Yeah, well, diabloii.net (and warcraftiii.net) have to be very strictly moderated. You see, there are certain undesirable elements that can cause strife and conflict in the community, and obviously if you remove those elements, then there will be only peace and happiness. Why fill the world with ugly legal debates when these be prevented through censorship? Keep the world beautiful and pure! Long live the Third Reich!
I was referring specifically to eDonkey's problematic servers, which rarely remain up, have a low user limit, and are are completely unsynchronized. A properly done central server is necessary for content distribution - someone has to have the content to start with.
FEC and secure block transfer is slower to compute, and it requires a bit of overhead in block size as well. But it is much faster because packets don't have to arrive in any particular order. It may be speed-equivalent or slightly behind for 95% of the file, but that last 5% under BitTorrent requires that someone else has already downloaded it and is currently broadcasting it. Or else you are back to the mercy of the server's upload speed for the last chunk. With swarmcast, there is a larger pool of available packets to pick the last 5% from, and they don't necessarily have to correspond to the lsat 5% of the file.
OK, so it is similar to eDonkey but without the problematic public servers. And it is basically identical to Swarmcast, but less robust and potentially slower to complete a file. Both of those also support linking, though each in their own way - I believe that Swarmcast is through Java applet parameters, while eDonkey intercepts ed2k:... style links.
Just wanted to know where BitTorrent stood in the grand scheme of things.
- X-Windows from MIT - Allowing vendors to suffix their product names with "for Windows" for many, many years - Allowing vendors to prefix their product names with "Win" for many, many years - Mac OS, a blatant ripoff of Windows
I can't tell if you're trolling or just dumb. It's a windowing system named X, not the X-Windows System. "for Windows" is a compatability statement. The prefix Win is not inherantly related to Windows. And... Damn. The last one gave it away - you are trolling.
Well, you're intentions are good, but you've missed something important:
Bnetd does not clone game servers, only the peer matchmaking service.
Bnetd's 'closed game' support simply forwards the game to a modified 'open' server. It is no more secure than playing on open games.
And I have to ask, if you are playing with friends, why are you worried about people using hacks and trainers? That seems to be more of an issue with your friends than with the game.
Well well, rational discussion on Slashdot? I'm shocked:) Here is my reply.
Could it be that what you see as trivial requirements on the part of the server are not as trivial as you think, and are not being met on the authorized server?
Not in this case. I have examined my network traffic carefully, and gameplay is completely separate from the Battle.Net service. The only connection to Battle.Net remains idle until the game is over, and then it reports the outcome with a small status packet.
the slowness being reported may very well be a result of a buggy server that has been hacked so that new or returning users have to spend an unusually long time waiting to connect to another player. The server may have been hacked so that players with unmodified games get linked up to players with modified games. The bugs could be preventing people from connecting with the server at all, making the server appear to be unreliable.
Interesting idea, but I doubt that this is the case. Having followed Battle.Net's status carefully for several years, I can say that I have only seen the server's security compromised once, and that was for a Diablo II game server and not the Battle.Net chat service.
Connection issues with the server have previously been a major problem; I'll admit that up front. That said, many of the worst time periods were a result of DOS attacks, and the hosting ISPs for Battle.Net have really tightened up.
... CD-Key authentication is built into the server, not the game, or it is built into the part of the game that connects to the server.
No - there are two levels of CD-Key authentication. The game itself checks that the CD-Key is mathematically valid. The Battle.Net service also checks all its clients for uniqueness and for revoked keys - two things which cannot be checked in offline play.
So people setting up competing servers will need one of two things: access to the code that can validate CD-Keys, or access to a service provided by the game manufacturer which can provide authentication of CD-Keys.
Access to the code would be pointless because the strength of Battle.Net's authentication is in the uniqueness and revoked-key checks. Without the Battle.Net key database, these checks could not be performed.
Creating a key-oracle service would also be ineffective, because it would require that the connecting server accurately report usage data. A modified third-party server could simply bypass the oracle check, or else it could check the key but not mark it as 'in use' to block other clients from sharing it.
Since the Blizzard server is:
- SLOOOOW
- Unreliable
- Hacked all to hell
- VERY buggy
Excuse me, but I've seen these assertions before, and I have no idea why people make them.
Starcraft/Warcraft are peer-to-peer games. Battle.Net is the matchmaking service. There can be no gameplay issues with the servers because games do not connect to the servers.
Diablo II is the only client-server game, and admittedly it has major problems. The original Diablo was also a bit of a multiplayer disaster so I think the problem lies with their Blizzard North department, not their Battle.Net service.
And yet people use Diablo II as an example of why Battle.Net sucks. But by doing that, they have willfully ignored the fact that Diablo II supports direct TCP/IP games (not restricted to LANs) as well as an 'Open' player-hosted mode.
