One thing I wished was available was all my textbooks in PDF format, not some DRM crippleware crap. Lugging around a lot of books is NOT fun. My solution to this was to scan relevant chapters and take them with me in an image format for the road. This isn't going to happen until the basic textbooks are open.. I'm not sure why you need a new edition of a intro calc text every few years. Other, than of course the obvious
You have to study the material anyway - why not transcribe those DRM riddled textbooks to another computer?
Sure, it's a copyright violation (and a lot of work), but you will have permanent access to the textbook. However, you will be studying as transcription is generally one of the ways to memorize material depending on your learning type.
But remember: Under no circumstance should you obtain a few friends because of this.
D20... I just don't feel as good about it as I did when I use to sit with my old AD&D books.
For reference, I have a copy of D&D first edition.
The rules in that game were barely designed - all too often, you have characters that get insta-killed because they only have one hitpoint. Not only that, but once you pick a character class, there is no further variation.
In a way, the same applies to AD&D. Although it was at least better since character flexibility was improved with dual classes (a cheap hack) and multi-classing. However, there is usually little reason to switch classes, and you couldn't become a ultra-powerful multiclasser because of a hard limitation.
I haven't played third edition, but it doesn't feel killed under any circumstance. In fact, TSR was doing a better job at trashing the game with attempts to enforce copyright on fireball damage tables.
Get over it! I am so sick of every week hearing about some other bitching from you sore losers...
Just because Ben Johnson can obtain a gold medal by natural talent doesn't mean that he should keep his gold medal. The rules are clear - there is to be no usage of "performance enhancing" drugs. The same applies to elections, where Bush interfered with the recount, and where some random democrat managed to put in enough votes for Gore to overflow an integer.
If you don't like this, then form an overt despotism where people know ahead of time that it is illegal to vote for anything other than the ruling party. That way, rigging elections will be within the rules.
One cannot fight irrational people with rationality.
Actually, you can. In the case of that person in question (who claims to be a lawyer), a large number of people wrote to the Flordia Bar Association asking to review his license to practice law. His reaction only reinforced the accusations about his professional conduct.
Right now, he has the effectiveness of a standard internet troll. Winning the debate is now as easy as completely ignoring him, as other moderate and anti-game groups are beginning to distance themselves from that person in question (who claims to be a lawyer.)
A while ago, he was a threat when he tried to attack Penny Arcade. Now, he's just back to a standard troll - even the newspapers are beginning to recognise this as one made an update on an existing article stating that no video games were found in the search in spite of such a claim by you-know-who (a person whc claims to be a lawyer.)
One of his latest proposals was to write a violent video game - which was intended to be satirical for targetting police, and stuff, but ended up satirizing the behaviour of anti-video game activists.
I have no idea what brand it was (pioneer or something), but a friend of mine has a nav system in his element. Maps are WAY more dangerous, because well, you have to look at a map.
Most people that use maps tend to pull over first - or even better, identify which landmarks to look for (e.g. highway signs that clearly state what their exit road is.)
Now comes interesting Tidbit Number two... The article mentions "My fingerprint results in Access Denied, but the person who wrote it gets into the [document]." Right... So what if they want ME to be able to get in, but not my coworker? How do they acquire MY credentials to allow me in? How secure is this acquisition? Already things like PK Encryption require chains of custody and KNOWN Public Keys to have the proper security. When you get into the extremely-high levels of security, it gets somewhat complex. But now there is a certificate associated with my fingerprint?
Under Windows XP, with an NTFS filesystem:
- Right-click on any file, select properties. - Click on advanced, and check "Encrypt contents to secure data." - Click on Details...
That's how it basically works. The technology is already there in Windows - the only difference is that it is now bound to a fingerprint reader, vhere the fingerprint reader uses existing known keys to gain access to the file.
Of course, DRM as it is claimed to be going will make this larger scale. You can be the judge of what comes next.
What you're clearly missing here is that Take-Two/Rockstar never had any chance at controlling this and coming out on top. It didn't matter what Take-Two/Rockstar said in their own defense, because this entire story exists because the American news media serves mainly to titilate its audience with twisted facts taken out of context followed by a lot of outright lies
Actually, they do - all they need to create is a bounty where the first person to produce said sex scene in an unmodified game gets a prize (e.g. $25000 - within most corporate advertising budgets as the media does much of the advertising for the company instead, leaving a massive surplus.)
