Boeings' site http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/pf/pf_4 00_prod.html suggests fuel capacity is 57,285 US Gallons and it has a maximum range of 13,450 km (8 357.4 miles) , even assuming that does not count taxying/circling/emergency fuel this gives us an efficiency of 0.14588 miles per gallon. Multiplied up by the 524 passengers this gives us 76.44 miles per gallon per passenger.
This is better than any car I've driven.
I also play WoW on my mythtv box. with HDMI connection to a LCD TV it looks sweet. Mythtv is a wonderful piece of software. It stores hundreds of hours of programs and music for my viewing pleasure, and leaving the underlying computer in a fully functional state is an excellent way to save buying another computer for those occasions when you wish to play games socially (you know, when you have a real person visiting)
I admit the software is not perfect yet - these are the hurdles I've either fixed or are living with...
To play World of Warcraft I am using Wine plus about a 30 line patch to fix mouse clicks. Then run "WoW.exe -opengl" (I'm running nvidia's drivers, and have an X configuration that mirrors the HDMI output with the VGA output). There are a few minor issues with sharing this computer between Myth and Wow - It works perfectly whilst recording, showing a framerate of about 25fps, but when transcodes kick in my framerate gets slaughtered, the TV crops the edges off the picture (which can be slightly irritating) and my Wine installation has a bit of trouble with WoW patches. On the Mythtvv front I've not got the infrared controller working, and the mythtv windows drivers now have a version mismatch, but they are minor issues.
In my humble opinion the worst attack on growing up in the UK society are the new *broken* attitudes to childhood.
To avoid being branded a paedophile... You cannot talk with children who aren't your own, If they fall down, you cannot pick them up and if its sunny you cannot apply sun block because you cannot be seen touching.
To avoid being branded a bad parent.. You cannot discipline even your own kids beyond gentle verbal persuasion. I quick poll of parents that I know indicates that this is not always effective - which leads to behavioural problems in the child.
To avoid being sued... Trees are cut down to prevent risk of damage when branches fall off. Games such as conkers are banned from school. Running is banned. Contact sports are banned.
Bad Science and hysteria... Hooping cough may kill or permanently damage thousands because of a non reproducable non peer-reviewed article about dangers in innoculations.
I'm glad its behind me, but I feel sorry for my children who are disadvantaged by well-meaning idiots.
As a parent, and generally suspicious net-user, I am glad that there is a fee and associated paper trail back to a real breathing human. That way, if legal recourse is required then it is available. I have noticed that games that allow anonymous entities are often full of cheaters, griefers and I believe they are more of a danger to vulnerable people (e.g. children). Anonymous means of expressions may be required for a democratic society but they can stay in their relevent forums.
On a gaming front I'm glad that the servers stay running, new content is added and that there are support staff available to fix problems - all of which require money.
I REALLY hope they're tempered by sensible people, but considering the last year has produced no solo content, but lots of high end raids and instances the facts are against it.
There are a lot of casual guilds, but they tend to come and go as the majority of active players get seduced into the hardcore side of the game and leave the casual guild for a hardcore guild. From the casual guilds point of view this means they have to work hard recruiting new members to keep a quorum, and from the players point of view this generally causes a frenzy of online time that lasts for a few months whilst their real life (work, family, education etc) suffers and then they burn out and leave the game.
I got close to being burned by this 5 years ago, but after a frank discussion with my wife (thankyou Dear), realised that there is more fun to the casual game (though less bragging rights as I have no cool gear) and have played casually ever since (well, maybe once a month I'll accept an invitation to a raid).
The casual guilds usually have quite a few mid-level players. To find one, watch round the auction house for guild nametags. If you see a common guildname on a number of non-maxlevel people then they may well be a casual guild.
I played everquest for years. If it weren't for mismanagement of Everquest we would be shaking our heads and wondering how a single MMORPG could dominate the market for 6 years. However, the gorilla on the block since 2005 is now WOW though I suspect it is starting to suffer the same problems. I hope sanity returns and they avoid EQ's fate.
The reasons I left EQ (and why WoW may not avoid these problems) were...
