this being so, there is ZERO achievement when the parent company handles a battle of any given size. "Our system simply slows down under stress" is no kind of technical achievement whatsoever. So, why is the story worth reporting? Because a record number of players fancied a rumble?
I think you misunderstand how their system works. When an event such as 4000 players in the same place at the same time all shooting at each other happens (no other MMO has come close to doing this), time in the game actually slows down in order to allow the servers to process everything. Now even though your ship is traveling at 300m/s, it will take it 10 seconds in realtime to travel 300 meters ingame. If your gun cycles in 6 seconds, it now takes it 1 minute of realtime to cycle. Game balance is unaffected, since everything scales at the same time.
It's also notable in that it fails gracefully. As more players enter the system, TDI begins to kick in and everything slows down in proportion to the server load. Eventually the server will crash if enough people show up. However, it's a huge improvement over abrupt crashes and/or disconnects once some load (I think they could semi-smoothly get to around ~600 people pre-TDI) over the more traditional system they used to use (which is still used by pretty much every other mmo out there).
If you haven't ever done so already, go wave your fingers through a candle flame. Notice how they don't get burnt as long as you don't hold them in there? The reason your fingers don't get burned is the same reason the launch vehicle will survive the atmospheric "friction" (it's actually compression that causes the heating). It's just not exposed to the heat long enough to do damage.