Perodically increase the bounty based on the number of negative press - which will make an impossible task much more lucrative. After all, if Hot Coffee is so popular/hyped, it should be easy to find without modifications, right?
As long as the bounty still stands unachieved (regardless of cash prise or otherwise), it is a dent in the credibility. Even if it doesn't have legal weight (IANAL), it still inches public opinion in their favour.
BTW, I'm really suprised that this game was not banned several times over.
FYI, don't point to the C64 games on the Underdogs - they are bloated as they contain much more files than necessary.
That file in particular contains PC64 - which is abandonware (actually Public Domain). There's much better emulators available that can run nativly under Windows - WinVice in particular is quite good at zooming past loading times.
The downside is that Joe(sephine) Blow regular HS student hasn't got a chance of even being noticed with their project that was done without access to a lab, or any funding. And hence... may not bother to do a project at all.
The school that I went to balanced things out by having a list of science fair projects that we take and use to set up a display... This was intended to prevent killer advanced projects from coming in, and to prevent a whole quantity of volcanos. Basically, it evened the playing field.
My project: Create a chocolate bar wrapper. That's right, I had an art project.
My research that there are two ways to design the wrapper: black and white (for a higher-class look), and coloured (for the masses.)
But that's all besides the point - the real issue is that there was a creativity mark on the grading scale used in the science fair. That either means I was graded on the creativeness of the laminated sheet at the front of the room, or that I was graded on the artisticness of the chocolate bar wrapper. Probably should have researched Tachyons instead.
Since these folks were being kind enough to let me stay in their home, I thought to repay them by helping them install a LAN so the wife could share the broadband connection. Aside from being more convenient, it'd save them the cost of an extra phone line and ISP. But they just couldn't be bothered!i>
Actually, installing a LAN generally requires a technician or someone who knows what they are doing.
While it is true that most computers can be plopped into an Ad-hoc network, it does not necessairly mean that internet access is available throughout the network. For example, my internet router at home has 1 port that plugs into my computer - getting other computers required getting a switch or getting a second network card (not counting cards required for other computers), along with the cabling.
There's also one person that visits my house... and I don't want him to use *MY* broadband...
Here's what can be a problem with inexperienced users: - Incorrect cable type: Internet connection Sharing via NICs require a crossover cable. - Incorrect hub type: Two routers on a home network is not recommended (for practical reasons). The thing that plugs into the Cable/DSL line is usually a router itself, and most users could easily purchase a second router without a second thought. - Incorrect network configuration: While DHCP and APIPA work without problem, static IPs can cause problems. It just takes an accidental ommition of the Default Gateway and you wonder why you don't have internet access. (Not a problem in most cases.) - Inability to install: There are some users that are just not comfortable opening up their PC to install a NIC card. - Long wires: While not a configuration problem, long wires that snake through a house tend to look ugly. There are ways around this (e.g. drilling through walls), but this is something that some users are not comfortable with. - Wireless configuration: Wireless seems to be strange and doesn't yet seem infallible. Took two conference calls to Netgear before I learned their procedure to getting a wireless device working. My personal experience: I know one friend who has intermittant loss of signal that lasts just long enough to kill any active connections. It's not major, but significant enough to cause him to auto-relogin to MSN. Perhaps I should give him a Ethernet NIC and a snaking wire as a birthday present - the two cats and one dog would love the new chew toy, as it has to run across the floor in at least one position. - Contractual agreements: Some ISPs have terms in their TOS that require Business to have a more expensive tier.
No suprise why some people are uncomfortable with home networks. As soon as you mention something like that, people will feel a little uncomfortable as if it were some magical thingy that is beyond mere laymans...
PC Gaming was great a decade ago when everyone had a 486 or Pentium and graphic capabilities were rather standard across the board.
A decade ago, you were in the era that was borderline DOS.
Graphic capabilities in that era were *NOT* standard, even under Windows 95. Some graphic cards supported 3D (classified as Prototypes) and others did not. Some graphic cards supported VESA 2.0, while others were VESA 1.x. Don't get me started on the whole slew of drivers required for pre-VESA cards.
Next, you have soundcards - which also required a whole ton of drivers. (Especially in the highlt pervailant DOS games.)