1. The game was so hard you cannot meaningfully accomplish things solo once you're high (e.g. 60th+ level). As a casual player who does not spend a long time online in one session I spent a large percentage of my time looking for a group. I even arranged a second subscription so that I would have two characters whilst I was soloing. Wow was therefore more accessible because you can solo meaningfully and it also halved my subscription costs. However, both systems are designed so that the greatest rewards are only achievable by massive multiplayer effort. and at that point, all the players who have real lives drop out.
2. Very few pieces of software are perfect, with a MMORPG this sometimes requires human intervention. The customer support at SOE was appalling. GMs sometimes abused their powers and if you had a problem you sometimes had to wait days for resolution. WoW support used to be fairly good and prompt, but I've noticed a drop in quality over the months. Over time, it looks like the WoW software has got more buggy to the point where I suspect EQ has the upper hand now. If you've got 40 people who spend hours trying to achieve a goal and all wipe because of lag (for example) then they're going to be fed up.
3. Even though the area to explore was huge, (and I'd explored for almost 4 years), I had only visited maybe 50% of the regions that were available. A lot of the new regions required quarterly expansions costing about $45. Every time an expansion comes out you are reminded that you're paying a subscription AND you're being asked to pay for the expansion. Blizzard had been very good at improving WoW for the standard subscription and I dont begrudge them an expansion every 18 months or to, but Sony's 3 monthly expansions to add broken content drive people away.
4. It became obvious that some mechanisms in EQ were overt time sinks (e.g. some people waited days for certain creatures to appear), now, obviously, the whole idea of a game is to be an entertaining time sink, but you're supposed to be enjoying yourself whilst doing it. WoW has a few irritating time wasters, such as flight paths but generally its a lot better.
So in summary, Sony destroyed Everquest's dominance of the MMORPG market by offering poor support for buggy software and charging lots of money for it whilst only a few hardcore players got bragging rights over their leet characters (at the cost of family, jobs and sleep). I can see a few faint shadows of this disease on WoW, and hope it won't get worse.
If someone wants to make a killer MMORPG then listen to the majority of players, not the vocal hardcore. Allow people to stop and attend to real life. Listen to them when they've got a problem and fix it as a priority before working on something shiny, new and broken. Let them play the game as fast or as slow as they like, so they can socialise or be a tourist. I'd love to play a casual wow-type game in the Everquest world, there were so many cool areas, monsters and quests that I miss.
Doing this at home - heres how
on
ASCII World Cup
·
· Score: 1
I have a mythtv server, to make it work at home you need to:
Stop the mythbackend processes from using the dvb capture cards.
Make sure that ~/.mplayer/channels.conf exists from a previous dvbscan.
In your xterm, - the mouse and choose a small font, then drag the window back to a suitable size
Run the following command: DISPLAY="" mplayer -vo aa -framedrop -menu "dvb://five"
As this was a quick hack I stopped there, but for added bonuses here are some projects:
Run esoundd locally and pipe the sound over the network to your workstation.
Tie the command to inetd, to display tv across the network without having to log in.
Work out some way of sharing the/dev/video0 device
Compile mplayer with the coco libraries, so you can get colour ascii.
Put a telnet client on your ipaq/phone, and watch TV whilst on the move through GPRS.
I tried hard to be a Gamecube fanboy, but failed...
Gamecube good:
pokemon games and integration with gameboy games.
wavebird wireless controller
hardware that was as capable as other game consoles of that time.
comparatively cheap.
Gamecube bad:
Could not play DVDs for no good reason.
More restrictive hardware and licensing compared with alternative consoles.
Poor coverage of titles in Europe (e.g. impossible to use midway arcade suite to play gauntlet because it was not released in europe and the region locking prevents import from regions that it is available).
Fewer titles available in UK stores than PS2 and xbox
Poor display quality on some TV screens.
According to a contact who works at a gaming company, the lack of titles stem from the restrictive licensing and/or lack of commercial incentive compared with other consoles.
I believe it is wrong to produce a product that is crippled in ways that prevent it from being used effectively. For me, the inability to play DVDs and region encoding of games meant I bought a PS2 to fill in gaps that my gamecube could not cover. Reaching round behind the TV to swap cables gets old very quickly, so after a while you just end up with one plugged in and you buy your games accordingly (also ps2 games are slightly cheaper).
The artificial restrictions placed on the gamecube led to me changing my console allegance to PS2.