The point I'm making is this: As long as all people involved have a CD-KEY, I have never seen a valid reason for the existance of a Battle.Net emulator. That doesn't mean its wrong to create one, but it *is* wrong to justfy its creation by some manufactured need. And don't throw LAN party crap at me - there's no reason that 50 people can't either use LAN play mode or else all log into a private Battle.Net channel.
Um, no, it wasn't fake. The 'slide in' effect came from the video source. If you've ever changed resolutions on an older video projector, you'd see that the horizontal alignment starts way off and then slides to the center.
You didn't read carefully: Your clickthrough rate and CPC together determine where your ads are shown, so better ads rise to the top.
The website agrees with the article perfectly - positioning will be based on a mix of the relevance score and the amount paid per click. You can pay the most, but if another ad is much more relevent than yours, you won't get the top spot.
... runs a total of 7 separate computers, a high speed network and a google of different communications devices...
I hate to play the grammar nazi, but the word should be googol, not Google (TM). Google is joke word, based loosely on the idea of a lot of data being searched, or a lot of people using the search engine, etc. See Google's corporate info page if you're curious.
No, LotR is not as good as classics such as Citizen Kane or Dr. Strangelove. The question is, Who said that it is?
Nobody who voted at IMDB ranked the movies. Nobody went to a page and filled out a form that said, LotR is better than The Godfather. People voted on a scale of 1-10 based on how good they thought that this particular fantasy-epic was. And they thought that it was better than any fantasy-epic movie that they could have imagined.
The fact that it has become the "#1 movie of all time" according to IMDB is not the fault of either the viewers or the voters. It is the fault of the IMDB for comparing the voted ratings of different types of movies.
It makes no sense to compare the user ratings of older movies with the user ratings of newer ones. After all, IMDB was not around when the classics were released and first appreciated. Nobody flocked to IMDB to fill in "10/10" and click Submit. The core IMDB users have probably voted for it, but people such as you and me have probably never thought to vote on something like Dr. Strangelove. And of course, when IMDB compares ratings between movie genres, we get into an obvious comparing-apples-and-oranges scenario.
So why should we put any stock into the Top Ten movies as selected by IMDB ratings? I think that we shouldn't. The IMDB is a wonderful tool to tell us how much we might like a particular movie, based on the people who have seen it and thought that they should vote for it. But it can not fairly tell us how well one movie compares to another, and it should not try to.
Even if they tested partitioned drives, it wouldn't have showed up. The problem only occurs when the target partition has a space in its name, and there is only data loss when the space is the first character. Even 99% of the partitioned Macs out there wouldn't have lost data.
Virtually every substantial post ever made by the "author" of the above comment has been stolen from other people. All he has to do is preface the text with "The following is a USENET post from Bleh on XX/XX/XX", but appearantly he wants everyone to believe that he is creating original material. He has already been bitchslapped once, and yet he continues. Mod him accordingly. please.
Re:test with fan failure, not heatsink falloff
on
AMD And THG update
·
· Score: 2
Many BIOS setups monitor their own off-chip diode. A fan failure raises the cpu temperature much slower than a total heat sink failure, allowing time for the BIOS to halt execution and power off.
It is only the quick burnouts (less than a few seconds) that can't be caught by external diodes.
They probably don't take physicists because physics majors tend to be too theoretical in everything. "Oops, I admitted a patent on the letter E? Must have been an experimental error."
Probably not, though there may be less latency than the 30+ ms in Windows. WINE's sound interfaces add a small overhead, IIRC, and the DirectSound implementation uses a longer-than-10ms mixing buffer on top of that. Also, I'm not sure exactly what APIs could be used on Windows to bypass the kernel mixer, but I'm fairly certain that those are (at best) just FIXME stubs in WINE.
Generally speaking, an emulator works at a more basic hardware level. UltraHLE processes instructions for the N64's CPU, unless I'm mistaken; WINE actually loads the.EXE binary and executes it directly. A Windows program that runs under WINE is actually running natively on your computer and calling WINE's dll functions.
WINE is both an API compatibility layer and a porting toolkit. More specifically, wine is the executable loader and winelib is a linkable library. Converting a Win32 program to run on Linux is sometimes as simple as changing some includes around and linking with winelib.
With XFree86 4.0 and above, direct hardware access is possible with DRI. Windows GDI calls are notoriously slow even when run on Microsoft platforms, so the user shouldn't notice a difference in the responsiveness of the GUI. DirectX programs can still run full-speed and even hardware-accellerated provided that the user has enabled DRI.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. It does not emulate Windows, it is an alternate implementation of the Win32 API. The DirectX portion of Wine simply translates the Direct3D interface to Mesa library calls.
So it does exactly what you describe; it runs Windows games natively on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I was playing to lose :) I was going to throw in a Disney reference too, but even I have to respect the limits of good taste.