They were also generally aimed at a different market than console games of the time. No-brained action games were on consoles, lengthy strategic games were on the PC.
Incorrect. Action games are quite common on the PC, and are easy to product because of the free compilers that are available. Lengthy 'strategic' games also appear on Consoles, known as RPG games - even if this does not qualify as strategic, it is similar enough that they qualify.
Blowing $900 on the latest NVidia card isn't enough, now you need two to get the full experience, don't forget a $500 processor and a couple gigs of ram to go with it. I've built pure gaming rigs that totaled $6k without the monitor.. it's absurd! i>
If you've built a $6k gaming rig, you're good for 2-3 years solid (excluding architectural changes.) A more realistic gaming rig costs $2k, and lasts for the current batch of games for at least 1 year.
Besides, the only bottleneck in modern games is the video card - just add one card and you can play any modern game. A cheapo costs $100, and doesn't have any problem playing what is considered to be games known to strain video cards. I'm still using a GeForce 4, and can play both Doom 3 and Painkiller with no framerate issues.
I agree -- the swearing's fine, it's all the racism, misogyny and homophobia that's really starting to get old.
That's why you create an anti-bigot coalition across a large number of guilds. When certain players develop a pattern of overtly violent bigotry across multiple servers, they are banned from the larger chunk.
For younger players Xbox live requires a credit card to use, so there's supposed to be some adult around -- why capture a few seconds of the audio stream and send them a damn letter with a link explaining why their son has been banned?
The X-box live thin is already half-way there - encourage other people to leave "child-abuser" or "childish-abuser" feedback for those who constantly cuss, swear or utter bigoted remarks over the microphone. It is fully accurrate, and the 14-year old will have a severly damaged reputation that forces him to be without online friends (until he improves.)
Also, note that a cusser is more than likely to have emotional problems - if you can find a way to disrupt him and make him angry, he's more than likely to be kicked/banned. Either that or you have him get distracted from the game (which can last for more than just one server.) There's more than enough information on how to do this and have some fun.
Virtual memory is not a carte blanche for memory hogging. As you should know, memory hogging will result in degraded performance.
Assuming that users have unlimited resources is exactly how Mozilla is barely usable on Windows 95-ME - especially when you have Slashdot Moderator access.
Who cares if Firefox or any app is a bit of a memory hog???
As long as it is just using the memory as cache space and not accessing the memory randomly, it'll be paged out into virtual memory as needed.
In an ideal situation, that would be correct.
However, the operating system does not know which memory is currenly "in use" and which ones are "in cache" - in fact, it's quite easy for an "in use" to be physically sandwiched between two "in cache" entries. Because of this, you will have a sudden loading time if you do plenty of other tasks in the background and suddenly switch back to Mozilla.
Small applications, being small, do not generally have to wait 1/2 seconds to recover from being pages in or out. Since Mozilla allocates the cache in memory, it will have to wait those two seconds.
assuming you're using an OS with decent vmem support.
An OS with decent vmem support would allow you to map files to memory. This results in no swapping at all - only writing perodic output to the hard drive, and loading the file into memory as required. If another application needs more memory, the memory map is discarded with no need to write the contents of memory.
An application that doesn't exploit the usage of memory maps is as good as an OS with shoddy vmem support. (Of course, it can simply use it's disk cache for the same effect.)
Where I went to elementary school in California, we had a GATE (gifted and talented education) program which was used to ensure any kid with decent grades from becoming disinterested and totally clocking out of school (which I guess was considered a rational fear at the time).
It is a rational fear, period (and may be overrated as well.) Gifted students are "ahead" enough of the pack that basic high-school education is merely educating what they've already learned - and in some cases, is counterproductive (e.g. Negative numbers do not exist before Grade 8.)
In addition, gifted students with learning disabilities are worse off - they learn how to fake their way through high-school through any means necessary (e.g. tactically miss artistic or technical assignments to perform things that they can do.)
Of course, the gifted program for schools isn't really effective anyway. As you mentioned, it is only a rigid one-hour removal where gifted students are given logic problems and stuff. It does nothing as those students still have to go through the rigid curriculum, and still have to wait until Grade whatever to learn the most advanced of topics with an associated textbook (library stuff and overshooting the child's capacity doesn't count - you need reference materials at the level of the child that can be used without the distractions of a substandard course).