Unfortunately, whilst I feel Nintendo are ethically unsound, placing short term financial gain over customer satisfaction and long term financial gain, I am even less sure about Sony (rootkit CD's, everquest - where they deviously charge things to your credit card) or Microsoft (convicted Monopolist and closed source company).
sudo provides much more than su... 1. It authenticates against the same password that you logged in with, not only saving you from learning two, but allowing you to keep the root password secret. 2. It doesnt always have to allow access to root, "sudo -u user" can be used to give application/db access. 3. sudo remembers your access for a little while, allowing you to single-shot commands, causing less irritation than "su -c" 4. You can control it remotely, e.g. by active directory group. This allows centralised user administration of system admins. 5. You can provide privileged access of single shot commands to batch processes.
A suitable level of paranoia would suggest that it would be good to decompress the compressed files and verify that they produce the identical dataset. I did not see this step in the overview.
Well, having read the Gaminggod synopsis the thing that struck me most was that you were REQUIRED to have a balanced party to progress.
The high end game in Everquest became like this, and this triggered a lot of casual players to leave. I've known LDoN (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) groups take so long to get together that by the time you have a quorum, it is so late in the evening that players have not got long enough left online to actually finish the adventure properly. Some players have families, or work in the morning. (BTW this was the main reason my entire guild left EQ for WoW).
Casual gamers in DDO who are only online for a short period will find themselves locked out from being able to progress unless someone has a revolutionarily good way for people to quickly find a suitable group. Hanging around waiting for tank/healer/thief combinations who have the right levels and also speak the same language and aren't on any of their blacklists will quickly become frustrating. If I were cynical I'd suspect that they can push advertising at these people waiting and pay for the servers that way.
I wouldnt miss PvP, crafting or housing. If you want PvP play halflife:-)
World of Warcraft has this solved - you can still solo meaningfully at even the higest level, letting you enjoy yourself whist a group slowly comes together. If the group doesnt pan out, well, that isnt the end of the world.
After months of playing the game, this week I have experienced disconnects, one rollback and one return to bind point. In the Gadgetstan zone, we tried to enter the Zul'Whatever instance, it said we were in the wrong instance and 90 seconds later we were all sent back to our bind points which unfortunately scattered the party across different continents and that was the end of that. Alternatively, I've been having disconnects, in particular when you first pick up an item that is used in a new quest there seems to be about a 10% chance that you get instantly disconnected. On one of these occasions I suffered a short-term rollback, putting my number of kills back by a few minutes and porting me back to my bind point. Since XP and quest progress was sent back in time I assume my inventory could have been too. Unfortunately blizzard seem incapable of admitting that they wrote buggy code, their technical fix is to blame the network card(!!).
Well, it looks like we slashdotted all the UK online shops - I could not find Phantasy Star Online available anywhere, which is a shame because its a pre-requisite to sampling this linuxy goodness.
I viewed the sony release about the new items in EQ2 and it just seems to be that they're adding cute fluff that is irrelevent to the reason that many people play EQ. The adventure is happening in our minds and the EQ environment is just a catalyst to help us visualise it.
I play EQ after the kids are in bed. I have found that I have to play it with the sound off to avoid disturbing the rest of the household. Also, as I often play 2 characters at once I found running two sound streams simultaneously to be irritating and problematic.
It doesnt bother me that I play in silence, and the only in-game downside is that I miss the odd unique sound made by "named mobs" that spawn which lets the other party know theres something exciting around but that hardly ever happens.
The current everquest world has thousands of players online over 120+ zones. Whilst I have only got a selection of people in my friends list and have only visited about 60 zones in the last 4 years I feel these are two of everquests main points that keep me returning to the game.
If there was a "sociable tourist" class that'd be me.
Whilst I'd admit that some of the old content is due for rebalancing and rework. It seems that the new everquest is just adding cute fluff and eye candy whilst reducing the content and community.
I wish they spent their money/effort on EQ1. I'd be more likely to keep my $20/month going to them than some prettyier newcomer.
There are a few common things that viruses and worms do that we can use, without causing the bad things and avoiding many of the ethical problems
Start with a small set of manually seeded machines that have the white hat virus installed.
1. The "white hat" virus sits quiescently on a machine and monitors its own infection vector passively, therefore not utilising any bandwidth. Upon receiving an attack from the virus it is programmed to protect against it will move to step 2 and remembers not to approach the attacker again within a week.