Yeah, well, diabloii.net (and warcraftiii.net) have to be very strictly moderated. You see, there are certain undesirable elements that can cause strife and conflict in the community, and obviously if you remove those elements, then there will be only peace and happiness. Why fill the world with ugly legal debates when these be prevented through censorship? Keep the world beautiful and pure! Long live the Third Reich!
Remember, it's for the good of the children!
I was referring specifically to eDonkey's problematic servers, which rarely remain up, have a low user limit, and are are completely unsynchronized. A properly done central server is necessary for content distribution - someone has to have the content to start with.
FEC and secure block transfer is slower to compute, and it requires a bit of overhead in block size as well. But it is much faster because packets don't have to arrive in any particular order. It may be speed-equivalent or slightly behind for 95% of the file, but that last 5% under BitTorrent requires that someone else has already downloaded it and is currently broadcasting it. Or else you are back to the mercy of the server's upload speed for the last chunk. With swarmcast, there is a larger pool of available packets to pick the last 5% from, and they don't necessarily have to correspond to the lsat 5% of the file.
OK, so it is similar to eDonkey but without the problematic public servers. And it is basically identical to Swarmcast, but less robust and potentially slower to complete a file. Both of those also support linking, though each in their own way - I believe that Swarmcast is through Java applet parameters, while eDonkey intercepts ed2k:... style links.
Just wanted to know where BitTorrent stood in the grand scheme of things.
Peer broadcasting is hardly something to write /. about, I'd say.
- X-Windows from MIT
- Allowing vendors to suffix their product names with "for Windows" for many, many years
- Allowing vendors to prefix their product names with "Win" for many, many years
- Mac OS, a blatant ripoff of Windows
I can't tell if you're trolling or just dumb. It's a windowing system named X, not the X-Windows System. "for Windows" is a compatability statement. The prefix Win is not inherantly related to Windows. And... Damn. The last one gave it away - you are trolling.
Latest patches for Blizzard games support TCP/UDP play on LAN, no IPX required.
Well, you're intentions are good, but you've missed something important:
Bnetd does not clone game servers, only the peer matchmaking service.
Bnetd's 'closed game' support simply forwards the game to a modified 'open' server. It is no more secure than playing on open games.
And I have to ask, if you are playing with friends, why are you worried about people using hacks and trainers? That seems to be more of an issue with your friends than with the game.
Well well, rational discussion on Slashdot? I'm shocked :) Here is my reply.
... CD-Key authentication is built into the server, not the game, or it is built into the part of the game that connects to the server.
:)
Could it be that what you see as trivial requirements on the part of the server are not as trivial as you think, and are not being met on the authorized server?
Not in this case. I have examined my network traffic carefully, and gameplay is completely separate from the Battle.Net service. The only connection to Battle.Net remains idle until the game is over, and then it reports the outcome with a small status packet.
the slowness being reported may very well be a result of a buggy server that has been hacked so that new or returning users have to spend an unusually long time waiting to connect to another player. The server may have been hacked so that players with unmodified games get linked up to players with modified games. The bugs could be preventing people from connecting with the server at all, making the server appear to be unreliable.
Interesting idea, but I doubt that this is the case. Having followed Battle.Net's status carefully for several years, I can say that I have only seen the server's security compromised once, and that was for a Diablo II game server and not the Battle.Net chat service.
Connection issues with the server have previously been a major problem; I'll admit that up front. That said, many of the worst time periods were a result of DOS attacks, and the hosting ISPs for Battle.Net have really tightened up.
No - there are two levels of CD-Key authentication. The game itself checks that the CD-Key is mathematically valid. The Battle.Net service also checks all its clients for uniqueness and for revoked keys - two things which cannot be checked in offline play.
So people setting up competing servers will need one of two things: access to the code that can validate CD-Keys, or access to a service provided by the game manufacturer which can provide authentication of CD-Keys.
Access to the code would be pointless because the strength of Battle.Net's authentication is in the uniqueness and revoked-key checks. Without the Battle.Net key database, these checks could not be performed.
Creating a key-oracle service would also be ineffective, because it would require that the connecting server accurately report usage data. A modified third-party server could simply bypass the oracle check, or else it could check the key but not mark it as 'in use' to block other clients from sharing it.
From what I read, your arguments do not stand up.
I hope I have strengthened them somewhat
- SLOOOOW
- Unreliable
- Hacked all to hell
- VERY buggy
Excuse me, but I've seen these assertions before, and I have no idea why people make them.
Starcraft/Warcraft are peer-to-peer games. Battle.Net is the matchmaking service. There can be no gameplay issues with the servers because games do not connect to the servers.
Diablo II is the only client-server game, and admittedly it has major problems. The original Diablo was also a bit of a multiplayer disaster so I think the problem lies with their Blizzard North department, not their Battle.Net service.