FYI, I participated in an extra-curricular gifted program when I was young - both as a student and a volunteer. Because of this, I read a lot of literature about gifted students and how they are square pegs being rammed into a round hole by the school board - just like some inexperienced toddlers try putting square pegs in a round hole.
... on The Temple of Elemental Evil, good riddance.
I'll play devil's advocate here...
What common properties do the following games developed by Troika have? - Arcanum - Vampire: The masquerade - Temple of Elemental Evil
One hint: The publishers of the games tended to treat Troika in the same way because of these similarities (although the first one could easily be dismissed as standard mismanagement).
First Counterstrike, then Aftermath. I think it's unnecessary for Valve to give their games the same names as Red Alert expansion packs.
The RA expansions are basically hard to find anyway, and thus the naming system should be okay. We'll be fine as long as Valve doesn't choose "Yuri's Revenge" as the next title... Which they will on April 1st.
With IE, there's almost always an unpatched vulnerability. Even if you visit only the most mainstream of commercial sites, who's serving their adds, or possibly other content?
With any browser that auto-executes any form of code that isn't trusted (or otherwise interferes with the browser or system), you have a vulnerability. It might not necessairly be a security leak, but it can and will disrupt normal operations.
In particular, I'm talking about: - The Firefox Sun Java plugin, which locks the browser while it is downloading the applet. (Don't say get broadband - it still locks the browser for two seconds, more so if the server stops responding.) - The Flash plugin that plays those annoying "Jabber" flash ads that plug the CPU at 100%. Tabbed browsers are hit hard, since you would have several links open in the background. (I know of a quick fix for Firefox - force plugins to be one priority level lower.)
no worries, just 'z'ap him with a/oD and watch that scary h be relaced with a lovey neutral '.'
Mind Flayers can wear Amulets of Reflection. While the chances of being slain by your own death ray is about 1 in a million... a 1 in a million chance will occurr 9 times out of 10 with Nethack's Sadistic RNG (tm).
Seriously though, I'm betting they aren't paying that much for all of their developers.
As you can tell, I'm overestimating - mainly because of previous cases where employers "forced" overtime without paying for it. (Standard mis-management stuff.)
Of course, you still can't hire some random programmer - a server on the scale of SWG cannot fail (or if it does, it must come back online as soon as possible.) This puts a limit on development as any inefficient coding is magnified by the sheer number of players.
Even if it were 150,000 USD at month, that just doesn't pay for the server costs, admin salaries, GM salaries (someone still has to make sure those 10,000 don't rampantly cheat), patching (if they do cheat, someone has to fix the bugs), QA (ideally a patch would be tested before release), and further development.
That's about 1.8 million per year... (This is really higher, as this is only the peak usage at one given time. )
A full-time GM costing $3000 per month would only cost $36000 per year - 15 of thim would change the net profit to ~$1.2 million. A full-time developer costs around $150000 yearly, thus four would bring profits to 600 thousand.
Are misc server expenses really costing over $600 000 a month?
Even so, these peanuts are still profitable - and prevents profits from being sent to other companies. There's even still room to prevent stagnation.
Gay people play the game to escape reality as well...
Then just play the game.
If you have the desire to be pampered with a guild that has to explicily state that they are "GLBT friendly", then you aren't escaping reality. You should instead look for a guild that has no tolerance for non-roleplayed immaturity.
If you need to have an anti-bigot guild, then go ahead and create one. (Or better yet, an anit-bigot coalition formed of several guilds.) Boycotting only one form of bigotry does nothing - it only encourages discrimination that is not yet enumerated.
Until you have the courage to hate bigots because they are bigots, you aren't even coming close to solving the problem.
It's easy to get around this voluntairy limitation, especially since most of the available games rely on user driven content. All the customer has to do is one of the following:
- "I don't have ID" - many cashiers will understand. - "It's an engine game" - this guilts cashiers and managers into selling the game anyway. - "I'm old enough to buy a computer... but not a video game?" - "It's going to be a rare classic." (That's how I obtained Duke3D Early on.)
These don't work all the time, but will work in the smaller stores that don't have heavy corporate bureaucracy.
Bittorrnet with 500 people seeding at 15Kbps is insanely fast compared to 5 people with 100kbps. If you throttle at lower outgoing speed the ISP does not pay attention.