2. Using the same known vulnerability that the virus exploits it is able to put itself on the attacking, infected machine. It then pops up a dialog box saying "your machine is infected with a XXX virus, may I deal with it?" with a cancel button which cancels, but if OK is clicked then we move to step 3.
3. It installs its package so it can be removed by the control panel, it paches the system so it is not vulnerable, cleans the virus and starts itself scanning, adding itself to the group of machines waiting in step 1.
4. if a month goes by without detecting anything, uninstall itself.
Benefits : minimal network traffic since only validated victims are addressed, no changes without authorisation and if the OS is secured then the white hat virus cannot propogate.
Worst case scenario : if someone is infected and will not patch their machine or remove the virus they may get irritated by popups.
Nope, Watching grown men chasing a ball round a field is not my idea of fun. I'm happy to pay the BBC license fees but I'm glad they didnt pay ridiculous amounts for hod-carriers playing football
[a hod-carrier is someone who carried bricks because he it too dumb to trust with cement]
This is a superb enterprise-level piece of equipment.
With this and a bluetooth phone your on-call engineers can be active and able to fix software problems without having to stay at home or carry a large/heavy/short-lived/fragile laptop around.
My Zaurus CL860 is linked to my GPRS phone. It has X, vnc, ssh and a battery life that lasts days giving me mobile net access and a screen that lets me see one whole and a few partial 80x25 xterms at once. All in a size and weight to fit into a shirt pocket.
When you fight spam with spamassassin you can submit fingerprints fo the spam to a central database that allows more spam to be identified. This way you help the global community.
I used to work at a company called Uniplex. They bought technology that could precis English text. One of their examples was cutting down "Alice in Wonderland" to 10% of its original length. It weighted words according to some magic algorithm that tried to retain the most important phrases.
Whilst the resulting document was a bit odd, you could certainly use it to remind yourself about the story.
Slashdot Mirror
quick, post their case history to refute sites such as:
/ Cancer/laetrile.html
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics
Boeings' site http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/pf/pf_4 00_prod.html suggests fuel capacity is 57,285 US Gallons and it has a maximum range of 13,450 km (8 357.4 miles) , even assuming that does not count taxying/circling/emergency fuel this gives us an efficiency of 0.14588 miles per gallon. Multiplied up by the 524 passengers this gives us 76.44 miles per gallon per passenger.
This is better than any car I've driven.
I also play WoW on my mythtv box. with HDMI connection to a LCD TV it looks sweet. Mythtv is a wonderful piece of software. It stores hundreds of hours of programs and music for my viewing pleasure, and leaving the underlying computer in a fully functional state is an excellent way to save buying another computer for those occasions when you wish to play games socially (you know, when you have a real person visiting)
I admit the software is not perfect yet - these are the hurdles I've either fixed or are living with...
To play World of Warcraft I am using Wine plus about a 30 line patch to fix mouse clicks. Then run "WoW.exe -opengl" (I'm running nvidia's drivers, and have an X configuration that mirrors the HDMI output with the VGA output). There are a few minor issues with sharing this computer between Myth and Wow - It works perfectly whilst recording, showing a framerate of about 25fps, but when transcodes kick in my framerate gets slaughtered, the TV crops the edges off the picture (which can be slightly irritating) and my Wine installation has a bit of trouble with WoW patches. On the Mythtvv front I've not got the infrared controller working, and the mythtv windows drivers now have a version mismatch, but they are minor issues.
In my humble opinion the worst attack on growing up in the UK society are the new *broken* attitudes to childhood.
To avoid being branded a paedophile...
You cannot talk with children who aren't your own, If they fall down, you cannot pick them up and if its sunny you cannot apply sun block because you cannot be seen touching.
To avoid being branded a bad parent..
You cannot discipline even your own kids beyond gentle verbal persuasion. I quick poll of parents that I know indicates that this is not always effective - which leads to behavioural problems in the child.
To avoid being sued...
Trees are cut down to prevent risk of damage when branches fall off. Games such as conkers are banned from school. Running is banned. Contact sports are banned.
Bad Science and hysteria...
Hooping cough may kill or permanently damage thousands because of a non reproducable non peer-reviewed article about dangers in innoculations.
I'm glad its behind me, but I feel sorry for my children who are disadvantaged by well-meaning idiots.