And yet people use Diablo II as an example of why Battle.Net sucks. But by doing that, they have willfully ignored the fact that Diablo II supports direct TCP/IP games (not restricted to LANs) as well as an 'Open' player-hosted mode.
The point I'm making is this: As long as all people involved have a CD-KEY, I have never seen a valid reason for the existance of a Battle.Net emulator. That doesn't mean its wrong to create one, but it *is* wrong to justfy its creation by some manufactured need. And don't throw LAN party crap at me - there's no reason that 50 people can't either use LAN play mode or else all log into a private Battle.Net channel.
Um, no, it wasn't fake. The 'slide in' effect came from the video source. If you've ever changed resolutions on an older video projector, you'd see that the horizontal alignment starts way off and then slides to the center.
The website agrees with the article perfectly - positioning will be based on a mix of the relevance score and the amount paid per click. You can pay the most, but if another ad is much more relevent than yours, you won't get the top spot.
I hate to play the grammar nazi, but the word should be googol, not Google (TM). Google is joke word, based loosely on the idea of a lot of data being searched, or a lot of people using the search engine, etc. See Google's corporate info page if you're curious.
Correction: the port was singled out for traffic shaping. Morpheus at UIUC is now limited to 3Mbps - split among 40,000 undergraduates. Yum.
Nobody who voted at IMDB ranked the movies. Nobody went to a page and filled out a form that said, LotR is better than The Godfather. People voted on a scale of 1-10 based on how good they thought that this particular fantasy-epic was. And they thought that it was better than any fantasy-epic movie that they could have imagined.
The fact that it has become the "#1 movie of all time" according to IMDB is not the fault of either the viewers or the voters. It is the fault of the IMDB for comparing the voted ratings of different types of movies.
It makes no sense to compare the user ratings of older movies with the user ratings of newer ones. After all, IMDB was not around when the classics were released and first appreciated. Nobody flocked to IMDB to fill in "10/10" and click Submit. The core IMDB users have probably voted for it, but people such as you and me have probably never thought to vote on something like Dr. Strangelove. And of course, when IMDB compares ratings between movie genres, we get into an obvious comparing-apples-and-oranges scenario.
So why should we put any stock into the Top Ten movies as selected by IMDB ratings? I think that we shouldn't. The IMDB is a wonderful tool to tell us how much we might like a particular movie, based on the people who have seen it and thought that they should vote for it. But it can not fairly tell us how well one movie compares to another, and it should not try to.
Even if they tested partitioned drives, it wouldn't have showed up. The problem only occurs when the target partition has a space in its name, and there is only data loss when the space is the first character. Even 99% of the partitioned Macs out there wouldn't have lost data.
Virtually every substantial post ever made by the "author" of the above comment has been stolen from other people. All he has to do is preface the text with "The following is a USENET post from Bleh on XX/XX/XX", but appearantly he wants everyone to believe that he is creating original material. He has already been bitchslapped once, and yet he continues. Mod him accordingly. please.
Many BIOS setups monitor their own off-chip diode. A fan failure raises the cpu temperature much slower than a total heat sink failure, allowing time for the BIOS to halt execution and power off.
It is only the quick burnouts (less than a few seconds) that can't be caught by external diodes.
They probably don't take physicists because physics majors tend to be too theoretical in everything. "Oops, I admitted a patent on the letter E? Must have been an experimental error."
Probably not, though there may be less latency than the 30+ ms in Windows. WINE's sound interfaces add a small overhead, IIRC, and the DirectSound implementation uses a longer-than-10ms mixing buffer on top of that. Also, I'm not sure exactly what APIs could be used on Windows to bypass the kernel mixer, but I'm fairly certain that those are (at best) just FIXME stubs in WINE.
Generally speaking, an emulator works at a more basic hardware level. UltraHLE processes instructions for the N64's CPU, unless I'm mistaken; WINE actually loads the .EXE binary and executes it directly. A Windows program that runs under WINE is actually running natively on your computer and calling WINE's dll functions.
WINE is both an API compatibility layer and a porting toolkit. More specifically, wine is the executable loader and winelib is a linkable library. Converting a Win32 program to run on Linux is sometimes as simple as changing some includes around and linking with winelib.
With XFree86 4.0 and above, direct hardware access is possible with DRI. Windows GDI calls are notoriously slow even when run on Microsoft platforms, so the user shouldn't notice a difference in the responsiveness of the GUI. DirectX programs can still run full-speed and even hardware-accellerated provided that the user has enabled DRI.
Wine Is Not an Emulator. It does not emulate Windows, it is an alternate implementation of the Win32 API. The DirectX portion of Wine simply translates the Direct3D interface to Mesa library calls.
So it does exactly what you describe; it runs Windows games natively on Linux.
Both, actually. Many features of quirks mode have no effect on Netscape 4.x rendering but help IE compatibility.