That is correct. However, torrents that have that many seeders are either: - Extremely small and easy to seed - Have just as many downloaders - Not obtaining new downloaders into the mix, which indicates that something is wrong with the file (which usually appear in private trackers that blindingly enforce a ratio.)
There are also plenty of torrents that don't have 500 people seeding at 15. These torrents are on the size of 40-50 (seeds + downloaders), where the throttled 15Kbps is still just as haphazardly thrown around - especially when you throw in firewalls into the mix (and don't say "enable port mapping" unless you are suggesting to criminally hack into an ISP level firewall.)
If anyone thinks that they pay attention for an entire month to your total data transfer amounts they are nuts. they look for someone using a sustained bandwidth useage.
Where you obtained that belief is beyond me. ISPs consistantly advertise a bandwidth cap (unless it is an "unmetered" connection), and have a fee if it is exceeded. Monitoring bandwidth is trivial - if it can be done on a local computer, it can also be done in a hardware router (and still make it smart enough not to bill traffic that doesn't leave the ISP.)
I really suggest you learn how P2P works. lots and lots of low speed = super fast downloads, a few of high speed seeds usually = crappy torrent without the final chunks.
A Missing few chunks = something repairable with any half-decent parity detection algorithm. Usenet already came up with this implementation, and so can P2P.
Bittorrent is not a massive upload but a tiny upload typically throttled pretty good with a massive download.
Where did you get that incorrect information?
At the minimum, you need to upload at least 90% of what you downloaded. In doing so, you have a significant upload footprint that is detectable by ISPs.
Even if uploading is throttled, you would still be uploading more than what would be considered average - as normal internet usage has a minimal upload compared to downloading. That's also generally why ISPs think some users are running servers when you transmit a 1GB video to a friend.
ISP's can not stop it. they can try, but us damned users will always find a way around.
Do you know what happens when there is no uploading in a P2P network? It collapses.
How do you get around the limited upload limitation? You can't. P2P networks need seeds to upload with acceptable speed or otherwise there is no point in using the network to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to study the material anyway - why not transcribe those DRM riddled textbooks to another computer?
Sure, it's a copyright violation (and a lot of work), but you will have permanent access to the textbook. However, you will be studying as transcription is generally one of the ways to memorize material depending on your learning type.
But remember: Under no circumstance should you obtain a few friends because of this.
For reference, I have a copy of D&D first edition.
The rules in that game were barely designed - all too often, you have characters that get insta-killed because they only have one hitpoint. Not only that, but once you pick a character class, there is no further variation.
In a way, the same applies to AD&D. Although it was at least better since character flexibility was improved with dual classes (a cheap hack) and multi-classing. However, there is usually little reason to switch classes, and you couldn't become a ultra-powerful multiclasser because of a hard limitation.
I haven't played third edition, but it doesn't feel killed under any circumstance. In fact, TSR was doing a better job at trashing the game with attempts to enforce copyright on fireball damage tables.
Just because Ben Johnson can obtain a gold medal by natural talent doesn't mean that he should keep his gold medal. The rules are clear - there is to be no usage of "performance enhancing" drugs. The same applies to elections, where Bush interfered with the recount, and where some random democrat managed to put in enough votes for Gore to overflow an integer.
If you don't like this, then form an overt despotism where people know ahead of time that it is illegal to vote for anything other than the ruling party. That way, rigging elections will be within the rules.
Actually, you can. In the case of that person in question (who claims to be a lawyer), a large number of people wrote to the Flordia Bar Association asking to review his license to practice law. His reaction only reinforced the accusations about his professional conduct.
Right now, he has the effectiveness of a standard internet troll. Winning the debate is now as easy as completely ignoring him, as other moderate and anti-game groups are beginning to distance themselves from that person in question (who claims to be a lawyer.)
A while ago, he was a threat when he tried to attack Penny Arcade. Now, he's just back to a standard troll - even the newspapers are beginning to recognise this as one made an update on an existing article stating that no video games were found in the search in spite of such a claim by you-know-who (a person whc claims to be a lawyer.)
One of his latest proposals was to write a violent video game - which was intended to be satirical for targetting police, and stuff, but ended up satirizing the behaviour of anti-video game activists.