Someone used search/replace to re-post an everquest article, or was it ultima online... or one of the muds?
Alternatively they're some sort of alien life form that has just discovered that when people spend time chatting together they socialise.
News? Old news if any.
As a parent, and generally suspicious net-user, I am glad that there is a fee and associated paper trail back to a real breathing human. That way, if legal recourse is required then it is available. I have noticed that games that allow anonymous entities are often full of cheaters, griefers and I believe they are more of a danger to vulnerable people (e.g. children). Anonymous means of expressions may be required for a democratic society but they can stay in their relevent forums.
On a gaming front I'm glad that the servers stay running, new content is added and that there are support staff available to fix problems - all of which require money.
Oh Noes.
I REALLY hope they're tempered by sensible people, but considering the last year has produced no solo content, but lots of high end raids and instances the facts are against it.
There are a lot of casual guilds, but they tend to come and go as the majority of active players get seduced into the hardcore side of the game and leave the casual guild for a hardcore guild. From the casual guilds point of view this means they have to work hard recruiting new members to keep a quorum, and from the players point of view this generally causes a frenzy of online time that lasts for a few months whilst their real life (work, family, education etc) suffers and then they burn out and leave the game.
I got close to being burned by this 5 years ago, but after a frank discussion with my wife (thankyou Dear), realised that there is more fun to the casual game (though less bragging rights as I have no cool gear) and have played casually ever since (well, maybe once a month I'll accept an invitation to a raid).
The casual guilds usually have quite a few mid-level players. To find one, watch round the auction house for guild nametags. If you see a common guildname on a number of non-maxlevel people then they may well be a casual guild.
I played everquest for years. If it weren't for mismanagement of Everquest we would be shaking our heads and wondering how a single MMORPG could dominate the market for 6 years. However, the gorilla on the block since 2005 is now WOW though I suspect it is starting to suffer the same problems. I hope sanity returns and they avoid EQ's fate.
The reasons I left EQ (and why WoW may not avoid these problems) were...
1. The game was so hard you cannot meaningfully accomplish things solo once you're high (e.g. 60th+ level). As a casual player who does not spend a long time online in one session I spent a large percentage of my time looking for a group. I even arranged a second subscription so that I would have two characters whilst I was soloing. Wow was therefore more accessible because you can solo meaningfully and it also halved my subscription costs. However, both systems are designed so that the greatest rewards are only achievable by massive multiplayer effort. and at that point, all the players who have real lives drop out.
2. Very few pieces of software are perfect, with a MMORPG this sometimes requires human intervention. The customer support at SOE was appalling. GMs sometimes abused their powers and if you had a problem you sometimes had to wait days for resolution. WoW support used to be fairly good and prompt, but I've noticed a drop in quality over the months.
Over time, it looks like the WoW software has got more buggy to the point where I suspect EQ has the upper hand now. If you've got 40 people who spend hours trying to achieve a goal and all wipe because of lag (for example) then they're going to be fed up.
3. Even though the area to explore was huge, (and I'd explored for almost 4 years), I had only visited maybe 50% of the regions that were available. A lot of the new regions required quarterly expansions costing about $45. Every time an expansion comes out you are reminded that you're paying a subscription AND you're being asked to pay for the expansion. Blizzard had been very good at improving WoW for the standard subscription and I dont begrudge them an expansion every 18 months or to, but Sony's 3 monthly expansions to add broken content drive people away.
4. It became obvious that some mechanisms in EQ were overt time sinks (e.g. some people waited days for certain creatures to appear), now, obviously, the whole idea of a game is to be an entertaining time sink, but you're supposed to be enjoying yourself whilst doing it. WoW has a few irritating time wasters, such as flight paths but generally its a lot better.
So in summary, Sony destroyed Everquest's dominance of the MMORPG market by offering poor support for buggy software and charging lots of money for it whilst only a few hardcore players got bragging rights over their leet characters (at the cost of family, jobs and sleep). I can see a few faint shadows of this disease on WoW, and hope it won't get worse.
If someone wants to make a killer MMORPG then listen to the majority of players, not the vocal hardcore. Allow people to stop and attend to real life. Listen to them when they've got a problem and fix it as a priority before working on something shiny, new and broken. Let them play the game as fast or as slow as they like, so they can socialise or be a tourist. I'd love to play a casual wow-type game in the Everquest world, there were so many cool areas, monsters and quests that I miss.