Most people that use maps tend to pull over first - or even better, identify which landmarks to look for (e.g. highway signs that clearly state what their exit road is.)
Under Windows XP, with an NTFS filesystem:
- Right-click on any file, select properties.
- Click on advanced, and check "Encrypt contents to secure data."
- Click on Details...
That's how it basically works. The technology is already there in Windows - the only difference is that it is now bound to a fingerprint reader, vhere the fingerprint reader uses existing known keys to gain access to the file.
Of course, DRM as it is claimed to be going will make this larger scale. You can be the judge of what comes next.
Actually, they do - all they need to create is a bounty where the first person to produce said sex scene in an unmodified game gets a prize (e.g. $25000 - within most corporate advertising budgets as the media does much of the advertising for the company instead, leaving a massive surplus.)
Perodically increase the bounty based on the number of negative press - which will make an impossible task much more lucrative. After all, if Hot Coffee is so popular/hyped, it should be easy to find without modifications, right?
As long as the bounty still stands unachieved (regardless of cash prise or otherwise), it is a dent in the credibility. Even if it doesn't have legal weight (IANAL), it still inches public opinion in their favour.
BTW, I'm really suprised that this game was not banned several times over.
FYI, don't point to the C64 games on the Underdogs - they are bloated as they contain much more files than necessary.
That file in particular contains PC64 - which is abandonware (actually Public Domain). There's much better emulators available that can run nativly under Windows - WinVice in particular is quite good at zooming past loading times.
The school that I went to balanced things out by having a list of science fair projects that we take and use to set up a display... This was intended to prevent killer advanced projects from coming in, and to prevent a whole quantity of volcanos. Basically, it evened the playing field.
My project: Create a chocolate bar wrapper . That's right, I had an art project.
My research that there are two ways to design the wrapper: black and white (for a higher-class look), and coloured (for the masses.)
But that's all besides the point - the real issue is that there was a creativity mark on the grading scale used in the science fair. That either means I was graded on the creativeness of the laminated sheet at the front of the room, or that I was graded on the artisticness of the chocolate bar wrapper. Probably should have researched Tachyons instead.
Actually, installing a LAN generally requires a technician or someone who knows what they are doing.
While it is true that most computers can be plopped into an Ad-hoc network, it does not necessairly mean that internet access is available throughout the network. For example, my internet router at home has 1 port that plugs into my computer - getting other computers required getting a switch or getting a second network card (not counting cards required for other computers), along with the cabling.
There's also one person that visits my house... and I don't want him to use *MY* broadband...
Here's what can be a problem with inexperienced users:
- Incorrect cable type: Internet connection Sharing via NICs require a crossover cable.
- Incorrect hub type: Two routers on a home network is not recommended (for practical reasons). The thing that plugs into the Cable/DSL line is usually a router itself, and most users could easily purchase a second router without a second thought.
- Incorrect network configuration: While DHCP and APIPA work without problem, static IPs can cause problems. It just takes an accidental ommition of the Default Gateway and you wonder why you don't have internet access. (Not a problem in most cases.)
- Inability to install: There are some users that are just not comfortable opening up their PC to install a NIC card.
- Long wires: While not a configuration problem, long wires that snake through a house tend to look ugly. There are ways around this (e.g. drilling through walls), but this is something that some users are not comfortable with.
- Wireless configuration: Wireless seems to be strange and doesn't yet seem infallible. Took two conference calls to Netgear before I learned their procedure to getting a wireless device working. My personal experience: I know one friend who has intermittant loss of signal that lasts just long enough to kill any active connections. It's not major, but significant enough to cause him to auto-relogin to MSN. Perhaps I should give him a Ethernet NIC and a snaking wire as a birthday present - the two cats and one dog would love the new chew toy, as it has to run across the floor in at least one position.
- Contractual agreements: Some ISPs have terms in their TOS that require Business to have a more expensive tier.
No suprise why some people are uncomfortable with home networks. As soon as you mention something like that, people will feel a little uncomfortable as if it were some magical thingy that is beyond mere laymans...
A decade ago, you were in the era that was borderline DOS.
Graphic capabilities in that era were *NOT* standard, even under Windows 95. Some graphic cards supported 3D (classified as Prototypes) and others did not. Some graphic cards supported VESA 2.0, while others were VESA 1.x. Don't get me started on the whole slew of drivers required for pre-VESA cards.
Next, you have soundcards - which also required a whole ton of drivers. (Especially in the highlt pervailant DOS games.)
Incorrect. Action games are quite common on the PC, and are easy to product because of the free compilers that are available. Lengthy 'strategic' games also appear on Consoles, known as RPG games - even if this does not qualify as strategic, it is similar enough that they qualify.
If you've built a $6k gaming rig, you're good for 2-3 years solid (excluding architectural changes.) A more realistic gaming rig costs $2k, and lasts for the current batch of games for at least 1 year.
Besides, the only bottleneck in modern games is the video card - just add one card and you can play any modern game. A cheapo costs $100, and doesn't have any problem playing what is considered to be games known to strain video cards. I'm still using a GeForce 4, and can play both Doom 3 and Painkiller with no framerate issues.
That's why you create an anti-bigot coalition across a large number of guilds. When certain players develop a pattern of overtly violent bigotry across multiple servers, they are banned from the larger chunk.
The X-box live thin is already half-way there - encourage other people to leave "child-abuser" or "childish-abuser" feedback for those who constantly cuss, swear or utter bigoted remarks over the microphone. It is fully accurrate, and the 14-year old will have a severly damaged reputation that forces him to be without online friends (until he improves.)
Also, note that a cusser is more than likely to have emotional problems - if you can find a way to disrupt him and make him angry, he's more than likely to be kicked/banned. Either that or you have him get distracted from the game (which can last for more than just one server.) There's more than enough information on how to do this and have some fun.
Non issue - it's currently 1:20 AM.
To be fair, that's generally within a half-hour when I get home from work. Now, I feel sleepy.
Virtual memory is not a carte blanche for memory hogging. As you should know, memory hogging will result in degraded performance.
Assuming that users have unlimited resources is exactly how Mozilla is barely usable on Windows 95-ME - especially when you have Slashdot Moderator access.
In an ideal situation, that would be correct.
However, the operating system does not know which memory is currenly "in use" and which ones are "in cache" - in fact, it's quite easy for an "in use" to be physically sandwiched between two "in cache" entries. Because of this, you will have a sudden loading time if you do plenty of other tasks in the background and suddenly switch back to Mozilla.
Small applications, being small, do not generally have to wait 1/2 seconds to recover from being pages in or out. Since Mozilla allocates the cache in memory, it will have to wait those two seconds.
An OS with decent vmem support would allow you to map files to memory. This results in no swapping at all - only writing perodic output to the hard drive, and loading the file into memory as required. If another application needs more memory, the memory map is discarded with no need to write the contents of memory.
An application that doesn't exploit the usage of memory maps is as good as an OS with shoddy vmem support. (Of course, it can simply use it's disk cache for the same effect.)
It is a rational fear, period (and may be overrated as well.) Gifted students are "ahead" enough of the pack that basic high-school education is merely educating what they've already learned - and in some cases, is counterproductive (e.g. Negative numbers do not exist before Grade 8.)
In addition, gifted students with learning disabilities are worse off - they learn how to fake their way through high-school through any means necessary (e.g. tactically miss artistic or technical assignments to perform things that they can do.)
Of course, the gifted program for schools isn't really effective anyway. As you mentioned, it is only a rigid one-hour removal where gifted students are given logic problems and stuff. It does nothing as those students still have to go through the rigid curriculum, and still have to wait until Grade whatever to learn the most advanced of topics with an associated textbook (library stuff and overshooting the child's capacity doesn't count - you need reference materials at the level of the child that can be used without the distractions of a substandard course).
FYI, I participated in an extra-curricular gifted program when I was young - both as a student and a volunteer. Because of this, I read a lot of literature about gifted students and how they are square pegs being rammed into a round hole by the school board - just like some inexperienced toddlers try putting square pegs in a round hole.
I'll play devil's advocate here...
What common properties do the following games developed by Troika have?
- Arcanum
- Vampire: The masquerade
- Temple of Elemental Evil
One hint: The publishers of the games tended to treat Troika in the same way because of these similarities (although the first one could easily be dismissed as standard mismanagement).
The RA expansions are basically hard to find anyway, and thus the naming system should be okay. We'll be fine as long as Valve doesn't choose "Yuri's Revenge" as the next title... Which they will on April 1st.