I have a mythtv server, to make it work at home you need to:
/dev/video0 device
Stop the mythbackend processes from using the dvb capture cards.
Make sure that ~/.mplayer/channels.conf exists from a previous dvbscan.
In your xterm, - the mouse and choose a small font, then drag the window back to a suitable size
Run the following command: DISPLAY="" mplayer -vo aa -framedrop -menu "dvb://five"
As this was a quick hack I stopped there, but for added bonuses here are some projects:
Run esoundd locally and pipe the sound over the network to your workstation.
Tie the command to inetd, to display tv across the network without having to log in.
Work out some way of sharing the
Compile mplayer with the coco libraries, so you can get colour ascii.
Put a telnet client on your ipaq/phone, and watch TV whilst on the move through GPRS.
I tried hard to be a Gamecube fanboy, but failed...
Gamecube good:
pokemon games and integration with gameboy games.
wavebird wireless controller
hardware that was as capable as other game consoles of that time.
comparatively cheap.
Gamecube bad:
Could not play DVDs for no good reason.
More restrictive hardware and licensing compared with alternative consoles.
Poor coverage of titles in Europe (e.g. impossible to use midway arcade suite to play gauntlet because it was not released in europe and the region locking prevents import from regions that it is available).
Fewer titles available in UK stores than PS2 and xbox
Poor display quality on some TV screens.
According to a contact who works at a gaming company, the lack of titles stem from the restrictive licensing and/or lack of commercial incentive compared with other consoles.
I believe it is wrong to produce a product that is crippled in ways that prevent it from being used effectively. For me, the inability to play DVDs and region encoding of games meant I bought a PS2 to fill in gaps that my gamecube could not cover. Reaching round behind the TV to swap cables gets old very quickly, so after a while you just end up with one plugged in and you buy your games accordingly (also ps2 games are slightly cheaper).
The artificial restrictions placed on the gamecube led to me changing my console allegance to PS2.
Unfortunately, whilst I feel Nintendo are ethically unsound, placing short term financial gain over customer satisfaction and long term financial gain, I am even less sure about Sony (rootkit CD's, everquest - where they deviously charge things to your credit card) or Microsoft (convicted Monopolist and closed source company).
Come back atari, all is forgiven.
sudo provides much more than su...
1. It authenticates against the same password that you logged in with, not only saving you from learning two, but allowing you to keep the root password secret.
2. It doesnt always have to allow access to root, "sudo -u user" can be used to give application/db access.
3. sudo remembers your access for a little while, allowing you to single-shot commands, causing less irritation than "su -c"
4. You can control it remotely, e.g. by active directory group. This allows centralised user administration of system admins.
5. You can provide privileged access of single shot commands to batch processes.
A suitable level of paranoia would suggest that it would be good to decompress the compressed files and verify that they produce the identical dataset. I did not see this step in the overview.
Well, having read the Gaminggod synopsis the thing that struck me most was that you were REQUIRED to have a balanced party to progress.
:-)
The high end game in Everquest became like this, and this triggered a lot of casual players to leave. I've known LDoN (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) groups take so long to get together that by the time you have a quorum, it is so late in the evening that players have not got long enough left online to actually finish the adventure properly. Some players have families, or work in the morning. (BTW this was the main reason my entire guild left EQ for WoW).
Casual gamers in DDO who are only online for a short period will find themselves locked out from being able to progress unless someone has a revolutionarily good way for people to quickly find a suitable group. Hanging around waiting for tank/healer/thief combinations who have the right levels and also speak the same language and aren't on any of their blacklists will quickly become frustrating. If I were cynical I'd suspect that they can push advertising at these people waiting and pay for the servers that way.
I wouldnt miss PvP, crafting or housing. If you want PvP play halflife
World of Warcraft has this solved - you can still solo meaningfully at even the higest level, letting you enjoy yourself whist a group slowly comes together. If the group doesnt pan out, well, that isnt the end of the world.
After months of playing the game, this week I have experienced disconnects, one rollback and one return to bind point.
In the Gadgetstan zone, we tried to enter the Zul'Whatever instance, it said we were in the wrong instance and 90 seconds later we were all sent back to our bind points which unfortunately scattered the party across different continents and that was the end of that.