With any browser that auto-executes any form of code that isn't trusted (or otherwise interferes with the browser or system), you have a vulnerability. It might not necessairly be a security leak, but it can and will disrupt normal operations.
In particular, I'm talking about:
- The Firefox Sun Java plugin, which locks the browser while it is downloading the applet. (Don't say get broadband - it still locks the browser for two seconds, more so if the server stops responding.)
- The Flash plugin that plays those annoying "Jabber" flash ads that plug the CPU at 100%. Tabbed browsers are hit hard, since you would have several links open in the background. (I know of a quick fix for Firefox - force plugins to be one priority level lower.)
Mind Flayers can wear Amulets of Reflection. While the chances of being slain by your own death ray is about 1 in a million... a 1 in a million chance will occurr 9 times out of 10 with Nethack's Sadistic RNG (tm).
As you can tell, I'm overestimating - mainly because of previous cases where employers "forced" overtime without paying for it. (Standard mis-management stuff.)
Of course, you still can't hire some random programmer - a server on the scale of SWG cannot fail (or if it does, it must come back online as soon as possible.) This puts a limit on development as any inefficient coding is magnified by the sheer number of players.
That's about 1.8 million per year... (This is really higher, as this is only the peak usage at one given time. )
A full-time GM costing $3000 per month would only cost $36000 per year - 15 of thim would change the net profit to ~$1.2 million. A full-time developer costs around $150000 yearly, thus four would bring profits to 600 thousand.
Are misc server expenses really costing over $600 000 a month?
Even so, these peanuts are still profitable - and prevents profits from being sent to other companies. There's even still room to prevent stagnation.
Then just play the game.
If you have the desire to be pampered with a guild that has to explicily state that they are "GLBT friendly", then you aren't escaping reality. You should instead look for a guild that has no tolerance for non-roleplayed immaturity.
If you need to have an anti-bigot guild, then go ahead and create one. (Or better yet, an anit-bigot coalition formed of several guilds.) Boycotting only one form of bigotry does nothing - it only encourages discrimination that is not yet enumerated.
Until you have the courage to hate bigots because they are bigots, you aren't even coming close to solving the problem.
Yes, they can. The key word is voluntairy.
It's easy to get around this voluntairy limitation, especially since most of the available games rely on user driven content. All the customer has to do is one of the following:
- "I don't have ID" - many cashiers will understand.
- "It's an engine game" - this guilts cashiers and managers into selling the game anyway.
- "I'm old enough to buy a computer... but not a video game?"
- "It's going to be a rare classic." (That's how I obtained Duke3D Early on.)
These don't work all the time, but will work in the smaller stores that don't have heavy corporate bureaucracy.
That is correct. However, torrents that have that many seeders are either:
- Extremely small and easy to seed
- Have just as many downloaders
- Not obtaining new downloaders into the mix, which indicates that something is wrong with the file (which usually appear in private trackers that blindingly enforce a ratio.)
There are also plenty of torrents that don't have 500 people seeding at 15. These torrents are on the size of 40-50 (seeds + downloaders), where the throttled 15Kbps is still just as haphazardly thrown around - especially when you throw in firewalls into the mix (and don't say "enable port mapping" unless you are suggesting to criminally hack into an ISP level firewall.)
Where you obtained that belief is beyond me. ISPs consistantly advertise a bandwidth cap (unless it is an "unmetered" connection), and have a fee if it is exceeded. Monitoring bandwidth is trivial - if it can be done on a local computer, it can also be done in a hardware router (and still make it smart enough not to bill traffic that doesn't leave the ISP.)
A Missing few chunks = something repairable with any half-decent parity detection algorithm. Usenet already came up with this implementation, and so can P2P.
Where did you get that incorrect information?
At the minimum, you need to upload at least 90% of what you downloaded. In doing so, you have a significant upload footprint that is detectable by ISPs.
Even if uploading is throttled, you would still be uploading more than what would be considered average - as normal internet usage has a minimal upload compared to downloading. That's also generally why ISPs think some users are running servers when you transmit a 1GB video to a friend.
Do you know what happens when there is no uploading in a P2P network? It collapses.
How do you get around the limited upload limitation? You can't. P2P networks need seeds to upload with acceptable speed or otherwise there is no point in using the network to begin with.