Alternatively, I've been having disconnects, in particular when you first pick up an item that is used in a new quest there seems to be about a 10% chance that you get instantly disconnected.
On one of these occasions I suffered a short-term rollback, putting my number of kills back by a few minutes and porting me back to my bind point. Since XP and quest progress was sent back in time I assume my inventory could have been too.
Unfortunately blizzard seem incapable of admitting that they wrote buggy code, their technical fix is to blame the network card(!!).
perusing the site, it seems like this SlashSnippet is news for nerds, news that only matters if you live in North America.
Not a single comment about MegaBites
Unbelievable.
Well, it looks like we slashdotted all the UK online shops - I could not find Phantasy Star Online available anywhere, which is a shame because its a pre-requisite to sampling this linuxy goodness.
I viewed the sony release about the new items in EQ2 and it just seems to be that they're adding cute fluff that is irrelevent to the reason that many people play EQ. The adventure is happening in our minds and the EQ environment is just a catalyst to help us visualise it.
I play EQ after the kids are in bed. I have found that I have to play it with the sound off to avoid disturbing the rest of the household. Also, as I often play 2 characters at once I found running two sound streams simultaneously to be irritating and problematic.
It doesnt bother me that I play in silence, and the only in-game downside is that I miss the odd unique sound made by "named mobs" that spawn which lets the other party know theres something exciting around but that hardly ever happens.
The current everquest world has thousands of players online over 120+ zones. Whilst I have only got a selection of people in my friends list and have only visited about 60 zones in the last 4 years I feel these are two of everquests main points that keep me returning to the game.
If there was a "sociable tourist" class that'd be me.
Whilst I'd admit that some of the old content is due for rebalancing and rework. It seems that the new everquest is just adding cute fluff and eye candy whilst reducing the content and community.
I wish they spent their money/effort on EQ1. I'd be more likely to keep my $20/month going to them than some prettyier newcomer.
There are a few common things that viruses and worms do that we can use, without causing the bad things and avoiding many of the ethical problems
Start with a small set of manually seeded machines that have the white hat virus installed.
1. The "white hat" virus sits quiescently on a machine and monitors its own infection vector passively, therefore not utilising any bandwidth. Upon receiving an attack from the virus it is programmed to protect against it will move to step 2 and remembers not to approach the attacker again within a week.
2. Using the same known vulnerability that the virus exploits it is able to put itself on the attacking, infected machine. It then pops up a dialog box saying "your machine is infected with a XXX virus, may I deal with it?" with a cancel button which cancels, but if OK is clicked then we move to step 3.
3. It installs its package so it can be removed by the control panel, it paches the system so it is not vulnerable, cleans the virus and starts itself scanning, adding itself to the group of machines waiting in step 1.
4. if a month goes by without detecting anything, uninstall itself.
Benefits : minimal network traffic since only validated victims are addressed, no changes without authorisation and if the OS is secured then the white hat virus cannot propogate.
Worst case scenario : if someone is infected and will not patch their machine or remove the virus they may get irritated by popups.
Nope,
Watching grown men chasing a ball round a field is not my idea of fun. I'm happy to pay the BBC license fees but I'm glad they didnt pay ridiculous amounts for hod-carriers playing football
[a hod-carrier is someone who carried bricks because he it too dumb to trust with cement]
This is a superb enterprise-level piece of equipment.
With this and a bluetooth phone your on-call engineers can be active and able to fix software problems without having to stay at home or carry a large/heavy/short-lived/fragile laptop around.
My Zaurus CL860 is linked to my GPRS phone. It has X, vnc, ssh and a battery life that lasts days giving me mobile net access and a screen that lets me see one whole and a few partial 80x25 xterms at once. All in a size and weight to fit into a shirt pocket.
When you fight spam with spamassassin you can submit fingerprints fo the spam to a central database that allows more spam to be identified.
This way you help the global community.
I used to work at a company called Uniplex. They bought technology that could precis English text. One of their examples was cutting down "Alice in Wonderland" to 10% of its original length. It weighted words according to some magic algorithm that tried to retain the most important phrases.
Whilst the resulting document was a bit odd, you could certainly use it to remind yourself about the story.
Sadly the only people running for office I have ever had the opportunity to vote for have been people who I would not want governing me.